The Floppies: May 2002

Warning: Make sure your next illegal copy of a song is a legitimate illegal copy. MP3 audio files can't contain viruses, but hackers figured out how to create bogus MP3 files that can invoke Web links and execute nefarious scripts when you try to play them. The dangerous files—which aren't MP3s but have .mp3 file extensions, are actually programs written to take advantage of Microsoft's Windows Media Player or RealNetworks' RealOne Player, whose functions go beyond just music playback to include Web access.

What do Ralph Nader, the Supreme Court, and Microsoft have in common? Online pollsters at ZDNet UK discovered that Microsoft employees had too much influence over the results of a public vote that made Microsoft's .Net look more popular than Sun's Java as a platform for developing Web services. An investigation found that a high percentage of the voters had come from the Microsoft.com domain, including one who voted 228 times. Many came from a link in an e-mail message whose subject line read, "Please stop and vote for .Net!"

And with the special USB attachment, it brews coffee or tea. Hitachi has prototyped a laptop computer that uses water instead of a fan to cool its ultrahot Pentium 4 processor.

Yes, please, I'd like 10 copies of this cat, enlarged by 40 percent. Genetic Savings & Clone claims to have licensed technology that was used to clone a cat at the Texas A&M University. Through its Web site (www.savingsandclone.com) the company is offering "gene banking"—storage of DNA—of any "mammal other than humans."

Headline: Porn Industry Found Shockingly Unscrupulous Opportunistic porn-site operators have been grabbing the old Web addresses of companies, government agencies, and civic organizations that have changed their URLs. According to Web filtering company N2H2, previous government addresses taken over by sleaze merchants include the Ohio State Senate and the Nebraska Department of Education, and civic organizations include the Ballet Theatre of Annapolis, the Cape Cod History Society, and the International Lutheran Women's Missionary League.

Oh—if only I weren't so mobile! Finnish traffic authorities fined Nokia executive Anssa Vanjoki $100,000 for riding his motorcycle at 46mph in a 30mph zone, according to The New York Times. The fine was assessed as a proportion of his income.

Privacy advocate #303455Z says he is outraged. Applied Digital Solutions has adapted an electronic pet-identification system to create VeriChip, a rice-size chip that can be implanted in human beings for identification purposes.

Copyright © 2002 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Ziff Davis Smart Business.