As promised, my guest on Ask a VC this week is James Chan of Neotany Labs, an early stage Singaporean investment firm. Chan isn’t some banker-fied expat, he’s a “son of Singapore’s soil” as he phrases it. He was educated in the system, served his two years in the army and got a scholarship to study in the US, part at Carnegie Mellon University and part at Stanford.

That scholarship came with a hefty price: He had to come back and work for the Singapore government for six years or pay hundreds of thousands of Singaporean dollars to get out of it. Yeesh, those are some strings, Pinnochio.

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This article describes a method how to use a USB memory device as an authentication token to log in into a Linux system instead of traditional password. This can be accomplished by use of Pluggable Authentication Modules ( PAM ) and some sort of USB st…

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Since the advent of the consumer digital camera, hard disks and memory devices have faced the burden of ever increasing amounts of images to store. This is, in part, due to digital photography being an inexpensive way of taking thousands of images with…

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Halloween is an exhibitionist’s paradise, and nowhere do more (safe for work) exhibitionists congregate online than places like DailyBooth, a site which allows you to upload a photo of yourself, um daily.

YC-funded DailyBooth has decided to get into the Halloween spirit this year (or is just really good at spotting opportunities for marketing itself) and is running a program that allows users to strut their Halloween stuff using the hashtag #trickortreat.

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Nearly a year ago, Microsoft pulled together a group of reporters for Bing Fall Release event. The highlight of the presentation was a demo showing off some nifty new features in Bing Maps. The problem? All of this stuff required Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plug-in to work. I berated the company for once again pushing users towards a more proprietary web. So today it’s time to laud them, as they seem to be backing away from that strategy.

During last week’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley asked Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s SVP of the Server and Tools Business, why the company failed to highlight Silverlight in a meaningful way this year. His answer was rather surprising.

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nSense-2010-002: Teamspeak 2 Windows client

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[John's] latest build strikes a chord of nostalgia by realizing the Banana Jr. 6000. The whimsical hardware is the product of the Bloom County comic strip. It first appeared in 1984, the same year as the Macintosh. [John] used a Mac Plus as the case but completely revamped the insides. An 8″ touchscreen takes the [...]

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During the Back to the Mac event, Steve Jobs made a particularly witty remark that made the audience giddy with laughter:

“We asked ourselves, what would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up? Well, this is the result, we think it’s the future of notebooks.”

There is always a deep strategic intent with the things that Apple does, especially when it comes from Steve Jobs. The first phase in “hooking up” that took place between the MacBook Air and iPad foretells a deeply converged future on many levels.

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Do people enjoy wasting 300$ on a bulky convoluted system, that only works for special “Teacher Edition” calculators, and is several years out of date; E.G. the TI-Presenter? [Benryves] certainly does not. So instead of purchasing a TI-Presenter, he made his own TV out system for the TI brand of calculators by using an ATmega168, [...]

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The GOP has successfully created the meme that ‘hopey, changey’ politics are dead and that electoral participation doesn’t really change anything.

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Gizmodo University is open for business. This free educational series aims to educate about the basics of electronic theory. No prerequisite knowledge needed and they’re starting from the ground level. First lesson? Resistors! From there they’ve posted about voltage dividers, series/parallel circuits, Ohm’s law, and how to calculate a resistor value for an LED. This [...]

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Church leaders are not allowed to endorse or oppose candidates from the pulpit. Yet that is exactly what one Church is doing in Iowa.

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A colleague of mine who runs another Fortune 10 CIRT asked the following question:Let’s say for example, there is a cesspool of internal suspicious activity from netflow, log and host data. You have a limited number of resources who must have some cri…

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It’s going to be Unity all the way for Ubuntu’s next major release codenamed Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". During Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) at Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that the Unity shell will become Ubuntu’s default interface not just for netbook editions, but also for Ubuntu desktop editions.

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While bad Wi-Fi security is my major Firesheep worry, I know it’s already a major pain in the ass for everyone. Even as I wrote this, I see my fellow ZDNet blogger Ed Bott had his Twitter account hijacked by someone else in the Microsoft Professional…

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If you’ve been frustrated by the inability to skip past parts of DVDs on OSX the here is one solution. It’s a patch script that uses some binary hacking to remove the User Operation Prohibition locks from DVD playback software. Using UOP flags is a way to force users to watch trailers or warnings as part [...]

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The OIG report shows that ICE talks about its priorities, but doesn’t have actual mechanisms to meet them by measuring progress or ensuring compliance.

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There are around 90 000 apps in the Android marketplace. We suggest 10 worth looking at. Google’s Android operating system is gaining popularity fast and its application marketplace is growing at break-neck speed. Already the marketplace lists around 9…

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The “mancession†narrative is based on a divisive argument which skews the facts.

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This just landed in our inbox: a pitch for a new URL shortener with the slightly amusing name Bu.tt, which is of course described by its creator – John McKinnon – as a shortening service that “kicks it”.

If you think bit.ly or TinyURL or whichever service you fancy just seems too serious for certain linking occasions, Bu.tt is one way to get the job done.

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Inkscape is an open source SVG graphics editor released under GNU General Public License. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. Here are some useful tutorials for creating amazing vec…

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[Aram Bartholl] is building his own filesharing network that screws those fat cats who want to control your freedom. He’s added file cache devices throughout NYC (five so far but more to come) that are anonymous and free to use. Upload what you want, download what you want. They’re completely offline which means monitoring who’s [...]

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At the Security Innovation Network (SINET) Showcase at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this week, Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, presented a dire assessment of the cyber-security threat facing our nation. He discussed how rogue governments and hackers are quietly infiltrating our computer systems and the disasters that can be perpetuated—like those you see on the TV show “24”. Chertoff worries that these risks haven’t yet gripped the public imagination; that it may take a “digital 9-11” to get businesses, consumers, and governments to fortify their defenses.

The most troublesome thing I learned by talking with a who’s who of our nation’s security community was that our government doesn’t believe it has the ability to defend us from the rapidly evolving threats. Yes, the National Security Agency and some branches of government have brilliant computer scientists working for them and can defend their own systems; but the rest of us are our own. The Government simply can’t innovate fast enough to keep pace with the pervasive threats and dynamics of the internet or Silicon Valley’s rapidly changing technologies. Indeed, as George Hoyem, a partner at the CIA-backed venture fund In-Q-Tel, noted, there has been a 571 percent growth in malware since 2006; today, 60 percent of all websites are infected.

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If you look closely at this shot of the bombs allegedly sent from Yemen to Chicago you’ll notice what looks like a small camera up in the corner. Slide down the side and you see the volume buttons and I suspect the silver area is where the battery holder once stuck to the circuit board. It’s clear that this was a phone – probably of modern vintage – so which phone is it?

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There’s been much hype, crazy valuations, and overall market excitement about businesses that promise to unleash the power of the social graph, location, recommendations and group buying. Facebook’s latest valuation according to SecondMarket is now about $30 billion, Foursquare raised $20 million at a post-money valuation of $115 million while still at a pre-revenue stage, Yelp, short of selling for $550 million to Google, raised over $25 million at an undisclosed but very high valuation, and finally Groupon raised $135 million at a whopping $1.35 billion valuation. So besides their huge success with the investment community, and their users, what do these companies have in common, and what does all this have to do with disrupting Local Commerce?

Editor’s note: The following guest post is by David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong, a mobile payment provider for Facebook Credits, AT&T and hundreds of leading destination websites and mobile applications

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Re: Secunia PSI Insecure Library Loading Vulnerability

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Day 30 ends week four of the Cyber Security Awareness Month. First, a network team needs a a leader …(more)…

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Hexspirit has discovered a vulnerability in scm.symantec.com, which could be exploited by malicious people to conduct XSS attacks.

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Sony has discovered a vulnerability in www.gohunting.co.kr, which could be exploited by malicious people to conduct XSS attacks.

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RoLex has discovered a vulnerability in supportforums.motorola.com, which could be exploited by malicious people to conduct XSS attacks.

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