George Lucas To Release Star Wars Films On 3D

George Lucas To Release Star Wars Films On 3D

It’s been rumoured for a couple of years now, but it appears George Lucas is finally putting together a 3D package of all Star Wars films to be released on to DVD.

ComingSoon.net recently spoke with DreamWorks Animations CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg on Tuesday, who informed them that Lucas is very excited about the project, and that he now has the technical know-how to pull it off.

“He isn’t going to put a product out, I think, that isn’t anything other than first rate,” Katzenberg said.

One wonders if this will mean the deletion of the existing Star Wars DVD back-catalogue. Lucas likes to move in mysterious ways, after all.

Will you be buying the 3D version? Is it a good idea? Or is it yet another example of Lucas milking the coffers of a still-loyal but increasingly frustrated fanbase?

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Spam King Gets New Career as Jail Bird

By PatB
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Robert Soloway was known by most spam fighters as the “Spam King.”  He has been making a fortune on flooding peoples’ inboxes with spam for almost a decade.  Conservative estimates determine Soloway banked $700,000 from his activities over a three year period.  He was convicted in May of 2007 and was sentenced yesterday to almost 4 years in prison.  And as a headline on FARK put it, Soloway is about to “have his inbox filled with unsolicited male.”

From PCWorld here:

The “spam king” was sentenced on Tuesday to 47 months in prison, with a ruling that the court hopes sends a message to other online criminals.

Robert Soloway, the man known as the spam king for the massive volume of spam he sent out, pleaded guilty to fraud, spamming and tax evasion after being indicted in May 2007.

Soloway apologized to the judge and to his family, admitting that his actions were wrong. “There is no one else to blame but myself,” he said, before the judge handed down her sentence.

Soloway has apologized for his activities before. After he was investigated in 1999 in California for spamming activities, he told detectives that he was sorry and learned a lot. He then moved on to another state and immediately engaged in the same behavior.

It has been more typical for Soloway to boast about his techniques than to apologize for them. In online forums he would brag that he would never have to pay the millions of dollars the civil courts ordered him to pay.

Unfortunately, this is just one spammer.  The PCWorld article mentions other notorious spammers already in jail for crimes too, but as everyone has noticed, the volumes of spam have not dropped.

According to MessageLabs here, more than 3 in 4 SMTP messages on the internet is currently spam.  Soloway and his ilk were the first to use stolen lists of known email addresses to feed as input into botnets.  But spamming has become much more sophisticated as botnets have evolved over the past few years, and they don’t solely rely on lists anymore.  Now botnets have advanced email address guessing algorithms in addition to standard webcrawling techniques to harvest email addresses from websites, forums and other public sources.

A study by Joe Stewart of SecureWorks lists the top Spam Botnets here, and he estimates that botnets alone now account for over 100 Billion emails per day.  And if it weren’t for major ISP’s blocking outbound spam from infected hosts, that number would be way higher.

Google Knol goes live – should Wikipedia worry?

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Knol – Google’s equivalent of Wikipedia – has today finally gone live.    Should Wikipedia be quaking in their boots?  Well not quite yet.   I’m sure Jimbo Wales hasn’t broken a sweat up to now and isn’t likely to for quite some time with his 116 million users a month.

Just like Wikipedia, you can write articles on virtually any subject you like and they will be published.   But it remains to be seen what kind of editorial process Knol has compared to Wikipedia and whether Knol has a more relaxed or more stricter editorial control over “self-promotion”.   It will also be interesting to see how Knol deals with spam pages.

It was speculated some time ago (I have lost the weblink now) that Knol was created because Google was becoming increasingly annoyed that Wikipedia was more and more the number one search result for most searches.    So they decided to make their own Wikipedia-like service to knock Jimbo off that number one slot.   Whether this is true or not I can’t say, but you can’t deny that whatever search term you put into Google these days, you more often than not get a Wikipedia link first.

But for Google to dislodge Wikipedia will take some serious doing.   Wikipedia has been around for years and are one of the most visited and linked to website ever.   Unless Google pulls an underhanded trick with their PageRank, I don’t see how they are going to knock Wikipedia off their throne anytime soon.   Do you?



Cell Phone Offers Pedestrian Protection

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Your cell phone could soon protect you from getting hit by a car.

Oki is showing off its new “Safety Mobile Phone” at a wireless expo in Japan this week. The phone will sound an alarm when it gets too close to a car that’s also equipped with a short-range wireless device (such as the vehicle-based system used to electronically pay tolls and parking fees in parts of Asia). The car’s device will send a warning bell, too, notifying the driver and hopefully preventing you from getting smashed to smithereens. The phone is being marketed for use by pedestrians — particularly, we assume, those with extraordinarily fast reaction times.

Oki doesn’t plan to charge any extra for the service, since it uses communications systems that are already in place. The new phone also has GPS capabilities and could eventually be used for other advanced tracking purposes.

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Five Blogs Green Techies Should be Reading

Green technology is the way of the future, no doubt about it. Nothing fuels mind-boggling innovation like the possibility of the world being totally destroyed if we don’t clean up our act. So, it’s an exciting time to be a geek right now – there’s so much cool green tech out there, you can hardly keep up. That’s why blogs like EcoGeek, WorldChanging, Ecotality Life, Treehugger and EarthFirst are around – to school us in all matters of green technology. These five blogs will keep you updated on all the latest gadgets, gizmos, models and ideas that are going to change the world for the better.

EcoGeek is the ultimate green techie site, without question. If you want all the latest info about eco-friendly technology – from special buoys that harvest tidal energy to solar-electric limousines – EcoGeek.org is the best place to find it. EcoGeek, founded and run by Hank Green, believes that ‘technology can be a force for evil, or for awesome’. The symbiosis between nature and technology is the focus here, and up to 10 posts a day highlight the newest, coolest green gadgets and technology that are going to help pull us through the climate crisis and into a new, green era.

WorldChanging is an online magazine that works on the premise that the tools, models and ideas for a better future lie all around us. We just need to start using them effectively. WorldChanging aims to keep their content as positive as possible, only highlighting the green technology that actually works and is a real potential solution to an environmental problem. They focus especially on technology and ideas that haven’t been covered in the mainstream media. WorldChanging is a great place to find ruminations on topics like “Permapave and Green Infrastructure“, “The Complexity of Sharing Scientific Databases” and “Scenius, Innovation and Epicenters”. Awesomely geeky.

Ecotality Life covers green tech, green gadgets and green gizmos. Funded by renewable energy company ECOtality, this green tech blog is dedicated to teaching the public about the booming market of green investing and technology. They provide in-depth reviews of the latest green tech and analysis of the companies working to bring us a greener future. The writers are eco-entrepreneurs and budding green TV stars like Michael D’Estries and Shea Gunther, who work their contacts in the industry to bring you green tech news before anyone else has it.

Treehugger, of course, is the one eco-blog that practically everyone is already familiar with. The godfather of green blogs, Treehugger focuses on a wide variety of green topics, but their Science & Technology category makes it easy to find the tech-related news. Treehugger’s unique vision takes the one-step-at-a-time approach, easing people into the green lifestyle with an upbeat, enthusiastic attitude.

EarthFirst is relatively new to the green blogosphere, but it’s already blasting out enough snark into the universe to blow your pants off. We don’t just cover green tech (along with many other green topics), we’re on a mission to seek and destroy greenwashing companies that try to claim their product is going to help the world when it’s really a piece of junk. Greenwashers and jerkasses of the world, beware.

Stephanie Rogers writes for EarthFirst.com, Weburbanist.com and Eco-Chick.com.

Will Google buy Digg then destroy it?

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Duncan Riley over at the Inquisitr has a very thought-provoking piece on what may happen to Digg if the rumored $200 million purchase deal between Digg and Google goes through as planned.   Will Digg become a central important plank of the Google empire or will it become another Feedburner / Jaiku and stagnate into nothingness?

Think about all the companies that Google buys up and then consider all the development and promotion Google then does on those companies – either it’s very little or zero.   Feedburner is a prime example.   Where is the much talked about “Google accounts” integration we keep hearing so much about?   Are they ever going to do it or is it just talk?   Me thinks it’s all hogwash.

With all the money that Google has in their coffers, they have the power to do a lot of good things for the Internet, but they also have the power to make a lot of purchases which they can then instantly forget about.   They’re like a spoilt rich kid who walks into a toy store and asks their parents for a ton of toys which they have absolutely no intention of playing with ever again – but they demand them because they can.    These purchases then sit in a cupboard unused, unappreciated and wasted.

Is Digg going to suffer this kind of fate if Google gets their claws into them?    Will Google buy them just to prove that they can?    Will they then sit in the corner of the internet neglected and unloved?    I never thought I would say this, but maybe it would be for the best if Microsoft was to win this one.    What do you think?

Bored with your feeds? Try Toluu!

In a world with more than 100 million blogs, do you find it difficult to find new and interesting things to read? How do you sift through all of the noise to find blogs that you might like? Would you like a simple way to find good content? Maybe Toluu will save the day for you.

Toluu matches RSS feed readers like Google Reader with the power of recommendation to help you find interesting new content. The way it works is very simple:

1- Get an invite code off of their site, which has one of the cleanest designs that I’ve ever seen. It’s easy to do, there’s a link to get the invites at the top of their homepage.

2- Once you get the invite code, set up your account.

3- The starting point is to import some of your current favorite RSS feeds into Toluu. If your current feed reader can create an .OPML file (a standard for storing RSS feed URLs), you can import that file into Toluu. Otherwise, you can start adding feeds manually. This information about your current RSS subscriptions gives Toluu a basis to start for developing recommendations.

4- Next, click on the Matches page. Based on the information that you’ve entered into Toluu, it will start recommending other Toluu members to you, showing the % fit between your likes and their likes. It will also list up to five blogs that you would likely fit your interests.

5- Clicking on a blog name will allow you to preview that blog like many other RSS readers do. You can subscribe to the blog within Toluu.

6- On top of all that, you can export your Toluu subscriptions into an OPML file, import that into your favorite RSS feed reader and the loop is closed.

There are a number of other things that you can do within Toluu, like building up your contact list of social media users. You can also use different views within Toluu to get different recommendations for blogs based on activity within:

  • The past week
  • The past month
  • All time

At its heart, Toluu is a simple tool, but it looks and works great. What more can you ask for from a tool? Try it for yourself!

Mark Dykeman broadcasts from his brain about communications, social media, and technology several times per week at Broadcasting Brain. He enjoys participating in several social media sites, including Twitter, FriendFeed and StumbleUpon.

SlyDial: Voice Communication, Without the Interaction

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

A new service can let you take the personal touch out of voice communication.

SlyDial gives you the option to dial directly into anyone’s voicemail — whether they’re on the same cell phone provider as you or not. You can use it for free if you don’t mind listening through a 30-second ad, or you can pay a small fee (15 cents a pop, or less if you buy a prepaid package) to go ad-free.

The setup is simple: You call 1-267-SLY-DIAL, punch in anyone’s cell phone number, and it’ll connect you to their voicemail — without their phone ever ringing. Some phones will even go as far as displaying an actual missed call from the number you specify.

This thing has plenty of possible uses, both positive and manipulative. It could definitely come in handy for the times you want to leave a quick note without getting into a whole conversation — almost as an alternative to a text message.

SlyDial is limited to the U.S. only as of now.

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How to work your inner geek for a comfy corner office

By Erica Davidson
Guest Blogger, [GAS]

We all know that non-verbal cues are key for landing the new IT director position or scoring a coveted promotion. But did you know that the way you dress could be the most important non-verbal communication of all?

It’s true. Dressing for success extends beyond the initial interview, or even the final offer. Your personal appearance is a critical part of the impression you leave on others throughout your career. Dressing like a “nerd” (wearing WOW t-shirts, taped glasses and black socks with tennis shoes) is a no-no that could leave you pigeon holed in the data center until retirement.

Not sure what to change? Not to worry. Follow these simple tips to boost your earning potential. They’re easier than developing IP-routing proficiency, and can strategically influence your workplace status.

1- Communicate your commitment

Practice the professional image you want to project. Dressing nicely will give you a sense of confidence, and self-assurance is a pretty hefty leverage tool when it comes to climbing the geek’s corporate ladder. In addition, your coworkers may measure your attention to detail by your personal grooming habits. No one wants a support staff member with dog breath and sweat stains.

2- Play your personality

No one’s asking you to be someone you’re not. If you’re happy being relegated to the cubicle in the corner, by all means wear the shirt you slept in the night before. But if you want to project yourself as a credible, knowledgeable source of information, step it up a notch. My guess is that if you’re reading this article, you’re in the latter category.

If you’re looking to communicate power and authority, adopt nonverbal signals of masculinity. Choose somber clothing shapes and color, like dark shades and tailored items. Stay away from pink, purple and bright green and blue dress shirts.

Want to paint yourself as fun, cooperative and team-oriented? Go more feminine. Light colors, patterns and loose shapes will signal relaxation and tolerance.

If you want to showcase technical knowledge and experience, build your wardrobe with black and white pieces. Black signals commitment, expertise and book smarts. White is a sign of purity, compassion and wisdom (look at the Pope!).

3- Silently scream confidence and competence

Use proven and trusted non-verbal clues to interact with power players. Look interviewers, coworkers and superiors in the eye. Don’t act nervous—tapping your foot, chewing your pencil, clipping your nails and picking your teeth are all on the how-to-get-demoted list.Shake hands firmly, but don’t be intimidating. You shouldn’t cut off blood flow with your grip.

4- For goodness sake, listen!

Open minds and receptive ears are an important part of your non-verbal persona. When someone else is talking, pay attention and make eye contact. Nod your head when appropriate. Repeat concepts back to the speaker to communicate acceptance and understanding.

In short, just because you’re in a technical field doesn’t mean you can’t use the techniques executives are known for employing. Working the non-verbal game is a surefire way to help you get noticed, and to help your paychecks start increasing.