Logic Bomb, standing in for a crowd of submittors, writes: "The New York Times has an interesting profile (free reg req) of John T. Draper, a long-time phreaker and hacker. He's had quite a career, but is probably best known for figuring out that a freebie toy whistle from a cereal box generated the right tone to make free calls at pay phones. It's an entertaining read." As sachsmachin puts it, "Crunch is apparently trying to redeem his blue-box-filled past by working as a white-hat hacker in the Web security industry -- his company, "ShopIP," does OpenBSD-based firewalls." Draper is also well-known for writing the first word processor for the IBM PC, (EasyWriter) among other things.

renai42 writes: "Rasterman gave a very interesting speech about his new EVAS canvas software at Linux.conf.au this week. This LinuxToday.com.au article gives a fair idea of the gist of the speech. EVAS is interesting stuff for the Linux community - a hardware accelerated X desktop with anti-aliased fonts and alpha blending." They've been claiming that the next Enlightenment will be the fastest WM around thanks mostly to EVAS.

Greyfox writes: "According to Techweb, Steve Ballmer now claims that Linux is one of the top threats to Microsoft going in to 2001. This up from his previous accounts of Linux as being nothing more than a toy etc. Expect to really see the FUD start flying now. As IBM found with OS/2, once MS percieves you as a threat, they attack like a rabid pit bull. I expect we'll see a lot more negative Linux press on zdnet, reporters paid to laud Windows and slam UNIX, fake grass roots movements, and all the other favorite MS tricks." Well, I'm not that quite that paranoid, but I'll be keping my eyes open

vonmar writes "A 20-second re-recordable message has been hacked into the "Boogie Bass" talking fish. The audio is stored on an ISD 1420P solid-state chipcorder voice record/playback chip. The head, tail, and mouth movements are also re-recordable, and are stored in EEPROM inside an ATMEL AT89S8252 microcontroller. Read more about it at the creator's site."

Hmmm... seems quite a few people (judging from email I've gotten) have figured out that this week's interview guest, Clinton Ebadi, is the 'unknown_lamer' who frequents irc.openprojects.net, not that this was a great secret or anything. Anyway, Clinton has a pretty good sense of humor about himself and this whole thing, and I think it shows through clearly in his answers (below) to your questions.

phutureboy writes: "Thought the gadget freaks and toy hackers out there would be interested in this badass video camera for kids. It transmits at 900MHz to a base station which has audio/video RCA outs you can connect to a TV or VCR. I bought one at Wal-Mart for $75, and have been fairly impressed with it so far even though it's sort of cheap and plasticky. Got me to wondering what other applications the Slashdot crowd could come up with for it, or whether anyone knew of other inexpensive video cameras suitable for experimentation." CT:You can get an x10 one too. Video quality kinda sucks tho.

Reader Whizziwig writes: "My CD player worked fine, but I was carrying around at least 36 CDs in my bookbag all the time, and breaking some. I also looked at all the mp3-cd players, I didn't see any that looked great, skip-protection & display-wise, plus it still meant carrying around a case of CDs." To deal with this, he bought a honkin' 6-gig MP3 player; read below for the review he contributed.

JWhitlock asks: "My wife recently purchased a Handspring Visor. There is a program that turns your Palm-based handheld into a learning remote control, which seems like a cool (and possibly useful) application, since I have at least four remotes, and digital cable's navigation system is nearly worthless. One problem - she won't let me install it. She's under the illusion that her toy is just for productivity, or that I'll steal it if I play with it too much. In any case, I do have a laptop with an Infrared port to play with, but there appears to be no software out there that uses it. Is this because it's not technically feasible, or has no one else thought of it?"

Here is the next in our Hellmouth Revisited series; below is Jon Katz' column "The Cost of Being Different," a look into what it means to grow up and face high school for a painfully large number of kids. What would make things better? Will being different always cause so much suffering?

The ongoing Slashback assault on previous stories here reveals that (among other things) 1) Maybe Compaq's Transmeta plans are at least slightly more up in the air than previously claimed; 2) Hasbro has again been unable to nab a clue(.com); 3) Hope still springs eternal that you won't have to give your address and DNA sample to RadioShack in order to use some nice (but high-ping) satellite bandwidth. Read on.

Apparently, the Panasonic Showstopper is doing a fine job of living up to an unfortunate name, by -- yup -- stopping shows, thanks to the wonders of Macrovision. Ars Digita's long-heralded free online university has released its first lecture, and now you can use double coupons for presidential candidates! Well, you can trade like action figures. No, that's not right ... but is it wrong? Oh, and something else for you to do with your Palm, after work of course. All below.

vees writes "Have you ever wanted to reprogram your Furby toy to do and say vile and obscene things, but just needed a good excuse? How's two-hundred and fifty dollars sound? Peter van der Linden is offering $250 to the first person who modifies a Furby so it can be reprogrammed. If you can read a schematic and wield a soldering iron without causing permanent personal cosmetic damage, be sure to visit his challenge page for more information on how to win."

valmont: "The folks at cnet have this article about Sony's latest toy: The Airboard. It seems to merge all kinds of wild stuff in a pad hooked to a base station with TV Antenna and wireless modem: simultaneous TV and Internet/web browsing, remote-controlling of home appliances. Looks pretty nifty ..." And considering that Sony is hep to Transmeta, I wonder what chip and OS will power this thing.

suwalski writes "ZDNet is running a sneak-preview of the upcoming FreePad, as announced on Slashdot awhile ago. The FreePad is a wireless device that can be used as a wireless phone and as a web browser. The technology appears to be finished, and the FreePad looks like a toy that could be in your house pretty soon." Provided you live in scandanavia ;) Its a lengthy article with lots of good stuff: standards in open source, certification, wireless protocols in europe vs the US.

bildstorm asks: "Has anyone seen a really good use for WAP? So far, for most of what I've seen WAP is just a nifty little toy which the paranoid use to monitor their stocks and make sure their flight is on time. But aside from that is there any good use of it other than as a buzzword?"

This is Slashback. Read it before it's wrong again. Find out more about Mandrake's new honcho, the neurons firing in the American legal system's brains on Napster, Yet Another Cool GPLization, and Larry's new toy.

cstaples asks: "I came into a bunch of hp C3450A's. They are basically a 486 DX 100 mini computer, built in video, Ethernet, 2 com ports and 2 ps2 ports and 1 ltp. You can also connect a HDD to this thing, it's a nice little package, 2"H X 14"W X 14" deep. I can see a couple of uses for it, Linux router(there is what appears to be an expansion slot on the motherboard for a 2nd NIC), DSS hacking box, Linux firewall, etc....great little toy to play around with, -if- I could find some info on it somewhere on the Web. Even HP seems to deny its existence: product #C3450A, model #4100DX and it was made around 1995. Any ideas?"

Updates below await your raw, chafed eyeballs anxious for information about new domain names (more than you can eat), developers eating bugs in contrition (more than you want to eat), a question about the EULA bundled with the new Larry Ellison toy (to chew on), and RSM's [Oops. That's "RMS's" -- timothy] reaction to the Qt / TrollTech take on software freedom. MMMmmmmm.

A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Ryan Lackey, CTO for HavenCo, a company dedicated to providing secure off-shore data hosting from Sealand, a principality off the coast of England. Ryan has lately survived dental emergencies, the loss of a laptop (it dropped into the North Sea -- how many people can say that?) and other stresses, but he's followed through with some interesting answers. He even has some ideas for how you can make a lot of money, and lists the tools you need to start your own data haven. Kudos to Ryan for taking the time to answer so thoroughly.

In this episode of slashback, there's more on NanoStuff, censorship in various forms and venues, and further proof that the word "upstart" uttered or tapped in computer journalism regarding Linux is ever so much twaddle. You have been warned.