Each week we've been giving internal code names to each now client version, these aren't coded anywhere and most users don't ever hear about them. So, for the benefit of the general public, here's a short list of release code names I can remember, in no particular order. Maple Hybrid Thighmaster Mr Release Banana Tiki Loung

OMG! A whole weekend of programming on Radio 1 devoted to Breakbeat. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/dance/breaks_weekender.shtml The Breakspoll Awards 2005 take place next Thursday night at Fabric in London and Radio 1 will be there. Not only will we be bringing you highlights from the awards but we will be marking the occassion with a series of special shows across the weekend. If you're a breaks fan then make sure you check out the following: Annie Mac: 24.02.05 - 21:00 Breakspoll Awards warm up show with an Adam Freeland Mini Mix and Annie Nightingale on the phone. Annie Nightingale: 25.02.05 - 01:00 Live from Fabric in London with Rennie Pilrem & BLIM Ft MC Chickaboo, Plump Djs and Stanton Warriors. Essential Selection: 25.02.05 - 18:00 Pete Tong keeps the breaks flavour going with Plump DJs in the Friday Night Hot Mix slot. Fergie: 26.02.05 - 23:00 Meat Katie v Elite Force recorded from Fabric and The Breakspoll Awards Essential Mix: 27.02.05 - 01:00 Brighton based breaks ace Krafty Kuts steps up the hallowed ones and twos.

Ok we all feel cheated when we find that Santa Claus is just a story, but these are things I was taught by teachers, scientific and historical facts which have been disproven over time. 1) The First Computer was the ENIAC, which was built at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and completed in 1945. It's with a certain degree of pride that I discovered that the first computer was the Colossus, built at Bletchley park during WWII to help crack German communications. This was of course top secret for many years. In fact, for many years the British government supplied the same German encryption technology to other governments, conveniently forgetting to tell them that it could read any message encoded using them. It wasn't until the 70's that the nature of the activites at Bletchley Park were revealed to the world at large. Of course, there are still a number of american patriots who like to argue that the Colossus wasn't general enough to be considered a real computer and therefore still lay claim to this historic step in IT history. I'm sure Alan Turing would have something to say on the subject. 2) The Planet Mercury's Day is 88 days long, the same duration as it's orbital period, so it keeps one side facing the sun and the other in eternal darkness. Mysecondary school physics teacher even suggested that the coldest natural temperatures in the solar system would be found on the night side of the planet. In the mid 19th Century Giovanni Schiaparelli observed the motion of surface features and announced that his observations suggested a 1:1 resonance between the Rotation and the planet's orbit. In 1974 and 1975 the space probe Mariner 10 had visited Mercury 3 times, and on each pass had found the same side facing the sun, this was compelling evidence that the planet's proximity to the sun had locked the rotation. I saw these photos in many science books along with the explanation of the rotation, and diagrams showing how tidal effects can lock in the rotations of object oribiting close totheir parent bodies. After the Voyager flyby's of Jupiter in 1979 the Galilean moons were added to the pages describing tidally locked satellites, along with the martian moons and the Saturnian satellites. The only problem is that in 1965 scientists at Arecibo made radar observations of Mercury which revealed that the period of rotation wasn't 88 days, it was 59 days. Instead of rotating in a 1:1 resonance with the Sun, Mercury rotates with a 2:3 resonance, which makes it unique in the Solar System. Further observations confirmed this and it was just an unfortunate artifact of the timing that resulted in Mariner 10 observing the same side of the planet on 3 occasions. This myth is still being taught in schools even 40 years after it was disproven, hopefully the Messenger mission will get some photos of the unseen mercurean surface when it arrives in 2011. Maybe then the myth will filter out of educational consciousness. 3) Scientists and engineers are studying the feasibilty of mining the ocean floor, collecting manganese rich mineral nodules from thousands of feet below the surface. Hughes corporations constructed the Glomar Explorer, a 63,000 ton vessel, for use by Global Marine Developement Inc. I saw this story in my geography textbooks, discussing new technologies for harvesting natural resources, it was mostly an aside to the main thread about how the world's raw materials were limited. The Glomar Explorer wasn't collecting minerals from the ocean floor, it was collecting the remains of a sunken Soviet submarine. The Soviet vessel had sank in 16,500 feet of water in the ocean near Hawaii in 1968, it carried 3 nuclear missiles on board, along with at least 2 nuclear tipped torpedoes. The CIA created Project Jennifer to recover what secrets they could from the remains of the vessel, to do so would need a specialised salvage vessel. And.... with such an odd ship they came up with a special cover story, this was a great example of hiding a secret in plain sight, with educational materials being made available to explain its deep sea mining ambitions to any curious member of the public. Also involved in the recovery was the HMB-1 - Hughes Mining Barge - this is essentially a submersible barge which acted as a garage for 'the claw' - a key component of the Glomar Explorer which presumably would have aroused suspiscion had it been attached prior to launch. The 2 vessels docked during the operation to transfer the claw once they were out of sight ot prying eyes. Deep Sea mining is still being researched, but I doubt the CIA is involved any more.

Most people know 'Day O' (The Banana Boat Song), but myself and Amy became big fans after I found an original album by the Calypso Superstar. When we wound up in Hawaii on honeymoon without any CD's we raided a local Wal Mart and came away with this (along with the Best of Barry White). His calypos numbers are best, "Man Smart, Women Smarter", "Jump In The Line" and "Angelina" all get replays. One of these days I swear I'm going to remix "Jump In The Line". Both these CD's are forming fundamental parts of Skye's musical eduction. She also seems to enjoy the Plump DJ's, which makes me very proud to be raising a funky breakbeat baby.

In the first case of its kind, a California video game maker is suing an entire community of software tinkerers for reverse engineering and modifying Xbox games that they legally purchased. Tecmo, Inc., a subsidiary of a Japanese company, announced a federal lawsuit Wednesday against Mike Greiling of Eden Prairie, Minn., and Will Glynn from Davie, Fla, for alleged violations of U.S. copyright law and the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. According to the complaint, Greiling and Glynn were webmasters of ninjahacker.net, an online forum dedicated to creating custom content and modifications for certain video games. Also included in the suit, filed January 21st in Illinois, are up to 100 anonymous users of the site, whose identities the company vowed to unmask. "[W]e believe it is our duty to uphold the integrity of our work," said John Inada, general manager for Tecmo, in a statement. "Hacking of this kind will not be tolerated and we intend to take all necessary measures to protect our intellectual property." The lawsuit claims the ninjahacker.net users decompiled the code to several Tecmo titles, including Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive 3, and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, and figured out how to create their own "skins" that change the appearance of game characters. They swapped modding techniques and hundreds of custom skins over the website message board. The defendants are not accused of pirating the games, and the modifications and methods at issue appear no different than those employed by hobbyists on other video games -- from Halo to the Sims 2 -- for years. But according to the lawsuit, Tecmo suffers in the practice anyway. "Most of the skins posted on the Message Board by defendants show Tecmo Characters with appearances that are different from the original Tecmo designs," the complaint notes. "Several... are designed to make Tecmo Characters appear naked." The harm isn't just to the wholesome values of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, hinted Tecmo spokesperson Melody Pfeiffer. There's a principle at stake. "Hackers, if they're allowed to do this kind of thing, will be allowed to hack into any game, anywhere," Pfeiffer warns. "We spent millions of dollars to develop these games, and people are coming in and changing the code to their liking, and that's illegal." Jason Schultz, an attorney with the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, couldn't disagree more. "This complaint is absurd," said Schultz. "The law allows for fair use of other people's copyrighted works without any permission needed, and one of the key things that you're allowed to do is make copies in order to reverse engineer and understand how they work." Everything the complaint accuses the defendants of doing is completely legal under well-established law, says Schultz. "If they'd offered a competing video game with Tecmo's code in it, it's a legal issue. But here, they have simply offered a way for legitimate game owners to modify how the game looks on their screen. Its like a home customization kit. It's not competing in any way with Tecmo's product. In fact, you have to own Tecmo's product to use this stuff." Tecmo's Pfeiffer says the company is seeking $1,000 to $100,000 in damages for every custom skin swapped over the website. "The key issue is going to be, do [the defendants] have the resource to fight back against a company that apparently has quite significant revenues," says Schultz. A message on ninjahacker.net reports the site was taken down on January 25th, a few days after the lawsuit was filed. Greiling did not return a phone message Wednesday. In a telephone interview, Glynn said he hosted ninjahacker.net as a favor to Greiling, but that he had no other interaction with the site or its users. "Basically, I was hosting this website," Glynn says. "I don't own an Xbox and I wasn't into modding or skinning things."

To the uninformed observer these skill sets may seem unrelated, but, I was given a chance recently to utilize my digital forensic skills when Amy accidently formatted a compact flash card containing irreplaceable photos of Skye. I mounted the card on my iBook, copied the filesystem image off and then wrote a program to reconstruct JPEG images without entries in the FAT structure. So we got our happy ending. We also got together with all the other members of the childbirth class. Skye was easily the biggest of the kids in attendance, and the only one wearing proper clothes, as opposed to one piece baby outfits. That's her in the middle BTW.

A Favourite quote of mine from a Wired article about Friendster http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/dating_pr.html Moore's buddy Matt Chisholm chimes in to tell me about a similar hack, a JavaScript app he wrote with Moore that works on Friendster. It mines for information about anyone who looks at his profile and clicks through to his Web site. "I get their user ID, email address, age, plus their full name. Neither their full name nor their email is ever supposed to be revealed," he says. Notified of the security holes Moore and Chisholm exploit, Friendster rep Lisa Kopp insists, "We have a policy that we are not being hacked." When I explain that, policy or no, they are being hacked, she says, "Security isn't a priority for us. We're mostly focused on making the site go faster." The poor rep's answer reminds me of the dead parrot skit by the Monty Python boys. You know, the one where the pet store owner tries to convince John Cleese that a parrot is *not* dead (Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords), ignoring reality completely. ------ At imeem we have this quote on our notice board, in big writing. It reminds us to make sure that security isn't something that just happens, it has to be built in from the ground up. I'd like to think we do a pretty good job.