It's hard to believe how much the British seem intent on driving their civilization directly toward 1984. Consider their new use for Smart cars here. This is just creepy.

Using these vehicles to monitor traffic and sending you tickets for being distracted? What if you've lent your car to someone, or someone stole your vehicle? That would be a nice gift to receive...someone steals your car and talks on their phone while joyriding around town and then YOU receive the ticket.

This is a great example of technology being used the WRONG way. Why do people not stand up and stop this type of abuse? Besides, isn't the purpose of police patrols to curb bad behavior? How does hiding behind a camera push anyone to follow the law?

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April fools day came and went with no real activity, but now it looks like things are beginning to roll. The p2p capability of the worm was activated and some new capabilities have apparently been downloaded by at least some clients. One thing has become clear: the motivation behind the worm appears to be money.

Interestingly enough, apparently a fake antivirus application could be downloaded and installed to infected machines. More information can be found at the trendmicro blog (look toward the bottom of the post). From the screenshot, the fake app looks pretty realistic...and offers to clean up your PC for the modest price of $49.95.

To test if you have the worm and for removal instructions, see my post from April 3.

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Get your gear! We now have a store at Cafe Press! If you have any specific requests for items please leave them in the comments and we'll see what we can do for you.

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Well, we certainly can't say we didn't see it coming.  This relates pretty directly to my earlier post on the Cybersecurity act currently making the rounds in Congress.  The WSJ article on the electrical grid hacks connects these as well.  While I have no doubt that hackers would certainly like to target our infrastructure, this is strange timing.

The most interesting piece of the article in my mind is that the current network in the U.S. is actually 3 in 1, the East, the West, and Texas.  Looks like a great idea Texas has there, the grid should probably be divided into even more segments.  I wonder which portion of the grid appears to be the most vulnerable?

Another question I have about this...why in the world are these systems even connected directly to the internet?  What good could possibly come from that?  If something doesn't need full network access it should NOT receive it.

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Here is an interesting concept for a search engine - SearchPDF. It seems to be very effective, if a bit slow. There's not a lot of information about how it works, but the homepage displays "Powered by Google" at the bottom. I would assume you could get the same results by using the correct Advanced Search on Google, but this site makes it VERY easy.

Besides, how could you turn down free eBooks!

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This may be the ugliest vehicle I've ever seen.  If there was any wonder why GM is on the brink of bankruptcy, here may be part of the answer.  Aside from the ungainly aesthetics, the size appears to be just "wrong" on a number of fronts.  Too big for the sidewalk while being small enough to be a death trap on the road, and no storage space for your stuff.  Sign me up!

Here's the part where I would normally say "Surely this would be useful in some places!" and yes, there is one I can think of...a daily rental vehicle for people just visiting an area.  However, there are already cheaper small-scale transportation alternatives to this PUMA (is this the acronym for EVERYTHING now?) thing, and most of them include you not looking like a complete tool.  You could:

• walk
• run
• take a cab
• ride a bicycle
• ride a moped
• ride a scooter
• ride a motorcycle
• ride a skateboard
• ride a REAL Segway
• get a full-on used car for less $

I guess I just don't see a big market for this thing even if it weren't hideous.  Am I missing something here?  Is GM overcompensating for the fact that nobody want's SUV's anymore and they've gone off the deep end in the other direction?

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