mogul

Federal-Mogul Corporation today announced it has developed a new flame-retardant polyethylene terephthalate for use in interior vehicle trim and in wiring harness insulation of motor vehicles.

Most flame-retardant materials are used to delay the spread of fire, but unlike Federal-Mogul's polyethylene terephthalate yarn, these typically contain halogenated substances that emit thick black smoke and toxic gases when they burn. Breathing in these toxic gasses can be extremely dangerous for drivers and passengers. The new yarn is a halogen-free flame-retardant material that doesn't release "flaming drips" when it burns.

"We see a substantial global market for … Read more

Though Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is worth $53 billlion, he is now only the world's second richest man, according to Forbes.

Carlos Slim Helu, a Mexican telecommunications tycoon, has earned the title as the world's richest man, worth an estimated $53.5 billion. A self-made billionaire, Helu holds a controlling interest in several Mexican telecommunications companies, including American Movil, the largest mobile phone business in Latin America. His net worth climbed $18.5 billion just in the past year.

Second-place Bill Gates, who gave up the reins of Microsoft in 2008 to focus on philanthropic efforts, saw his … Read more

It's been far too long between visits, but CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy is back in New York and joins our sewing circle today on The 404 Podcast. Lately it's been difficult to track down our favorite jet-setter, so Caroline's Dopplr feed comes in handy for locating her.

We start things off with a chat about Caroline's recent travels and why "Up in the Air" brought tears to her eyes. CMC tells us about her two favorite airlines and the luxurious amenities offered to those special travelers who can somehow find a way to sneak in to the executive lounge. We had no idea airports have showers, and we're starting to scheme on how we can match her frequent flier miles.

On the topic of movies, movie-goers might be thrilled or crushed to hear that a "Zoolander" sequel is in the works. Ben Stiller and writer Justin Theroux are both back for the next movie, but my fellow hosts are disappointed to learn that Jonah Hill is close to getting signed to play the villain.

More disappointing news: Owen Wilson has yet to confirm his reprisal of Hansel, who might or might not be so hot right now. However, the entire conversation gets derailed when Caroline drops a bomb on the studio and makes a polarizing comparison to the original "Zoolander" that has Jeff reaching for the mute button.

Caroline also tells us about the wacky citizens of Topeka, Kan., unofficially changing the city's name to "Google" in a sell-out move to be the first city to test Google's fiber-optic technology. As pathetic as it sounds, I guess anything is better than ToPikachu. Also, a side note: you need to click this to witness Caroline's master MS Paint skills. Who needs Photoshop?

The big story in the tech and entertainment world today is "The Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" getting yanked from Hulu after the two couldn't reach an agreement over extended rights from Comedy Central and its parent company, Viacom. Fans of the shows can still watch full episodes on comedycentral.com, but Wilson and Caroline have their own predictions for their final destinations.

The 404 flirts with disaster almost every morning, but today we take it to new levels of destruction. That's right, folks, phone-smashing day is UPON US! Watch today's show to see Jeff's old phone rest in pieces. We also find out exactly how the Internet is ruining the nuclear American family and offer tips on teen tattoos.

You're going to have to wait until the second half of the show to see the smashing, but that's OK, because we have a bunch of excellent stories in the news to talk about. First up is Wilson's revelation: the Internet is singlehandedly destroying family as we know it.

All right, we admit that this isn't exactly news, but it offers a great jumping-off point to a conversation about when and how Jeff will have a baby. Just kidding, but Jeff brings up a great point, that Facebook is not only destroying the way we interact with our families, but how we interact with high school classmates. He offers that high school reunions are becoming a thing of the past thanks to Facebook; social networks as a whole make it all too easy to find out where your old chums are living, what they do for money, their marital status, etc...do we even have a reason to go to a reunion anymore? Would you have gone to a high school reunion anyway, or are you still friends with the people you actually care about? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

All right, enough random news talk--let's get to the smashing. Jeff's HTC Mogul has been on the fritz for a while now, giving him a huge headache with constant freezing, hardware malfunctions, lagging OS, etc...so when he finally bought a Palm Pre, we collectively decided to put the HTC out of its misery in what we think is the first-ever on-the-air phone smashing. If all goes well (you'll have to watch to see how it turns out), we might even start a "Smash Club," wherein we'd take obsolete and frustrating tech (read: printers) and essentially "Office Space" it to death. Today was a lot of fun, but Jeff and I are a little worried about Wilson...it looks like had a little too much of a good time with the hammer. Smash it up, psycho!

Updated 2:50 p.m. PDT with comments from security researcher Rich Mogull.

Three weeks after the disclosure of a serious flaw within the Domain Name System (DNS), Apple has yet to patch its MAC OS X operating system, but the company may be able to look to a third party in defense.

In a posting to an Internet newsgroup on Monday, Paul Vixie of the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) acknowledged that the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) DNS Server's recent -P1 releases may be unstable for some users. The BIND DNS Server is used on the vast majority … Read more

As of Wednesday, an exploit code allowing someone to attack the domain name system (DNS) was available in various places on the Internet.

On July 8, IOActive researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed a flaw in the DNS but would not provide the details until all the affected vendors had released patches and all the systems worldwide could be patched. He figured that it would take about 30 days for that to happen.

The 30-day mark just happened to coincide with his speaking engagement at Black Hat in Las Vegas on August 6.

But on Monday, fellow Black Hat presenter Halvar Flake attacked Kaminsky's plea … Read more

Gov. Spitzer.... [insert joke here]. Jeff's Mogul nabs an upgrade, and we reveal the winner of Super Smash Bros. Brawl! Plus, do we really need to be going into space? And If you want to win something, e-mail your best faux Steven Segal movie titles to us (the404 [at] cnet [dot] com). Don't worry about that bumper before the show, it's still us.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

The HTC Mogul is about to get fast...real fast. Today, Sprint released a software upgrade that brings an EV-DO Rev. A upgrade to the Windows Mobile smartphone, making it the first such handset in the United States. EV-DO Rev. A is an evolution of EV-DO which boosts download speeds from the 400Kbps-to-700Kbps range to 600Kbps-to-1.4Mbps range, while upload speeds will average about 350Kpbs to 500Kpbs (compared with EV-DO's 50Kpbs to 70Kbps). In short, you're going to get faster Web browsing, e-mail, and downloads--that is, if you're lucky enough to live in a coverage area.

According … Read more

Video advertising online is certainly becoming more common, but it's still difficult to get a good handle on exactly the kind of impact those types of ads are having.

Three companies came to Demo to push their individual strategy on how to improve the placement of video ads and the information gathered about them.

Liquidus: This 6-year-old Web marketing company has come up with a quick way for digital cable providers to produce and push video classified ads to the Web and TV screens via video on demand. Liquidus' video publishing platform aggregates video ads from a variety of … Read more