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Fiber Optic Table Illuminates Your Dining – Deepa writes “We highly doubt LumiGram’s Luminous Fiber Optic Tablecloth was designed with power outages in mind, but why hook up a boring string of lamps or fiddle with half melted candles when you can plug this bad boy into the generator? The cloth, which has fiber optics woven throughout, cotton borders, and a Europlug mains adapter, proves most useful when the lights are dimmed, and should prove quite the centerpiece at your next get-together. The illuminating device is available in a trio of sizes, comes in a variety of color schemes.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slasdot]

High-Tech Firms Defeat Foreign Worker Hiring Laws With Fake Want Ads – No American would respond to these ads. If they do, they aren’t qualified. So the company can import and hire a foreigner. [Dvorak]

US Prepares for Eventual Cyberwar – The New York Times is reporting on preparations in the works by the US government to prep for a ‘cyberwar’. Precautionary measures are being taken to guard against concerted attacks by politically-minded (or well-paid) hackers looking to cause havoc. Though they outline scenarios where mass damage is the desired outcome (such as remotely opening a dam’s gates to flood cities), most expect such conflicts to be more subtle. Parts of the internet, for example, may be unreachable or unreliable for certain countries. Regardless, the article suggests we’ve already seen our first low-level cyberwar in Estonia: “The cyberattacks in Estonia were apparently sparked by tensions over the country’s plan to remove Soviet-era war memorials. Estonian officials initially blamed Russia for the attacks, suggesting that its state-run computer networks blocked online access to banks and government offices. The Kremlin denied the accusations. And Estonian officials ultimately accepted the idea that perhaps this attack was the work of tech-savvy activists, or ‘hactivists,’ who have been mounting similar attacks against just about everyone for several years.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slasdot]

WoW Database Site Sells for $1 Million – MattHock writes “Wowhead (a WoW information database) has to ZAM (Affinity Media) for the price of $1 Million. ZAM is the owner of several other WoW databases, including Thottbot and Allakhazam. Until recently Affinity was also the owner of IGE, a highly controversial company that sold in-game wealth for real life money. Affinity recently sold IGE, which Wowhead claims as the reason they allowed the sale to go through. But did ZAM really sell IGE? The blogger who put this story online doubts that IGE and ZAM have actually distanced themselves. He believes that the supposed sale was just actually a means of restructuring to hide the relationship, similar to how IGE’s relationship to Thottbot was hidden for a number of months through a convoluted set of parent companies.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slasdot]

YouTube To Share Revenue With 20-year-old Filmmaker – destinyland writes “YouTube just has signed a deal to share ad revenue with 20-year-old Brandon Fletcher. YouTube had already said they’d implement revenue sharing this summer, but this indicates they’re willing to put their money where their mouth was. 10 Zen Monkeys has a funny chronicle of Brandon’s enviable march to YouTube money. 9 weeks ago he flew to California to demand YouTube feature his video on their front page. A security guard refused to let him off the elevator — but he made crucial contacts which helped seal the deal 9 weeks later. Taking this business to the next level makes sense in the here and now, when some 70 percent of internet users are streaming video.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slasdot]

Insane Laptop: Alienware m9750 –

Looks like Alienware will never stop out-doing itself. This bad boy comes packed with up to two 512MB GeForce Go 7950’s using SLI and a slew of Core 2 Duos to pick from. Options include a pair of 200GB HDD’s in RAID 0 for a total of 400 gigs of media storing power. The 17″ 1920 x 1200 res LCD is also sure to impress. Integrated b/g/nwireless, Bluetooth 2.0, and 7.1 high def audio is definitely making a few mouths water at CrunchGear HQ.

Alienware Area 51 m9750

Click on for a few more pics (more…)

[CrunchGear]

Apple Has A Sense Of Humor –

Check out this image from Cupertino’s newest OS, Leopard. Looks like it popped up when the user tried to connect to a windows share. Can you spot the funny?

We can only imagine the stifled giggles which were brought on by this screen shot.

Windows share as seen by Mac OS X Leopard [via Digg]

[CrunchGear]

Solar motorbike uses snail shell shape for surface area –

Filed under: Transportation

Powering a car with solar panels is a relatively easy task, but on a motorbike it’s a lot harder to find flat surfaces to catch the sun. That means that a solar powered motorbike has got to look rather odd in order to provide enough surface area for the panels: hence the snail shell-like design of SunRed’s prototype solar powered bike. When (or if) SunRed completes a real world prototype, the bike’s surface area will be 25 square feet, allowing the bike to store enough of the sun’s energy to ride for 13 miles at speeds of up to 30 MPH. The motor is integrated into the wheel too, so there’s no transmission. Once these “green” bike thinkers sort out the problem of running a bike without oil, we hope they’ll move onto making them a little less fugly. It seems like a precedent is being set here.

[Via Autoblog Green]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

[EnGadget]

NASA funded robots to search for life under Arctic ice –

Filed under: Robots

In a mission that is apparently similar to searching for life under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa (sans the space travel part), three robots are set to start a mission to explore the underwater hot springs under the ice of the Arctic: because someone else did the Antarctic last year. On a 40 day expedition in July, researchers from Cape Cod hope to use three new robotic vehicles — two that can operate without cables under ice — to find life that resides in the hot streams along the techtonic boundary between Eurasia and North America. Although the robots can descend over 3 miles under the water working just meters from the bottom to photograph objects and collect samples, the task of the NASA-funded $450,000 Puma and Jaguar robots will be hindered by the rough terrain and their inability to surface through the ice. Sounds like NASA’s got quite a while to go until it can submarine around Europa — they probably won’t be able to surface there at all. [EnGadget]

BlockHosts 2.0.5 (Default branch) – BlockHosts is a script to record how many times a local system is attacked, based on configurable scanning of system logs for sshd or other services. When a particular IP address exceeds a configured number of failed login attempts, that IP address is blocked using hosts.allow files, or by using null-routing, or by using packet filtering. An email notification facility is also available. License: Public Domain Changes:
This release updates the vsftpd rule and adds an –enable-patterns option to enable specific rules at run-time. Email notification is now sent on both adds and deletes of host IP addresses, and the source distribution includes the test routines.

[FreshMeat]