ARLINGTON HEIGHTS– An arm wrestling match turned violent when a man stabbed another man in the thigh after losing a match.

The 25-year-old victim was stabbed twice in his upper, left thigh after he beat another man at arm wrestling, according to Arlington Heights police Cmdr. Michael Miljan.

Yowser. I wonder what this bar this was in. Sounds like something from the film “Roadhouse”.

There are, and have been for many years, Linux-based embedded devices popular in the United States and Europe, and they must have their own vulnerabilities. I’m expecting malware authors to be inspired by this to build similar networks. Consider this list of Linux router or firewall distributions as a starting point.

This makes these devices a mass community of targets for attacks on default configuration errors. And it all just goes to prove there’s nothing inherent in Linux that makes it more secure. It’s all about how you configure an operating system to function, out of the box and with user intervention. The main thing keeping Linux on the desktop out of botnets is the sophistication of its users. Without that, embedded Linux devices are only as secure as the vendors want to make them. Given that vendors will usually make the security versus ease of use trade-off in favor of ease, I think Psyb0t may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Interesting coverage of what is being called the first Linux botnet. No operating system is inherently secure, and so when it reaches the point where it is worthwhile for malicious coders to target it, it is only a matter of time before they do so.

It will be interesting to see if we reach that point with OSX. An exploit for an always-on device like the Apple TV could be enormously damaging for a firm who markets themselves as “not getting viruses”.

Moving to a reserve currency that belongs to no individual nation would make it easier for all nations to manage their economies better, he argued, because it would give the reserve-currency nations more freedom to shift monetary policy and exchange rates. It could also be the basis for a more equitable way of financing the IMF, Mr. Zhou added. China is among several nations under pressure to pony up extra cash to help the IMF.

Reuters

Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China.

John Lipsky, the IMF’s deputy managing director, said the Chinese proposal should be treated seriously. “It reflects officials’ concerns about improving the stability of the financial system,” he said. “It’s interesting because of China’s unique position, and because the governor put it in a measured and considered way.”

This is the one-world currency the conspiracy theorists warned us about. I expect Adam Curry is going to have a field day with this one.

Doesn’t sound like such a bad idea the way Zhou Xiaochuan puts it though…

Imagine never upgrading your hardware again.

If you’re a console gamer playing on your HDTV, that means avoiding shelling out $500 to play next generation titles. If you’re a PC gamer, it means opting out of the endless cycle of new CPUs, motherboards, and graphics cards. It also means you can play your favorite game on just about any platform—even laptops or netbooks. This even includes games famous for being resource hogs, like the Crysis series.

At least, that’s dream of Steve Perlman and Mike McGarvey of OnLive.

OnLive is a new gaming service, slated to launch towards the end of 2009. The core idea of OnLive is to make all modern games playable on any system. The actual heavy lifting of rendering, AI, and other gameplay is handled by big iron servers, which are loaded with multiple CPUs and high-end graphics chips (GPUs).

The player has a simple, lightweight client running on a PC or Mac or, alternatively, may opt for what OnLive is calling a “MicroConsole” to play on a big screen TV. No large, power-hungry console needed, no high-end GPU or CPU required on the PC.

In other words, welcome to gaming in the Internet cloud.

“This is the last major console cycle,” Perlman said. “If not this one, then definitely the next one.”

This is is enormously disruptive technology. The end of console and PC gaming as we know it! If you follow this train of thought through to its logical conclusion, why not serve up ALL your software like this. That means you wouldn’t even need an traditional operating system on your machine, just a BIOS chip that instantly connects you to your apps.

Now all we need is the bandwidth.