CCTV spying on smokers

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So now the bastards have made sure that you’re actually outside killing yourself in the rain, wind, sleet, cold, whatever with your cigarette, they’ve decided that the litter you create when you throw away your cigarette butt is aweful enough that they’re going to automatically ticket you for littering after they’ve automatically identified you with the huge CCTV spy network of camera’s they’re placing in front of every pub in Wales.
Run little smoking piggies, run! The government is out to get you…

Google Lunar X-Prize

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Google has teamed up with the X-Prize foundation to offer incentives to get onto the moon:

• GRAND PRIZE: A $20 million Grand Prize will be awarded to the team that can soft land a craft on the Moon that roams for at least 500 meters and transmits a Mooncast back to Earth. The Grand Prize is $20M until December 31st 2012; thereafter it will drop to $15M until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation
• SECOND PRIZE: A $5 million Second Prize will be offered as well, providing an extra incentive for teams to continue to compete, and increasing the possibility that multiple teams will succeed. Second place will be available until December 31st 2014 at which point the competition will be terminated unless extended by Google and the X PRIZE Foundation

It worked as the X-Prize to get Burt Rutan’s Spaceship One into space, so why not this? Good plan!

UK Data Protection Act Flaunted

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In an interesting art project, where the director wanted to make a movie out of only CCTV footage (which the UK, under the DPA has to provide quickly and for a fixed fee if you want to see your own face with other faces blacked out) about a woman living in a land of faceless people, it turned out that the holders of the CCTV footage seemed totally unaware of the DPA or tried to break it.

PHP compilers

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So far as I can find out there are two PHP compilers out there:

Zend Guard, which compiles your code so that it’s optimised, sped up and unreadable. This is run using an Apache / IIS extension called the Zend Optimiser (free).

Phalanger, which is open source and compiles to .NET, allowing the use of .NET classes. It runs on top of the .NET 2.0 framework, so you can run your PHP scripts directly on microsoft windows machines without installing PHP.

Big damn botnet

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The Storm botnet is now sending around 2 billion emails per day, has around 30,000 computers hosting the webpage that is linked to in the email, runs at around 10% capacity and blasts anybody who starts looking at it with a massive DOS. This thing can take down just around everything (allthough it doesn’t seem to be doing so) and is way more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
The article focusses on the DOS power of Storm, but what if it started doing some more interesting stuff like curing cancer, running folding at home or something?
Pretty amazing – it’s not the first of April, is it?