The Truth About Truth Serums

Truth Serums have been utilized by some of the three-letter government agencies in the past, particularly during the rampant paranoia of the Cold War. And in the aftermath of 9/11, there was some discussion on the idea of bringing them back into use for interrogation. But are these truth serums effective? Do they produce any useful results?

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Digg (Out Of Service)



Today, at approximately 8:50 A.M. Central Time, Digg has temporarily gone down.
Edit: Digg was down for approximately 10 - 15 minutes (probably while updating servers...), and now is up and running again!

Let There Be Light, Cables Included (Photos)

New company Sunlight Direct looks to commercialize a system for piping daylight into buildings through fiber optic cables.

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AT&T Hack Exposes 19,000 Identities

Hackers broke into one of AT&T's computer systems and accessed personal data on thousands of customers who used the carriers online store.

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Vertical Mice, Foot Pedal Mice And Vertical Keyboards (Photos)

Who says a mouse has to lie flat, and on a desk? You might not see these as often as your garden-variety mouse, but a few oddball peripherals are giving real relief to frequent computer users.

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How to Reach 100,000 People for Under $1.00

How to video showing how to exercise your right to free speech.

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The Mobile Internet: Are We There Yet?

Basic components, such as speedy wireless networks and Web page formats for the small screen, are on their way.

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Laptop Laser Engraving (digg logo)

Phillip Torrone from MAKE magazine helps me engrave the digg logo into my laptop. Thanks to Dylan for the video.

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Digg Trademark Fun

A while ago our trademark attorney approached us and was concerned we could loose the name 'digg'. I had no idea this was possible as we had already filed for the trademark...

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CBS Bluetooth Billboards To Allow People To Download Video Clips Of Shows

The TV network will install billboards in NYC that let people download clips of five shows on Bluetooth-enabled handsets.

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The Dark Tale Of Colliding Superclusters

For all that mankind has learned through science, the Universe has so far managed to keep most of its secrets. We don't know where it came from, what its fate will be, or even its most basic composition. Astronomers now believe that for every kilogram of normal matter like atoms, electrons, and quarks there are five kilograms of dark matter.

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Internet Search Is Looking To Go Web 2.0 With Social Searching

Yahoo, Microsoft and others are acknowledge that some questions are answered better by humans than a search engine algorithm. Social search generally refers to a Web site or service that relies on the participation of a community to come up with answers to specific questions or to provide links to Web sites or other resources of common interest.

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YouTube Could Be A Steal At $1 Billion

Sony's buy of video-sharing company Grouper could mean big bucks to others in online video.

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Digg is Named #1 of the 5 Most Successful People-Powered News Sites

Netscape came in waaay behind at #5.

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YouTube Is Down

OK. We admit it. We're fixing stuff, but we'll be up soon. In the meantime, please enjoy a layman's explanation of our website...

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Digg2Phone: Follow Digg Stories Via Text Messages On Your Cell Phone

With Digg2Phone, you can choose which stories you want us to follow for you, and we'll text message you when something happens. For example, if you submitted a story to digg and wanted to be notified of changes to the story in real time, when a story hits the digg homepage, when someone diggs it, when someone comments on it, or when it's buried.

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Operation Acoustic Kitty

One of the CIA's most bizarre Cold War efforts was Operation Acoustic Kitty. In declassified documents from the CIA's super-secret Science and Technology Directorate, it was revealed that some Cold-War-era cats were surgically altered to become sophisticated bugging devices.

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Digg Signature Creator - Generate your own personal Digg Signature

DiggSig allows Digg users to enter their username and will generate a personal forum signature, including their latest Digg, Rank, Stories Dugg, Stories Submitted in addition to other useful Digg.com stats from their account. Signatures automatically update so to show your latest stats. Works on MySpace, forums, personal websites, etc.

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No Price Cuts For Verizon & BellSouth DSL Customers

Verizon Communications' and BellSouth's DSL customers won't see a reduction in their broadband bills, even though a special fee that had been tacked on to bills to pay for a federal program has been eliminated.

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Reinventing The Scroll Wheel (Photos)

A recent visit by CNET News.com to Synaptics' headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., turned up several notable concept designs that might make their way into future PCs.

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Google Defends Net Neutrality Regulations

During in-person debate, telecom executives claim Google is hypocritical on Net neutrality and worried about search competition.

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Linux Leaders Plan Lightweight Virtualization

Novell and Red Hat have concrete plans to build resource-stingy "containers" to aid use of virtualization.

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Microsoft Reaches Out To Firefox Developers

The head of Microsoft's open-source business has offered to help get Firefox to work with Windows Vista, but it remains to be seen whether Mozilla and the open-source community will respond positively.

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The Stephen Colbert Bridge

The soon to be Stephen Colbert Bridge.

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Digg Mobile

Diggaholics can now grab the latest stories with Digg Mobile. Powered by Mobits, this new mobile version has been tested with all cHTML-capable mobile browsers - which basically means that you'll most likely be able to use it on your phone. Yet

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Securing Data By Scattering The Pieces

New software divides digital documents and other files into slices, then stores the slices on the Internet.

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SocialPicks: Collaborative Investment Research

SocialPicks is a stock market oriented community, focused on reputation building and small group collaboration. They believe that an emphasis on individual reputation instead of aggregate information will prevent much of the gaming that critics of social stock sites often critique. They have just begun to offer limited beta accounts.

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Evolving Universes

Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin looked at the simple, functional elegance found in the the theory of natural selection, and thought that maybe such a concept could be applied on a universal scale. Thus the theory of Cosmological Natural Selection was born.

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Digg Card, Get your digg profile on your site

This takes your Digg profile and makes it into a card that you can display on your website. Basically its like the xbox live gamer card but for digg. I am interested in getting some feedback on this. It is very easy to use.

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You can see mine on the top of the side bar to the right. Future updates are to come with new usability and features to better implement this into your webpage, more seamlessly. I will toy with this a little myself, and see if I can't find a better way to script this, even if I have to only use simple html, css code to do so. Definitely a cool idea though.

The Daily Show: John Hodgman On Countering Insurgency

The Daily Show's John Hodgeman on a write-in contest to defeat the countering insurgency in Iraq.

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Spying An Intelligent Search Engine

While most would agree that Google has set the current standard for Web search, some technologists say even better tools are on the horizon thanks to advances in artificial intelligence.

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The Daily Show: "Target: USA" "Threat Down"

Following airport terrorist scares and subsequent arrests in the UK, American mass media jumps on the "threat down" bandwagon, calling it "Target: USA"

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Secret Law At The Supreme Court

Does the government have the right to keep secret a law that is applied to millions of Americans every day? That's the question John Gilmore has asked the Supreme Court to decide in his petition to the Court, filed on the 4th of August 2006.

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Dell On AMD Through The Years

Like the popular cheerleader who finally talks to the geek when he strikes it rich, Dell is paying more than a little attention to Advanced Micro Devices these days.

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The Daily Show: Stephen Colbert's Fear-Mongering

Stephen Colbert takes a look into the scare tactics the news media uses, "that kill you and you children."

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Old Records And Tapes Go In, New CDs Come Out

Have a big collection of records or tapes, and want to be able to take that collection with you anywhere? Only one problem, the current standard in music storage are CDs. Well, here's your answer; the Teac GF-350. It allows you to convert your old music collection directly to new CDs in no time, without the need of a computer, or fancy equipment.

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Microsoft At Its Viral Marketing Schemes Again

An unknown advertiser is running a viral at Notfornoobs.com, using a TV that flashes the logos for Razer computer peripherals and Microsoft. (We assume that anything with an unauthorized MS logo would be shut down before you can say "crack legal team," so the company's partly guilty for this ad.)

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Stephen Colbert's Tips For Protecting You Identity Online From AOL

Stephens Sound Advice: Protecting Your Online Identity.

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Web 2.Ooh: Amanda Congdon Vs. Rachel Rhodes

The first lady-vs-lady battle of Web 2.Ooh sees two vloggers who are comfy with the camera. Who will come ahead in the photo finish? Place your vote for your favorite Web 2.Ooh lady.

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No Oats Were Harmed In The Making Of The Firefox Crop Circle

We received permission from the landowners and all oats were pressed and flattened with love and care. The representative insists that no oats were harmed in the making of the crop circle.

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Dell Earnings Down, But AMD Chips Up

As expected, Dell reports sharply lower net income for second quarter, and announces plans to use more AMD chips.

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Firefox On The Brink Of Several Updates

Firefox Portable 1.5.0.6 has just been released by John Haller of PortableApps.com. I say Firefox Portable now because of the recent name change. Also recently released is Firefox Portable 2.0 Beta 1, for all you who love the latest test versions of the popular Firefox browser.

Portable Firefox is now Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition (aka Firefox Portable)

You can read more about the reason for the name change, and about what's new in both Firefox Portable 1.5.0.6 and 2.0 Beta 1 here.

Live/CD Support - Firefox Portable supports running from a CD or other read-only media right out of the box. You just need change one setting to do it, too. Best of all, Firefox Portable will even detect if you're running from a read-only location and offer to run locally, which is handy if you have a write-protection switch on your flash drive or memory card. Full details are in the support topic on Running from a CD.

In-Place Upgrades - Firefox Portable now supports the ability to do what we're calling an "in-place upgrade". This means that you can extract it right over an existing installation of Firefox Portable without losing any of your existing data and it'll Just Work. This will apply to future releases of Firefox Portable as you'll still need to manually update due to the directory changes.

Partial Upgrade Support Fixed - Firefox Portable now fully supports the ability to use Firefox's partial upgrades. No changes are needed. Firefox Portable will automatically let you know when an update is available and let you choose when you'd like to install it. This is important, since some flash drives can be very slow, taking several minutes to update. Just be sure you have at least 40mb free on your drive when you do an update, since Firefox's update process doesn't yet check for low disk space.

Wine Support in Linux/Debian/Unix - Firefox Portable now supports the ability to download, install and run within Wine. That means you can run it right within your *nix of choice without any changes. You can even copy things like your bookmarks and cookies back and forth to your local copy of Firefox.

Users are sure to love the new support for Wine, and the "In-Place Upgrades" and "Partial Upgrade Support (Fixed)." This will surely alleviate the tendious task of updating Firefox Portable. And adding Wine support will only help Firefox Portable grow a larger audience.

Downloads:
Firefox Portable 1.0.8
Firefox Portable 1.5.0.6
Firefox Portable 2.0 Beta 1 Preview

Enough with Firefox Portable for now. Mozilla also recently stated at their most recent status meeting that the next test release of their Firefox web browser, Firefox 2.0 Beta 1, will be released at the end of the month, sometime between August 25th - 31st.


There are currently working on 34 bug fixes, with about 91 still to go.



CyberTech has reported that the latest hourly build of Firefox 2.0, now has implemented the new Firefox 2.0 theme into the tabs as well. You can view the comparison on their post. They also have a link to a post on CyberTech about how to keep the Firefox 1.x theme in case you don't like the Firefox 2.x theme.

Another recent Mozilla status meeting stated that Firefox 1.5.0.7 is slated for an early release on September 5th.

Due to Firefox 2.0 slip, we have decided to shorten the 1.5.0.7 release cycle to get it out before we reach release time for 2.0. Current schedule and info is available at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:1.5.0.7:Community

(Sorry, there were a bunch of small stories, figured I'd condense them into one rather than submit many smaller stories.)

Colbert Report: The Word - "Dumb"ocracy

Colbert explores what will happen if every idiot in America is forced to vote.

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Digg Tools

An updated list of tools and links relating to Digg.

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Digg Adds Video Thumbnails

Starting today, all newly submitted videos from YouTube and Google will include static thumbnail previews. Support for Yahoo! videos is coming soon.

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Google Analytics Now Open To Everyone

The Google Analytics Blog has announced that you no longer need an invitation to receive the Website statistics tracking for free. Just head on over to the Google Analytics site and login with you Google account. It will then take you through the steps that are needed to setup your Website.

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Diggnation Won The 2006 People's Choice Podcast Award For Best Tech Podcast


The 2006 Podcast Awards, who judges podcasts in a wide variety of podcasts, has selected Diggnation as the best technology/science podcast. After being featured on Digg, their traffic hit its highest point, blowing out the previous years.

Total Hits to Website since July 1st when started was 7,911,000 blowing out last years traffic.

This is only one in a series of milestones this podcast has made since its launch just over a year ago. Diggnation was the first podcast ever to be (partly) recorded in full Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound (Episode 14). With regular live shows, including shows at CES and E3, and more live shows speculated to be coming, such as a London or Hawaii episode. Diggnation isn't showing any signs of slowing down. Especially with the rumored upgrade in the Revision3 homepage, the corporation that produces Diggnation and a growing list of other top podcasts.

Congratulations Kevin, Alex and the rest of the Diggnation crew!

(Sorry for the blog post, couldn't find a submittable url)

Office Waste: Workers Kill 1.86 Hours A Day

"I'd say in a given week I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work," Peter tells a the consultants. Well, Peter, you're not alone. A new survey by Salary.com and America Online found the average U.S. worker fritters away 1.86 hours per 8-hour workday -- not including lunch and scheduled breaks.

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A new way to test your bandwidth (and it looks pretty cool too!)

The site allows you to select servers to ping from around the country on an interactive map and graphically displays connections as they travel with varying speeds along the way. It also lets you store results of tests for your computer and sort them by date, time, speed and distance.


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WD Caviar 500GB SATA Hard Drive for $199.99 shipped free, no rebates

The Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB Serial ATA II Internal Hard Drive with 16MB cache, model no. WD5000KS, costs $199.99 with free 3-day shipping at newegg.com. That's the first time this drive has been below $200 without the added headache of rebates.

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The World Now Has Miore Fat People Than Hungry People

The world now has more overweight people than hungry ones and governments should design economic strategies to influence national diets, a conference of international experts have heard.

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Huge Firefox crop circle - aliens do prefer Firefox!

This past weekend, the OSU Linux Users Group descended on a field in Oregon to create a 45,000+ square foot crop circle of Firefox. The photos of this, taken from planes and helicopters, are incredible

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Iranian President Launches Jihad On Microsoft

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new blog is targeting certain Israeli visitors with a virus attack. Israeli bloggers report that the Iranian president's site is sending viruses (or Trojans) to anyone with an Israeli IP address. Well, not exactly -- he's attacking anyone from Israel using Windows and Internet Explorer.

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TechTV Reborn as 'UndoTV'

"Pirillo and LaPorte hope to attract a sponsor and begin producing original content, but for now will let the site evolve from the ground up. Contributors will keep 100 percent control of the content they provide to the site, Pirillo wrote."

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Tired of prying eyes at work?

My boss recently decided that we'd be more productive if we adopted an open floor plan, which includes having all monitors facing outwards so he can keep a constant eye on what we're working on. In order to continue reading digg in peace, I whipped up a little proxy app which I thought some of you might find useful.

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Confirmed, CNN & New Yorker: Bush pre-planned Lebanon War

Today on CNN, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, the one who mainstreamed the Abu Gahrib story, has confirmed with insiders that Bush and the Israeli Government planned months in advance that any incident, no matter how small, would ignite a broad and punishing response by Israel in a preemptive move to start a war with Iran.

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The Internet Is A Denial Of Service Attack On Your Brain

"We found that mental performance, the capability of the brain, was also reduced. Workers cannot think as well when they are worrying about e-mail or voicemails. It effectively reduces their IQ," says Wilson.

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AMD Quietly Releases Chips

AMD has expanded the range in their X2 line of CPUs. Quietly releasing a X2 5200+ - L2 cache being 1MBx2. As well as producing a cheaper dual core chip, the X2 3600+.

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The Extraordinary Dymaxion Automobile

Imagine a car that seats eleven passengers, turns on a dime, has excellent fuel efficiency, and cruises happily at 120 miles per hour. A man named Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller imagined and designed such a car, and in 1933, several fully capable prototypes were built for Chrysler. This sleek, aerodynamic vehicle was called the Dymaxion.

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The Daily Show: President Bush "Dangerous Madman"

Jon Stewart takes word count on Bush's interview with Meet The Press, or should I say 'Meet The Prez'.

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After Peak Oil: No More Business As Usual

Any interesting analysis of our peak oil future.

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