1950’s STROWGER UAX13

Over the bank holiday week, I took a trip down to the Forest of Dean, with my family, to see the Thomas The Tank Engine event that was being held by Dean Forest Railway. Now, obviously, this has nothing to do with hack, tech or phreaking. However, before we left I noticed a small museum crammed into the back of the gift shop, I slowly walked around the miniatures and plaquards before coming to what was easily the best part of the day - telephones, lots of telephones. Surrounding the phones was alot of old machinery, not just any old machinery, no, old school GPO telephone exchanges and manual switchboards, dating as far back as the 1930’s. Behind a glass wall was something even more impressive - a fully functional STROWGER Unit Automatic Exchange #13 (UAX13) from the 1950’s.

Click to read more and see photos of old telephone exchanges and the UAX13

So last month was the first real push with the site, despite a lack of advertising and what not, we managed to do pretty well. The site went live in July to a small audience, ending on 93 unique visitors for the month. Now in our second month our figures have grown dranatically. August saw our stats top out at 344 unique visitors contributing 4379 hits!

Furthermore, we have been quoted on sites such as news.com, and linked to from numerous sites including, Icerocket, Technorati and Answers.com.

As well as our massive increase in visitors and our media exposure, we had a number of rather interesting visitors emerging from the inner workings of well known institutions. Below is a small list of some of the better ones:

• Institute of Physics (IOP) www.iop.org
• svext.nec-labs.com
• VeriSign Infrastructure & Operations (208.17.184.62)
• wp.eris.qinetiq.com (DERA)
• leonet.royalbank.com
• BIOPASS MEDICAL SYSTEMS
• rc8fhf.rcertc.army.mil
• NASA (139.229.33.92)
• legion.dera.gov.uk
• www.maxcyte.com (Biotech Company)
• ritig5.rit.reuters.com
• fw54.torolab.ibm.com
• ex2k.cdacouncil.org
• www.shef.ac.uk (University of Sheffield)
• www.monitor110.com
• webgw0.thls.bbc.co.uk
• Kyoto University (133.3.96.208)
• 0×10.com
• ce-tec.kuwait.net

Men are from Mars, women from Venus, and Firefox from outer space, or so it would seem. A creative group of Linux enthusiasts, from the Oregon State University in the States, took to the countryside recently in a bid to carve a giant Firefox logo into the surrounding rural area.

Surpassing Mozilla’s PR stunt of building a public access Firefox lover’s database, the group has upped a number of photos at the groups University web site here.

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

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

Its almost that time of year again when we all don our Red Hats and Slacks and make our way to London. This years LinuxWorld Expo will offer 26 hours of Open Source topics as well as 16 top name industry speakers, by the likes of Bruce Perens, Alan Cox, Ian Pratt and Chris DiBona.

For more information and registration, please follow this link for the LinuxWorld Expo 2006