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Reuters, via ,

HYDERABAD, India (Reuters) - Tax defaulters in southern India are being forced to face the music after city authorities hired drummers to play non-stop outside their homes until they pay up.

After many residents ignored repeated demands to settle overdue property taxes. authorities in a city in Andhra Pradesh state have sent 20 groups of drummers to play outside offenders’ houses for the past week.

“They put up a spectacle outside the houses of defaulters, draw them out and explain their dues to them and the need to clear it at the earliest,” said T.S.R. Anjaneyulu, municipal commissioner of Rajahmundry city.

“They don’t stop until people agree to clear the dues.”

The city, owed a total of 50 million rupees ($1.15 million), had been at its wits’ end after sops like waiving interest and penalties had failed to recover the arrears.

The new method seems to be working, though. One week of incessant drumming has cleared 18 percent of the backlog.

John Hering from Flexilis, with the new BlueSniper Rifle

Tom’s Networking, via Slashdot, writes:

Introduction

Watching the news these past few weeks, you would think that hackers have taken over our cellphones. From the Paris Hilton phone hack (which was not Bluetooth-based), to the unintentional release of Fred Durst’s (from the band Limp Bizkit) sex video - Wireless security has been thrust into the limelight. The proliferation of Bluetooth devices has made wireless communications easy and the Bluetooth group wants you to believe that this technology is safe from hackers. However, the guys from Flexilis, a wireless think-tank based in Los Angeles, beg to differ and they have a big freakin gun to “voice” their opinions.

The gun, which is called the BlueSniper rifle, can scan and attack Bluetooth devices from more than a mile away. The first version of the gun showed up at Defcon 2004, a hacker/computer security convention held annually in Las Vegas. You can read about it in Tom’s Hardware show coverage report here.

While the early version was held together with tie-straps and rubber bands, this newest version has a much more professional look. The team at Flexilis learned a lot from making their previous gun, and have made many improvements. The gun is now bigger, stronger and more durable and the antenna is almost twice a powerful as the older model. It also has a small computer which eliminates the need for lugging around a heavy laptop just to gather data.

How hard was it to make this gun? John Hering, from Flexilis, says, “The parts are easily available for a few hundred dollars and you can make this gun in a long afternoon.” In fact, in this two-part article, we will show you how to build your very own Bluetooth sniper rifle. A complete parts list is provided and we will document each step of the manufacturing process. We’ll also report on our test “shoot” of some famous high-rise buildings in downtown L.A., namely the US Bank / Library Tower and the AON Tower.
(more…)

Celeste Biever, NewScientist.com news service, via Slashdot, reports:

Lawyers, judges and jurors could soon explore crime scenes in three dimensions in the courtroom, in the same way that video gamers explore virtual worlds.

Software called instant Scene Modeler (iSM) re-creates an interactive 3D model from a few hundred frames of a scene captured by a special video camera. Users can zoom in on any object in the 3D model, measure distances between objects and look at scenes from different angles.
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The Wall Street Journal, via Reuters, via Slashdot:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. is to give the U.S. government priority in fixing security holes in Windows and other software, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Under a plan to take effect later this year, Microsoft will give the U.S. Air Force versions of software “patches” to fix serious security vulnerabilities up to a month before they are available to others, the paper said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will give advance notice of problems to other government agencies and distribute patches to them, the Journal said, citing officials at Microsoft and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
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Paul Graham writes:

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that’s kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

If there is one message I’d like to get across about startups, that’s it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.
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This new robot at biscuit brand McVitie’s laboratory in Buckinghamshire is tasked with testing the crumbliness of cookies. The plastic-toothed robot chews up biscuits to determine which baking techniques produce the desired amount of crumbs.
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On BoingBoing, AV writes:

“George Atkinson, the man who opened the first video rental store in the 70’s has died at 69. To start his rental business, Mr. Atkinson bought 50 movies that had recently been made available on video, including ‘The French Connection,’ ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’ He then advertised their availability for rental in a one-inch ad in The Los Angeles Times. Customers arrived in droves and willingly paid the $10-a-day rental fee. (Only the wealthy could afford the $1,000 that VCR’s cost then.)”
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renai42, on Slashdot, writes:

“Linux creator Linus Torvalds said this afternoon that he’s now running an Apple Macintosh as his main desktop, mainly for work reasons, although partly simply because he’s a self-described “technology whore” and got the machine for free.” And yes, he is running Linux on it ;)
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Alexander Payne writes:

A while back I was quoted in a Wired News article about iTunes library sharing. I had totally forgotten about that until this evening.

I parked myself in Murky VA, my lackluster de facto “third place,” and opened up iTunes. Before I hopped on Bassdrive or another streaming station I had a look at the sole shared iTunes music library in a sea of PowerBooks: maria’s music. I browsed. What a fucking music collection. Not in size, not that many albums really. But content-wise, things I’ve not seen outside of, well, my collection: multiple Muslimguaze albums, scads of shoegaze and post-rock, Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack to Twin Peaks, for fucksakes.

It had to belong to the girl with dark hair by the counter. I saw her when I got my coffee. Took note, lovely. Her. Her?
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Phillip Torrone, Make: zine blog writes:

Okay, this is what my friends call a “Torronesque” project. This is where I usually come up with something and build it, and it really has no purpose or usefulness- but on further inspection it’s kinda neat. This is the iPod shuffle hand charger, actually recharger. There are many “crank powered” accessories floating around, so I thought I’d try a few and figure out if the iPod shuffle can be recharged with one. Well, it can, sorta. Here it is in action! I am still working out the best voltage regulator and wiring, as I figure it out, I’ll post the details, I don’t what to screw up everyone’s shuffles. What I’d really like to do is add little power generating motors to more things. Imagine getting a little power charge everytime you press a key or open your or phone laptop, maybe it wouldn’t matter that much, but multiply that by a billion people and perhaps it would…

The New York Post reports:

March 4, 2005 — WAS Hunter S. Thompson’s mysterious death really a suicide?

There are some serious irregularities surrounding the demise of the gonzo author, who was found shot to death in the kitchen of his Woody Creek, Colo., ranch on Feb. 20, and local cops seemed to have done a lackluster job of investigating.

Police reports obtained by the Rocky Mountain News note that cops arriving on the scene heard shots being fired, that Thompson’s son, Juan, was allowed to be alone with the body, and that there was something odd about the gun Thompson supposedly used to kill himself.
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Jeff Baumgartner, CED via asterisk-biz list:

The Federal Communications Commission has slapped the hand of a North
Carolina-based telco for engaging in VoIP blocking, a practice that can
prevent customers of Vonage and other broadband-enabled voice services from
accessing service.

The FCC on Thursday said it had reached a $15,000 consent decree with
Madison River Communications LLC, a move “that will ensure uninterrupted
Internet voice service on the company’s network.”
(more…)