Wooohoo!  Summer is officially here folks.  I’m jazzed about all the stuff I have planned to do with my family, and of course with you ;)  My son, bless (or curse) his 12yr old heart, is on his last day of school today, which marks the end of having any peace during the day for the next few months.  Maybe I’ll do the same thing my parents did when I was his age, feed him breakfast, and then shove him out the door and tell him not to come back until it gets dark!  Hehe.  Well, it doesn’t work for everyone….

On to the matter at hand here.  Congrats to xavier for guessing that last weeks WIT was a braille device!  (insert applause here)  Maybe I was too easy on you!  Here’s a snappy of something you don’t see everyday.  Try this one on for size…

So onward into verbal battle we go, my fellow geeks.  Show no mercy and defeat the mighty mystery at hand!  Sharpen your wit, and submit your comments…

The CIA’s web site has a Freedom Of Information section to search declassified documents from the spy agency. In the last 2 months here are the top 5 search keywords people have entered into their site:

May, 2007:
 ufo: 1782
 0001156395: 1625
 bay of pigs: 950
 cuba: 634
 vietnam: 547

April, 2007:
 bay of pigs: 1124
 ufo: 1064
 iran: 682
 vietnam: 588
 soviet: 412

As you can see (unless you’re color blind), i’ve highlighted ‘UFO’. Are people so daft as to think that they’re going to post the ‘good stuff’ online? Gimme a break

From spot checking the UFO reports myself (looks like ‘Flying Saucer’ was more popular back in the 50’s), they all pretty much run along the lines of this one from 1952:

I’ve found some really cool stuff though, completely unrelated to UFOs, will report here later. Some of it is stuff that was formerly Soviet Top Secret which was translated, shared within the US intelligence community and is now declassified under our own rules! How cool is that!

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/26plans.html

All iPhone monthly service plans are available for individuals and families and are based on a new two-year service agreement with AT&T.

Individual plans are priced at $59.99 for 450 minutes, $79.99 for 900 minutes and $99.99 for 1,350 minutes. All plans include unlimited data (email and web), Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile and a one-time activation fee of $36.

An Austrian vendor of real-time networking stacks for automotive, off-highway, and aeronautics use has pledged to port its flagship technology to Wind River Linux.

TTTech claims its “Time-Triggered Architecture” (TTA) offers better safety, cost, and developer productivity, compared to event-driven architectures such as the CAN (controller-area network) fieldbus.

Read the rest of the details at LinuxDevices

Hew Raymond Griffiths is a 44 year old Brit living in Bateau Bay Australia. Or rather was living in Australia; he was extradited to the United States earlier this year to face piracy charges from his time leading the group known as DrinkOrDie which was part of a giant piracy operation. That’s their warez logo up there.

Monday, a US District Court judge sentenced the infamous cracker to 51 months in prison.

Back in the day, his operation covered the UK, Australia, Sweden, Norway and Finland but was founded in Russia in 1993.

DrinkOrDie’s specialty was producing cracks for MS, Adobe, AutoDesk, Novell and Symantec, and of course there were likely many hundreds of other applications or OS’ that were cracked and hosted on their private network to hide it all from law enforcement.

In all it’s estimated DrinkOrDie benefited in over $51 Million dollars of pirated software, one of their claims to fame was releasing a pirated copy of Win95 2 weeks before the product shipped.

To date, the US effort known as “Operation Buccaneer” has resulted in more than 30 felony convictions in the United States and 11 convictions of foreign nationals overseas.