The Suite Vollard in Curitiba, Brazil is supposed to be the world’s first revolving apartment building. It has eleven 3,000 square foot units, each of which occupies a whole floor. The owner of an apartment can rotate the apartment as well as control the speed and direction of the rotation and a 360 degree rotation can take from anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. The bathrooms and kitchens are in the stationary core of the building so that the pipes and wires don’t get twisted. At 300k an apartment, I would prefer to walk to the other side of the apartment if I want a different view but it’s a cool building nonetheless.

Iraq wants to administer and control the internet domain name .’iq’. The domain name is technically under the control of a Texas-based company called InfoCom, whose owner is a Palestinian, Bayan Elashi. Bayan Elashi is currently on trial in a US federal court for funding the hardline Palestinian movement, Hamas. This could one of the reasons the Iraqi government want the domain name under their control.
The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority recently conducted a survey of internet use in Iraq and only about 6% of Iraqis said they have internet access and only 2% said they use it regularly. I don’t know how reassigning control over the .iq domain will help improve these figures but many Iraqi officials are optimistic that it will help educate people about the internet in Iraq.

Viruses for the new Windows version, Vista, have already begun to surface. The security firm, Fsecure, has reported that an Austrian virus writer has published five viruses to illustrate vulnerabilities in Vista. This can be seen as a really good thing. Lets get the operating system shaken and tested before the final version is released. The number of computers running Windows makes Microsoft the most prominent target for hackers and I think Microsoft will stand up to the challenge. To help improve the security of the operating systems, Microsoft invites security professionals (a.k.a hackers) to take their shots at Windows software at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. These sessions are called ‘Blue Hat’ sessions and the name is a takeoff on the White Hat and Black Hat categories used to describe good and bad hackers. The Blue, of course, represents the color of Microsoft’s logo.

A flaw on the eBay site has allowed hackers to redirect the sign-on process to a phishing site. This means that you could log in from a genuine eBay webpage and then be redirected to fake site which would ask for your information to confirm that you are the genuine account holder or whatever. This is a step up from being directed to a fake website to log into eBay in the first place. So, if you get an email which has a link that takes you to eBay, delete that email. This latest effort makes it even more difficult for the users to detect a phishing attack as the user is being taken to a genuine page and then to the hacker’s website. What other ways will they find to rob us?

All these years, Mac users had to press the ‘Control’ key and then click the mouse to access the alternative menu because the mouse is just one BIG button. After 10 years of being different, Apple is releasing a multi button mouse called the ‘Mighty Mouse’. Is anyone else noticing a trend here? Apple first switches to Intel and then changes the type of mouse that made them so different. Wonder what they will do next.

A vulnerability in many hotel T.V. infrared systems can allow a hacker to obtain names and room numbers of guests from the hotel billing system. The hacker could read the e-mail of guests who use web mail through the TV, putting the users at risk. Adam Laurie, technical director of the London security and networking firm The Bunker showed Wired News how he conducted such attacks at hotels around the world. Laurie is known as ‘Major Malfunction’ in the hacker community. He also revealed how infrared used for garage door openers and car-door locks could be hacked. If you are interested in getting freebies at the hotels, all you need is a laptop running Linux, an infrared transmitter and a USB TV tuner. We are sure to hear more of ‘I did not rent that movie!’