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Archive for November, 2008
HOWTO: Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use With SocialHistory.js
One of the great things about the web is the relative ease with which one can set up a new service. In social bookmarking alone with have Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, Mister-Wong, Newsvine, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon, to name a few. That’s great for competition, and that’s great for users, but it’s not so good for [...]
MP3s Prevent Piracy
If you're looking to attack a pirate ship, forget cutlasses and cannon balls. Go full speed ahead with an MP3 sonic blast. At least that's the latest method being used in sea warfare, as highlighted last week when a sonic blast was used to scare away Somali pirates from attacking a chemical tanker close to the Horn of Africa. The weapon, which [...]
Dodgy diners in Melbourne Facebooked
Melbourne restaurateur Peter Leary has used Facebook to track down bill dodgers in his up-market establishment, Seagrass. The drama unfolded last week when a group of five young diners, after drinking at the bar, requested a table at the Southbank restaurant. Over dinner, they worked their way expertly through the menu, ordered and drank [...]
Passwords suck
Google cryptographer and all-round security expert Ben Laurie's been blogging some great security thinking lately. Today he's got a really fascinating, thoughtful piece about the problems of passwords... So, where does this leave us? Users must have passwords, so why fight it? Why not admit that its where we have to be and make it a familiar (but [...]
HOWTO: Interview a Linux machine
Just the other day, a client called upon me to perform a hardware and software inventory on all of the computers on his network. There weren't that many machines to inventory, but we needed to gather quite a bit of information about each one quickly. The client was a Microsoft shop and so I had to deal with about an even mix of Windows XP and [...]
Wikiscanner Creator: Internet Man of Mystery
Here's a clip from Virginia Heffernan's New York Times profile of Virgil Griffith, the creator of Wikiscanner, whom Pesco and I had the pleasure of meeting a few weeks ago at the Webby Connect conference. BTW, when we met, there were no hot girls clinging to him. But that was at lunchtime, surrounded by sandwiches, and the day was young. Also that [...]
Microsoft cleans fake antivirus tool from 994,061 PCs
The Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) is a small program Microsoft pushes out to computers on Patch Tuesday to clean out a list of malware. On this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft added scans for a malware file that masks itself as security software, and it found plenty of copies. Win32/FakeSecSen has gone by various names, including [...]
Print this file and your printer will jam
Another story from printer-land of 20 years ago: this time about a seemingly impossible bug. While working on the LPS-20 PostScript software, a bug was filed that said roughly, Print the attached file. The LPS-20 will jam. You'll have to open the printer to remove the scrunched up paper. We were no strangers to jammed printers, but a [...]
Automotive Family Tree
Interesting to see how automotive manufacturers are affiliated with each other...
MiniNova Introduces Embedded Ads for Authorized Content
There are a lot of good things to be said about TV and movie studios opening up to the idea of streaming content. Almost any popular TV show is freely available for streaming, without any fear of copyright enforcement. Legal sites such as Hulu.com also provide a great avenue for streaming video entertainment as well. Could embedded advertising [...]
Internet vs. Dating
I get it... I get it. We've turned anti-humanist thanks to our short attention spans. Thanks a lot, Dilbert. (more...)
Verizon fires workers over Obama cell phone records breach
Verizon Wireless has fired employees connected to a breach of records from a cell phone used by President-elect Barack Obama this year, a Verizon source said Friday. The source would not say how many people were terminated but said "we now consider this matter closed." Verizon reported the breach Thursday, and Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs [...]
Reliable Linux netbooks for Black Friday
I like (read: love) Linux netbooks. I like them a lot. They're lightweight, they're solid performers, they're cheap, and it looks like they're soon going to be cheaper than ever. According to Mike Elgan, starting on Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, you'll see new, solid brand-name netbooks going for as little as $199. We're already [...]
BlackBerry Storm: RIM’s new touchscreen smartphone released today
The world's love affair with touchscreen smartphones continues as RIM and Verizon Wireless unleash the first touch-sensitive BlackBerry. But can this buttonless smartphone push out e-mail as fast as its counterparts? We spent 24 hours with the device to find out. The hardware Weighing in at 5-1/2 oz., the Storm is one of the chunkiest [...]
ASUS CEO says return rates same for Linux and Windows netbooks
Earlier this week the ASUS Eee PC celebrated its first birthday (with a full birthday party and cake at LAPTOP Magazine). It was one year ago that the Taiwanese company began selling its first sub-notebook (which would form a new category known as netbooks). The little Eee PC 701 not only would spur on a whole Eee brand for the company and line of [...]
The Dark Knight on its way to become the most pirated movie of 2008
The Batman sequel The Dark Knight was a smash hit at the box office, with $400 million in U.S. ticket sales in its first 18 days after release and more than $1 billion in sales globally so far. But the title achieved another significant milestone: It amassed over one million illegal downloads on BitTorrent in less than seven days. The data, [...]
Linux “Game System of Tomorrow” Ships in Two Weeks
Last month I wrote about the EVO Linux-based gaming console. The term "gaming console" seemed a bit misleading to me at the time -- it is ultimately where parent company Envizions Computer Entertainment would like the EVO to be -- but it is an early adopter system in the truest sense of the phrase. The EVO Smart Console was originally scheduled [...]
Linus Torvalds’ old company Transmeta acquired
Transmeta, once a sparkling startup that set out to beat Intel and AMD in mobile computing, announced that it will be acquired by Novafora. The company’s most famous employee, Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early [...]
Boston College Will Stop Offering New Students E-Mail Accounts
The student mailboxes are a pain in the ass. The students never delete anything and they use them as spam accounts when they sign up for "stuff" online. Their mailboxes sit out on the SAN and just take up space. Reverting to just forwarding email would lower overhead drastically. This seems like a really smart move for once. Many students don’t [...]
