./emilychang eBot

A survey out today by the organizers of the tech-security conference Infosecurity Europe found that 21% of 576 London office workers stopped on the street were willing to share their computer passwords with a good looking woman holding a clipboard. People were offered a chocolate bar in exchange for the information.

A US man has sold the domain name pizza.com for 2.6 million - after maintaining the site for just $20 a year since 1994....Mr Clark registered the domain name in 1994, when the world wide web was just starting. He had hoped that pizza.com would help to get a contract with a pizza firm for his consulting company...The online auction was launched on 27 March. The first bid was $100, jumping to $2.6m a week later. Having accepted the latter offer, Mr Clark hopes to get his windfall in a few days’ time when the transaction is completed. He said he now regretted not buying more domain names in the 1990s. 

The average Apple iPhone user is an avid email reader (not writer) under age 30, browses the Web heavily and may carry a second phone. Meanwhile, a lot of these folks would like a few physical tweaks to the iPhone.

The browser needs to evolve...The dream is to be able to take any Web site or app and turn it into an app that can run directly from the desktop. A very big part of this initiative is to make sites/apps work when they are not connected to the Internet. HTML 5 (the next version of the basic standard for the encoding of Web sites) includes explicit support for local, offline resources.

Japan’s space agency launched an experimental communications satellite Saturday designed to enable super high-speed data transmission at home and in Southeast Asia.

The domestically developed H-2A rocket carrying the satellite, “Kizuna,” was launched Saturday evening from the southern island of Tanegashima, according to a live Internet broadcast by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA.

The satellite, equipped with two large multi-beam antennas, separated from the rocket and successfully entered its intended orbit 175 miles from Earth, JAXA said in a statement.

When the Internet suddenly collapsed early last Wednesday across the Middle East and into India, it provided a stark reminder of how the Net’s virtual spaces can still be held hostage to real-world events.

Edward discusses the iPhone interface and “computer administrative debris.”

Has the open source software movement become a victim of its own success? A provocative new study by a longtime software analyst suggests that the giants of the commercial software world are cashing in on the popularity of open source and becoming the dominant force in what was once called the free software movement.

What will a child in the UK make of a laptop designed to help children in the developing world? Rory Cellan-Jones brought an XO home to find out.

The small scope of microformats may make you ask “is that it?”, but this succeeds through simplicity where other mechanisms have faltered. Unlike XML, which really can represent anything to the point that no two sites agree on schemas, microformats mandate a universal structure for data records that machine parsers to read.