"Microsoft is making an effort to appear open, and they are hoping that this will accomplish that objective," said Mike Gilpin, an analyst with Giga Information Group.
"It's just a battle of perceptions," Gilpin said, noting that the move isn't likely to have the same kind of commercial repercussions that would come from a fuller move to open source. "\

Microsoft opens some source for a component of .NET

Microsoft makes a college try - Tech News - CNET.com

"H2K2 will take place July 12, 13, and 14, 2002, at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. "

2600 Magazine is throwing another con this summer.

H2K2

"Digital file-sharing technologies -- Napster and its offspring -- are now undermining the established economics of music. And everything we know about digital technologies suggests that Napster is only the beginning. "

Kevin Kelly on Digital Music

Where Music Will Be Coming From

In the aftermath of history’s biggest and giddiest boom-and-bust, the tech industry is entering the early stages of yet another cycle of innovation. “It’s a great time to start a new company,” says Heidi Roizen of Mobius Venture Capital. Jim Breyer, a partner at VC firm Accel, concurs. “This is exactly what was happening in the early 1990s [before the Internet exploded].”

Silicon Valley Reboots

Like previous technological upheavals, the IT revolution is likely to yield the greatest benefits not to investors but to workers, in the form of higher real wages, and to consumers, in the form of enhanced product selection, quality, service, and lower prices. No wonder so many of America's investors and chief executives remain anxious about the future, even as economists--not usually known for their optimism--celebrate the economy's remarkable performance.

BW Online | March 25, 2002 | Info Tech: The Payoff Is Bigger Than You Think

"On a 4GB Linux partition, the block size is typically 4K (chosen automatically when the mke2fs utility is run to create a filesystem). Thus one can reliably hide up to 4KB of data per file if using a small file. The data will be invulnerable to disk usage, invisible from the filesystem, and, which is more exciting for some people, undetectable by file integrity checkers using file checksumming algorithms and MAC times. Ext2 floppy (with a block size of 1KB) allows hiding data as well, albeit in smaller chunks."

Covert Channel in Linux Filesystem

"The institute has a remit to produce fabrics that can morph to improve camouflage, stiffen to provide splints for broken limbs and store energy that can be tapped later to increase the wearer's strength."

MIT nanotech suits

"But NDS had one important rival, an encryption technology developed in France by the local broadcaster Canal Plus which had been adopted by just about all News Corporation's rival broadcasters.

The NDS team in Haifi, according to a lawsuit filed in the US district court for the Nothern District of California, set out to "sabotage Canal Plus technological security measures engineered into its smart cards."

Breaking the encryption alone would cost up to $5m. The process demanded the use of ultra-expensive electron-scanning microscopes, with the team probing wafer-thin chips no bigger than a thumbnail. Each chip contained up to 50 layers, with each layer in turn carrying up to 1,000 transistors, every one of which had to be pulled apart and analysed."

Sounds like they spent too much money. :)

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | How codebreakers cracked the secrets of the smart card

Microsoft does something cool:

"The company is building new file organization software that will begin to form the underpinnings of the next major version of its Windows operating system. The complex data software is meant to address a conundrum as old as the computer industry itself: how to quickly find and work with a piece of information, no matter what its format, from any location.
For those using Windows, this will mean easier, faster and more reliable searches for information. Replacing its antiquated file system with modern database technology should also mean a more reliable Windows that's less likely to break and easier to fix when it does, said analysts and software developers familiar with the company's plans. "

MS to replace FAT with SQL

Many people at NASA beleive that further space exploration is basically unreasonable without using nuclear rockets. Of course, on the other side of this table is a public that has been taught to fear nuclear technology. With the Cassini probe, honestly, I couldn't tell who was right. Both groups were sure they were right, but neither group could convincingly counter the opposition, IMHO. However, I heard a lot more volume from the anti-nuke crowd then from Nasa, so I thought I'd "meme" this.

To the Moon on Nukes