Technology Bytes

Ruh-roh – MPAA sues the wrong guy… Nasa no longer protects the planet… Trojan piggybacks on FireFox… How long is your iPod supposed to last?… Now you can Ride the Lightning, Enter Sandman, And Justice for All on iTunes… Vista to benefit from 4 Gigs of Falsh Cache – for Speed!

Boing, Boing: The MPAA finally sues the wrong person

Though [30-year-old software developer Shawn Hogan] expects to incur more than $100,000 in legal fees, he thinks it’s a small price to pay to challenge the MPAA’s tactics. “They’re completely abusing the system,” Hogan says. “I would spend well into the millions on this.”

Oops – I guess the scan and sue software picked the wrong guy to F— with.

Boing, Boing: Earth left defenseless from greenhouse gases, aliens, robot invaders

NASA officials removed the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” from their mission statement over political pressure from global warming naysayers,

So some political dumbass – my guess is the successor to the college dropout who was pushing creationist bullshit – decided that NASA should ignore global warming. IMO, global warming exists and is caused by humans – this will stay my opinion until there is solid, peer-reviewed science that disproves that hypothesis.

Cnet News: Trojan piggybacks on Firefox

The FormSpy spyware then gleans sensitive information, such as credit card and bank account numbers, from the user’s browser and forwards it to a malicious Web site.

This is a low impact trojan, but it also tries to steal your passwords for just about every web service you might touch.

iLounge: Apple: iPods designed to last four years

In a Chicago Tribune article on faulty iPods, an Apple spokeswoman said that failure rates for the device are low, and that an iPod is designed to last four years.

I wonder what kind of iPods will be available in another 3 years when my Nano gets old.

Cnet News: Metallica ends iTunes holdout

Metallica, one of the biggest acts yet to make its music available for sale via Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store, has ended its holdout.

Enter iTunes…

the Inquirer: Samsung offers 4GB flash drive for Microsoft Vista

What Ready Boost purports to do is to populate the flash drive with data by readying favourite apps and data in the background. A traditional HDD is limited to serving 100 to 200 requests a second, but Samsung claims its thing will manage to service 5,000 requests a second.

This one bears watching – it could speed up and secure more than just Vista boxes.

And that’s the news…