Brandon Dimmel

About the only tech sphere blamed more often than 'video games' is the 'Internet'. Some kids from Flesherton, Ontario, Canada have done little to change that stigma, after being caught having constructed their very own homemade stun gun. According ... to reports, the boys found instructions on how to build the sometimes-lethal device online. The teen who first made the search also built the primitive taser, which he then sold to a friend for $20. Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) described the teens responsible as "good young men," and seem to believe neither fully realized what they were doing. ... (view more)

Think Microsoft is unfazed by the criticism of the now one-year-old Windows Vista? Doesn't look like it, given recent rumblings that the company is speedily working towards the release of a completely new operating system (OS), tentatively titled ... 'Windows 7' perhaps as early as next year. Those rumblings are coming straight from the the lips of company chairman Bill Gates, who recently hinted to Reuters that Windows 7 might ship as soon as 2009. That's a huge jump forward for an OS originally dated for the year following. In response to Gates' alleged quote to Reuters starting all the rumors ... (view more)

Fans of the Sony PlayStation 3 had a rough time of it when the console launched in November 2006. Pounded in sales by Nintendo and overshadowed by the game library of the Xbox 360, few Sony fanboys could legitimately 'sell' the system for gamers. ... Now, that may be changing as the console regains a critical feature once thought lost forever. When it first shipped well over a year ago, the PS3 lacked a small but important little trick that many gamers enjoyed: rumble. Part of the reason, as claimed by Sony, was that the PS3's new controller function, SIXAXIS, would be impaired by the vibrations ... (view more)

There's a time and place for malware. Well, ideally there's never a time and place for it, but there certainly are places we'd expect it to strike over others. For one, few of us would link the average supermarket with the latest in technology, let ... alone its breach. Surprisingly enough, malware is being blamed for a remarkable security hack of the Massachusetts-based Hannaford supermarket chain in early March. The Boston Globe recently cited a letter sent from the grocery chain to state regulators, announcing that the breach was the direct result of malicious software meant to intercept ... (view more)

Got a thing for America's most glamorous gadabout? Then take a trip down Facebook lane, where a glitch in the social networking page has opened the door to very private pictures of Paris Hilton for anyone to see. A Canadian computer technician ... recently discovered that a freshly-implemented security measure was anything but secure. The new barrier, designed to prevent random profile visitors from flipping through personal photo albums, can easily be circumvented by simply guessing the ID of a photo. Surprisingly, Facebook never checked to make sure their new barricade actually validated ... (view more)

With all of the hysteria surrounding viral and spyware attacks or the hacking of government agencies, sometimes we lose sight of those truly vulnerable on the Internet: our kids. A Saskatchewan mother recently felt the sting when her 14-year-old ... daughter fled with a 41-year-old man who she met online. Last Tuesday, the girl snuck out of her parents' home to meet a man old enough to be her father. However, she didn't expect it to be that way; up until their meeting, the girl was under the impression her new friend would be much younger. When they finally did meet, Daniel George Nickolson ... (view more)

Google is the web's most powerful entity. That much is not in doubt. The search engine's popularity dwarfs competitors Yahoo or Ask.com, and no one knows it more than retailers. A number of companies are now a bit worried Google is inching up on ... their territory, offering a service that steers consumers away from official retail web sites for an alternate page established by the search titan itself. It works like this. A web user enters the typical, one-in-a-gazillion search on Google. Nothing new there. However, once the results are listed, a second box created by Google points those shoppers ... (view more)

Gotta get your Milwaukee Bucks score every morning? Apparently, so do hackers. MSNBC Sports' web page was recently the victim of a major hack attack, compromising more than 26,000 pages. It's set off alarm bells for legitimate web sites, and ... highlights a new trend being forged by the web's most elite hackers. The MSNBC attack was reported this past Tuesday by San Diego-based Websense Inc. The security company has been tracking the exploit for about a month, stumbling upon the MSNBC invasion while performing one of their many web scans. Other major sites that appear to be hit include TV.com, ... (view more)

Last week, I reported on the controversial case of social networking fan Chris Avenir, a Canadian university student facing expulsion for creating a Facebook group dedicated to providing hints for an upcoming exam. Seems Avenir won't be expelled ... after all, a result that has many in the web world -- and at Ryerson University -- applauding. Avenir, a first-year computer engineering student at Ryerson in Toronto, Ontario, first came under fire for his "Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions" group. The eighteen year old was harassed by school administrators who believed the group's sole purpose ... (view more)

Reports are now suggesting that Microsoft's highly-anticipated series of updates for Windows Vista, called Service Pack 1 (SP1), will be available for download and shipping, today and tomorrow, respectively. The news keeps with previous estimates ... that the company would be releasing a series of fixes by the middle of March. First word of the release comes to us via Amazon.com, whose web site recently revealed that users can begin downloading the free SP1 upgrade Tuesday. By Wednesday, Amazon will begin shipping boxed copies of Windows SP1. Preorders can be made now. In a statement sent to the ... (view more)