People being rescued in Haiti via SMS and Twitter

From TFA: Relief workers in Haiti received an emergency text message Tuesday about a collapsed school, with children still alive in the rubble. A search-and-rescue team on the scene, however, couldn’t find the right location.

Then a group of volunteers in Boston pinpointed the origin of the message, sent using the 4636 SMS shortcode. They rapidly relayed the information back to Eric Rasmussen, a former top naval medical officer working with rescue teams in Haiti.

A team was then dispatched to the correct grid location. The coordinates were accurate to five decimal places.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/texts-tweets-saving-haitians-from-the-rubble/

I think this is pretty freakin' awesome.

And then I came upon this:

"A team of radio ham volunteers from the Dominican Republic visited Port-au-Prince to install VHF repeaters, only to be fired upon as they left the Dominican embassy. Two non-ham members of the party were hit, one severely. ARRL is sending equipment, and there is confusion as unfamiliar operators in government agencies join in on ham frequencies."

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/01/23/0230224/Radio-Hams-Fired-Upon-In-Haiti?art_pos=10

I'm an amateur radio operator, and this just boggles my mind. A VHF repeater is a receiver/transmitter that greatly extends the range of hand-held radios by receiving their signal on one frequency and rebroadcasting it through a much more powerful transmitter on a different one. The hand-helds are configured to receive on the repeater's output frequency and flip over to transmit on their input frequency. ARRL is the Amateur Radio Relay League, an American organization representing ham radio interests. One of the things that they're always involved in is emergency operations like this. During Katrina, they were the most reliable way to get messages in and out of the area.

Interview with Terry Gilliam

re: his new movie, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and how he handled the death of Heath Ledger during the filming of it.

I want to see this movie, but I have my doubts that it'll run in my area. I'll probably have to wait for the DVD.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/01/imaginarium-terry-gilliam/all/1

Microsoft patched IE yesterday to fix the Aurora bug: it's already being attacked

"The first widespread attack to leverage the Internet Explorer flaw that Microsoft patched in an emergency update Thursday morning has surfaced. By midday Thursday Symantec had spotted hundreds of Web sites that hosted the attack code. The attack installs a Trojan horse program that is able to bypass some security products and then give hackers access to the system, said Joshua Talbot, a security intelligence manager with Symantec. Once it has infected a PC, the Trojan sends a notification e-mail to the attackers, using a US-based, free e-mail service that Symantec declined to name."

I would find it so amusing, and not in the least bit surprising, to find out that the free e-mail service was Hotmail or Gmail.

Security is a bitch. Someone once said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, well, so is the price of security.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/01/23/1429207/Widespread-Attacks-Exploit-Newly-Patched-IE-Bug?art_pos=3