Its that time of the month again. Traditionally, all 2600 meetings in the UK are held on the first friday of each month. Our first announcement comes from the Manchester group, who will be having a meet at the usual spot from 7.30pm this Friday 4th.

The meet we be held in ‘The Green Room’ bar on Whitworth street West, opposite the Ritz. Usually upstairs on the balcony.
This is round the corner from Oxford Road Station.
In the event that the Green room is closed the meet will take place in the Corner House Bar.

Please Email man2600.org.uk if you envisage any problems.

If you have a meeting planned and would like to put out an announcement, mail us via our contact page.

Telecoms regulator Ofcom, are making efforts to increase the availability of wireless networks in rural parts of the UK where broadband isnt readily available.

The problem with wireless networks outside of urban areas is that, due to the relatively low range, a greater number of transmitters is required to provide wide coverage. This of course costs alot of money. Ofcom aims to increase the range of each node in order to reduce the number of transmitters required.

In a BBC article, Selina Lo of Ruckus said;

“A typical network will have hundreds or low thousands of access points. If you have power limits, these nodes have to be closer together and you need a lot more nodes.”

Need we go on? Blogger Rickard Liljeberg posts on his website of a strange phenomenon whereby a Dell desktop, model GX520, will spontaneously shut itself down if a mobile phone placed near it recieves an SMS text message. A video of the bug can be found on Lliljeberg’s site.

Initially baffled, Dell blame the problem on interference between the phone and the harddrive and recommend that people refrain from using their mobiles within a foot of their desktop.

If last months exploding laptop wasnt enough for Dell, its happened again in a small office in Illinois, USA. As before, it would appear that the battery developed a fault, caused massive amounts of heat and then exploded.

A full set of pictures and first hand account can be found at Toms Hardware

In an effort to reduce mobile phone related crime, the Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum (MICAF), along with all five major UK mobile networks, have vowed to block 80% of stolen phones, within 24-48 hours of being reported.

MICAF are now making the phone networks take full accountability for the theft of mobile phones. Backing the incentive, Home Secretary, John Reid has pledge £1.35 million in order to form a new “National Phone Crime” unit.

It is likely that the IMEI will be blocked in order to render the phones useless, but many people fear that this may lead to an increase in stolen phones as thiefs will be likely to use the phoen for 48 hours and discard it in place of another.

The Mozilla Foundation have just released version 1.5.0.5 of their popular Internet browser. The latest download is a security and patch release, covering the recent JavaScript and memory vunerabilities as well as a number of other issues. Users are advised to upgrade as soon as possible.

Download Firefox 1.5.0.5 here.
1.5.0.5 Changelog

At this years HOPE conference in New York, Jonathan Westhues of www.cq.cx demonstrated the ability to clone an RFID chip imbedded in the arm of his colleague. Using a laptop running signal processing software, a standard RFID reader and antenna, Westhues was able to read the ID number from the embedded VeriChip.

“Their (VeriChip’s) website claims that it cannot be counterfeited — that is something that Jonathan and I have shown to be untrue,” Annalee Newitz (colleague).

A “VeriChip” is an implantable, passive Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) about the size of a grain of sand that can be used in a variety of applications such as assessing whether somebody has authority to enter a high-security area.

more information can be found at Westhues site : http://cq.cx/verichip.pl

Shanghai’s Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies have created a toy car that will run entirely from hydrogen as part of their research into cleaner fuel alternatives.

The 6 inch car uses a small electric current, supplied by the solar cells, to extract the hydrogen from water and can run for 4 minutes on a full tank.

Horizon’s car, the H-Racer, comes complete with its own solar powered refuelling station and is expected to retail at around $80 USD.

More Information: www.horizonfuelcell.com

Popular social networking site MySpace.com has been down since sunday. Visitors to the site have been instead greeted with a notice from the companys president and founder, Tom Anderson, and a flash interface for the classic arcade game Pacman.

Whilst the official word is that the outage is due to a power loss, rumours are spreading that the chav valhalla has been a victim of futher spyware in their banner advertising, with some people, such as RadioIO.com’s beat Hi, going as far to claim that the server has been hacked.

The Mor-Pah Project have just released version 2.3 of their Command Line MSN Messenger program.

CLI-MSN is an Open Source project that enables users to logon to the MSN network and carryout both public and private chat sessions. Design for nix based systems, CLI-MSN incorporates SSL secure login and runs on the latest MSN protocols.

For more information, check out download page at www.mor-pah.net