Thanks to billing problems and the FCC’s intervention, the Navajo Nation will be sans Internet on Monday. An FCC audit uncovered the fact that satellite service provider OnSat Networks had double-billed the tribe in 2007. Since the U.S. government pays for 85 to 90 percent of the cost of Internet service, it cut off funds to OnSat, pending an investigation into the matter. And, since OnSat can’t pay its subcontractors, it is shutting down service. In the meantime, the Navajo will have to find other ways to peruse LOLcat pics and update their Myspaces. Will the struggles of the Native Americans never end? [DSL reports]
Roughly 1,800 external drives manufactured by Seagate were infected with a Trojan horse virus that sent personal information back to China, according to the Taipei Times. The disk drives, sold at retail in Taiwan, were presumably messed with when they were in the possession of one of Seagate’s Chinese subcontractors. The situation has been locked down, but it certainly puts a new spin on security fears, and Seagate itself has got to be pretty freaked out. All we have at the moment is a statement: “All products leaving the factory are now cleared of the virus.” [Reuters]
At one of Toronto’s locations of The Bay department store, four giant screens have suffered from the infamous Blue Screen of Death for days. You’d think that someone would, I dunno, turn off the freakin’ screens. Or, at minimum, there’s gotta be some 2.4gHz nanny cam feed they could leech for at least a few days before anyone complained. Because after the first 24 hours or so of BSOD, we begin to think that they like the aesthetic. [freshdaily]
Unfortunately this isn’t a Merry Christmas loopy-loo light show designed to inspire yuletide joy. Board speculation stakes it as a new error code for 360s stuffed with Falcon guts—whether it’s the same hardware failure deal as before but in prettier, less depressing colours or is an entirely new error is still up in the air, but when we get some confirmation we’ll let you know. [Logic Sunrise via Xbox-Scene via CrunchGear]
It’s been a while since Apple originally acknowledged freezing with their new aluminium iMacs. But since then,many users are still having problems. AppleInsider has started to wonder if the problem is not a software error, but a hardware issue caused by overheating.
One specific symptom that some users have experienced is a series of graphical glitches before their computer freezes up. Such glitches are the same you’d see in an overclocked video card that’s running too hot. And apparently upgrading to Leopard often exacerbates the problem, at least according to one Apple thread—which makes sense, since Leopard takes advantage of video chipset processing throughout normal OS functions, adding fuel to the not quite literal fire. Anyone out there having problems? [appleforum via appleinsider]
If you got hit with Verizon’s early enthusiasm for the switch back to standard time—apparently a whole mess of people experienced the joy of an extra hour of sleep on Friday morning instead of Sunday morning, thanks to a mixup at Verizon Timekeeping HQ—you might be able to get $20 out of it. Some customers at the FatWallet forum are reporting success wrangling $10 or $20 credits out of the snafu. We’re guessing the better your sob story, the better your odds of collection, so make it good! [Fat Wallet via Punny Money via NYT/Blogrunner]
Retrodata, a data-recovery company, has just issued a warning for Apple MacBook owners with Seagate hard drives that were manufactured in China and have a firmware version of 7.01. Apparently these have a fatal flow that cause their read/write heads to fail mechanically, scratching up the hard drive surface as pictured and making data unrecoverable (even by professionals such as themselves). If you’ve got a MacBook, you should check to see if your internal drive is a Seagate and back up your data accordingly. There’s no official word yet from Apple on whether or not this actually a problem, but better safe than crying over lost nudie photos. [Retrodata - Thanks Eric!]
newVideoPlayer("vanhalen_clamfest.flv", 475, 376); And now for a Friday musical interlude, we bring you Van Halen caught on its comeback tour, except there was one big problem and it involved gadgets. What happens when you play back a prerecorded synthesizer track at 48K instead of the intended 44.1K? The whole track plays back a little bit faster and at a slightly higher pitch, that’s what. A dissonant musical mess ensues, trapping the guitarist and bassist in an on-stage musical hell with nowhere to go.
See Eddie Van Halen launch into his famous solo on “Jump,” trying in vain to somehow transpose to this otherworldly key that is nowhere to be found. This travesty of a performance happened earlier this month (in my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina), and the funny thing is, the crowd was delighted with it. I shutter to think that no one realised something was terribly amiss, but those hometown folks always were overly polite. [RW370, via BoingBoing](Thanks, Joel Johnson!)
Today there was some buzz about a battery bug in the iPod classic. Since perceived bugs aren’t always universal, or even widespread, we like to wait a bit before sounding the alarm. Well, this afternoon, when I plugged in an iPod classic that I swore was close to fully charged and saw the “Please connect to a power source” error message you can see above, I decided to dig deeper.
newVideoPlayer("robotank_gawker.flv", 475, 376); A robot cannon began wildly firing on its own for some reason in South Africa last friday, killing nine soldiers and wounding 14. The Oerlikon GDF-005 antiaircraft gun suddenly began uncontrollably firing as it swung back and forth, spraying hundreds of high-explosive 35mm cannon shells all over the place. The crazed robot’s handlers are still trying to figure out what sort of software bug would cause such mayhem. The video you see above is not the actual incident, but is a similar occurrence from a few years ago when an XM-151 remote weapons station filled the air with lead, and then spun around toward the reviewing stand in search of even more targets. Hey, good thing it had run out of those .50 calibre bullets, or else it would have laid waste to some pretty important suits. These robots, they’re going to take over the world, I tell ya. [Danger Room]
