Posts by happygeek

How is saying that MS and the open source movement are still in disagreement an "anti Microsoft tone" any more than it is an anti open source one?

The UK House of Lords Science and Technology Committee are currently investigating personal Internet security, something that would normally be a dull as dishwater parade of civil servants and former civil servants now consulting for private sector business giving boring ‘evidence’ to a committee of half asleep geriatrics. But something different caught my eye this time around, the fact that representatives of both Microsoft UK and the open source community were answering their Lordships questions, and amazingly seemed to be in broad agreement.

Of course, you would have to be at each other’s throats in something more of an Apple and Cisco manner not to be able to find common ground when it comes to the small matter of the UK police lacking the skills and expertise (not to mention financial resources – and unsurprisingly their Lordships didn’t mention financial resources) to be able to deal effectively with the current cyber-crime epidemic that is sweeping the nation.

Here’s what Jerry Fishenden, National Technology Officer for Microsoft UK, had to say on the subject of reporting cyber-crime: “We believe it is necessary to have as easy a reporting mechanism as possible so that when people are victims of cyber-crime or attempted cyber-crime there is a streamlined reporting structure and ideally one body with responsibility for receiving those complaints and having appropriate resources to investigate and potentially initiate prosecutions where appropriate. My understanding is that the United States does have a single point of reporting established …

Apple has had something of an exciting couple of weeks, it has to be said. There was the announcement of the iPhone and the predictable if misplaced media frenzy that accompanied it. Misplaced because, let’s face it, do we really need another smartphone even if it can play music which, in and of itself is not exactly new. Sure, the design looks good as you might expect, but design and practicality are often poles apart and I will reserve judgment on the latter until I have actually lived with the thing for a few weeks myself.

Then, before the ink on the press release way dry, came word of Cisco taking legal action over a trademark infringement by Apple. Again, totally predictable seeing as it had not only already got a telephony device of that name, and what is more had been in lengthy negotiations about use of the name with Apple right up to a few hours before the big announcement.

Continuing the roller coaster ride came the news that Apple posted a record $1 billion net quarterly profit on revenues of $7.1 billion, which equates to $1.14 per diluted share. Again, not altogether unsurprising seeing as it included the run up to Xmas and Apple sold some 21 million iPods during that period. Heck, did anyone not get an iPod of some description in their Xmas stocking?

The real surprise, though, has to be the Apple TV. This digital media adapter which supports draft 802.11n …

That's why only 2% of the 55-64 year olds and 3% of the 65 years plus folk surveyed would swap their partners for tech booty.

The survey covered all age groups, perhaps unsurprisingly for the reasons you have cited it was the 16 to 24 year olds that were most keen on the swapping idea.

They say it is a ‘man thing’ this fantasy about swapping their wife or partner for someone new. Unfunny jokes about trading up to a newer model abound, some even indulge in a swinging lifestyle. But now it seems that some 13% of men in the UK, according to new research conducted by pollsters GfK NOP, would gladly swap their other half for the latest gadget.

Personally I do not find this a surprising statistic, given the poor state of many relationships and the huge attraction of gadgets such as the iPhone or PS3. Oh, and the fact that so many men are shallow and self-obsessed of course. What I do find surprising is that only 6% of women would do likewise, especially when you balance the attractive gadgets against us unattractive men. The Women's Watch: Girls Gone Wired survey
reckons that some 77% of women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond solitaire necklace, and 86% would take a new digital video camera over a new pair of designer shoes (obviously they never consulted my Jimmy Choo obsessed wife for her opinion on this.)

Not only is there a gender gap when it comes to gadget love, but a generation one as well. The survey reveals that the most dangerous men to get involved with, from a ‘you love your iPod more than me’ perspective, are those aged between 16 and 24 years of age as some 17% said they would swap …

Like many other geeks I have lost the ability to read a map, so used am I to having a posh if slightly robotic lady telling me where to turn during a road trip. SatNav is a wonderful thing, in the right hands, such as Eva Ericsson and the boffins at the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden who reckon it could be environmentally important as well.

They have developed a device which not only calculates the quickest route, but the most fuel efficient as well. By considering such data as fuel consumption, street width and typical traffic flow it can, I am told, save an average of 8.2 percent on your fuel bills, and less fuel has to be better for the environment.

But I can’t help thinking that it might also be a good idea to remove not only SatNav devices, but access to motor vehicles, from the terminally dumb drivers that populate our planet. By way of illustration I have compiled a list of what I reckon must be the six most stupid SatNav users in the history of the technology, but please do feel free to let me know if you have heard of any even more lacking in the SatNav sense department.

In reverse order:

6.

Local farmers are making a healthy profit, charging motorists £25 ($50) a time to remove their vehicles from a deep ford after they have been left stranded in four feet of water thanks to …

Gartner has estimated that phishing attacks cost the US something in the region of $2.8 billion last year, a problem that is growing fast as proved by the statistic showing the average individual loss per attack has risen from $256 in 2005 to a staggering $1244 in 2006. Banks are taking these kind of figures very seriously indeed, as you might imagine, and one of the security solutions attracting their interest is the so called ‘two-factor authentication’ device.

This takes the form of the usual username and password style login, together with a second layer of user authentication. Some banks have chosen to adopt the ‘random digits from a long PIN’ approach whereby you choose an 8 digit number and after the first login stage are asked to input the 2nd, 4th and 7th digits (or whatever) in order to gain access to your account. Even if your username and password were compromised, the attacker would have to know your ‘long PIN’ as well in order to fully penetrate your defenses.

Of course, if the attacker had phished the username and password out of his victim the chances are pretty high he could have got that PIN data as well. Which is why the banks with a better understanding of risk tend to look towards hardware tokens when it comes to the second authentication factor.

And so it is that PayPal, one of the biggest targets of phishing attacks along with parent company eBay, is opting to …

No judge is going to hand the device itself over to Cisco, that would just be silly not sensible.

I agree that no matter what the outcome, everyone is going to refer to the Apple device as the iPhone and forget about the Cisco/Linksys product. Indeed, I suspect that it will be the latter that might end up with the bigger rebranding exercise at the end of the day.

When Steve Jobs heralded the iPhone as being as revolutionary as the iPod during his MacWorld keynote in San Francisco on Tuesday, he must have known that it was going to be a bloody revolution. Sure enough, Cisco has now fired the first shots with a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California which cites preventing Apple “from infringing upon and deliberately copying and using Cisco’s registered iPhone trademark.”

The device is not earth shatteringly different from that which has gone before, and to be brutally honest its biggest value comes by way of the brand association. If this were the ‘Apple Smartphone’ or the ‘MacMobile’ it simply would not be generating the kind of totally to be expected hyperbole that it is. However, because it is another ‘i’ device, the iPod evolved, a lifestyle and cultural icon taken to the next stage of development, there can be little doubt it will sell well. Assuming , of course, it is allowed to be called an iPhone , and that is in serious doubt.

Linskys, a division of Cisco, acquired the iPhone trademark along with a company called Infogear back in 2000. The original trademark request was filed way back in March 1996. There is no way that Apple can contend it was unaware of this, and no way a court will find in its favor. Just to compound matters, a senior vice president and general counsel at Cisco, Mark Chandler, has revealed that …

The Finjan Malicious Code Research Center (MCRC) has set itself something of a Herculean task with a goal of staying not just one, but many steps ahead of those hackers who would exploit open platforms and technologies to develop spyware, Trojans, phishing attacks, worm and viruses. But, working alongside some of the world’s best known software vendors, MCRC aid in the patching of their security holes as well as helping with the development of next generation defense tools for Finjan’s proactive secure content management solutions. On top of all of that, it seems to also find time to distill the data that passes through the no doubt thick steel walls of the secret control center (or more likely an open plan office at the Finjan San Jose HQ) into a quarterly report highlighting web security trends. The latest of which has just been published.

Unsurprisingly this reveals that a key trend as we enter 2007 is the use of code obfuscation to hide malware, bypassing traditional signature based security solutions. Indeed, hackers have now developed dynamic code obfuscation techniques which enable them to generate different and unique sets of function and parameter names for every visitor to the hosting website. While stealth and polymorphic viruses can be traced way back into the 1990’s, proving that obfuscation is certainly nothing new, it is equally certain that the injection of a large dose of perverse criminal professionalism into the malware development business has led to vastly improved …

Sometimes you just cannot help it, you find yourself with time on your hands and you go snooping around in places that normal folk just do not venture. So it was with security researcher Michael Sutton who spent an entire day plugging through the Google blacklist, the Google encoded/hashed blacklist and the Google domain whitelist.

The blacklist, in case you did not know, contains a huge listing of URLs that Google suspects might be involved in phishing activity, and forms the basis of the Google Safe Browsing tool for Firefox, and the new Firefox anti-phishing filter for that matter. Both of these allow for user feedback when a suspect site is stumbled upon, and one must assume that this is how the blacklist is compiled although Google itself is keeping schtum.

What Sutton did reveal, though, was just how useful such an exercise in monotony can be, especially if you have an interest in phishing trends. So, for example, he discovered that a staggering 86% of the URLs listed were no longer actually available. Not surprising, as phishing crews tend to work on a ‘here today, gone later today’ basis to avoid getting caught. Less obvious was the fact that of the sites that were still accessible, the majority employed simple social engineering tactics rather than the perhaps to be expected zero day exploits we read so much about. Once a conman, always a conman I suspect. Which is …

Sometimes you have to take the initiative and help create a market.

Although I agree that most consumers are not in dire need of this amount of storage, plenty soon will be as the 'PC as media centre' concept continues to get a grip. Streaming video, digital photography, MP3 jukeboxes all require hefty storage requirements and I think that Hitachi is showing a commitment to meet them both now and in the future.

This is a good thing, IMHO, and much preferable to the storage folk sitting back and not bothering to push the technical boundaries.

Some would say blue, given the amount of sex that can be found on the web. Others might go for black, thinking along the lines of increasing online crime. To many the whole idea of Internet technology is a grey area. But, my friends, thanks to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Science, the University of Leuven in Belgium and Washington State University, the answer could soon become a lot more black and white as they plan to dye the Internet to make it run faster.

No, I have not been on the sherry again, this is a serious technology news story, honest! You see these boffins have been playing around with the electrons of a chromophore, and have discovered a new synthetic form of the organic dye molecule which performs much better than any other ever measured.

It is not getting any clearer yet, is it?

But hold on, and I will try to explain. Optical fiber has been used to transmit data faster and further than other technologies for many years now, indeed the concept goes back to Victorian times but we had to wait until the 1970’s for anything sensible and computer network related of course. Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) essentially joins together numerous optical carrier signals on a single fiber, taking a 10Gbit/s system to a capacity approaching 1.6Tbit/s across a single fibre pair, by utilising different wavelength patterns. In layman’s terms this has led to the broadband revolution because it has allowed …

The International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) is planning an alternative Internet, the Neuronet, designed to meet the needs of Virtual Reality applications. Which begs the dual questions of what those needs might be and what does Virtual Reality actually mean these days?

Indeed, I spent quite a time poking around the IAVRT website and am not that much the wiser as to how the Neuronet will actually work in reality. Sure there are plenty of pie in the sky claims and hopeful visions of an immersive VR networked future, but IAVRT would appear to be lacking in the sensible technical specifications and detailed timetable departments. Simply stating that something is easy to create because there is a lot of dark fiber available which could be used is a long way from coming up with a viable real world plan to turn science fiction into business fact.

Statements such as “IAVRT recognizes that immersive and cinematic virtual reality technologies will play a fundamental role in the evolution of human experiences in cyberspace” are easy to make, and stating “there will be a need for a governing body to set VR standards and protocols that will ensure VR safety, reliability and functionality and the VR industry's long term ability to remain self-regulated” looks awfully like someone fishing for a money maker.

But it’s the doozy of “the underlying architecture of the Internet was not designed to support the data transmission requirements of immersive or cinematic …

Would I pay the extra for this? No.

Do I think it is needed, given the hard drive protection built into most decent laptops these days? No.

Do I think it is good value, given the 32Gb size compared to the 100Gb I have in laptop number one, and 100Gb x2 in larger laptop/luggable number two? No.

Am I excited bt the technology? You betcha, but then I am a happy old geek after all :)

Research published by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) just before Christmas revealed that UK consumers are being conned to the tune of £3.5 billion every single year. The detailed analysis suggests that nearly half of the adult population of the UK has been targeted by a scam, and as many as one in fifteen, or 3.2 million people, fall victim to such fraud and lose an average of £850 each. Investment scams were most lucrative with an average pay-off of £5,660 per victim, followed by African 419 advance fee fraud on £5000, property investment scams at £4,240, holiday club schemes at £3,030 and foreign lottery scams at £1,900.

The total fraud can be broken down as £1.2 billion to bogus holiday clubs, £490 million in high risk investment fraud, £420 million pyramid style get-rich-quick schemes and £260 million for lottery scams. Frighteningly enough, the survey also revealed that a victim has a 30% chance of being scammed again within a year of the first sting, not least because there is evidence that their personal details are included on a ‘suckers list’ which gets sold between the scammer organizations.

Although anyone can fall victim to these things, the common belief that it is the elderly who are most at risk is exposed as a misconception as most victims were actually aged between 35 and 44. Women are most likely to fall for a ‘miracle health’ or ‘clairvoyant’ scam while men are mugs for ‘investment’ and ‘advance fee’ fraud. …

Finnish mobile phone giants Nokia are claiming to have organized the biggest 2006 New Year’s Eve celebration in the world, with more than 2 million people in 5 locations joined by 150 million television and Internet viewers. Fittingly enough, Nokia was delivering on its promise to connect the world through five spectacular events that combined to make this the most technologically advanced New Year yet.

Five capital cities, which could also be said to be party capitals of the world, played their part in the celebrations: Hong Kong, Mumbai, Berlin, Rio and New York in that order. Things kicked off at Hong Kong's Ocean Terminal when Atomic Kitten played their first international gig since officially splitting in 2004, including such hits as Whole Again and The Tide Is High. Local mobile operators ensured that despite the challenges created by the recent earthquake in Taiwan, Hong Kong music fans could stream the live concert footage to their cellphones. Going west, Mumbai was next on the party list with another star-studded concert taking place at the Andheri Stadium and featuring Nelly Furtado as well as Indian music maestro A.R. Rahman with Bollywood legends Priyanka Chopra, Shahid Kapoor and Koena Mitra. Furtado wooed the crowd by singing two Hindi ballads, Kabhi Kabhi and Yeh Sama, alongside her usual repertoire. Rahman, the "Mozart from Madras", performed his mega-hit Humma Humma as the bells rang out at midnight.

Next up was the biggest individual party of the five last night, at …

Also see this posting.

It is one of those headlines that makes you stop and read again, is it not? After all, surely nobody is really suggesting that if you partake in an act of virtual violence within the digital realm of a video game that you should pay a very real world penalty and spend time in prison.

Well, actually, politicians in the Bavarian and Lower Saxony state governments within Germany are not only suggesting exactly that, but have drafted a new proposed law to cover the offence of, and I kid ye not, “cruel violence on humans or human looking characters’ within a video game.

Whether you are ‘promoting’ or ‘enacting’ such violence matters not, both players and programmers alike are covered by this draft, or should that be daft, proposal which could see the a punishment of as much as 12 months in jail for those found guilty.

As usual, it was a tragic incident that has been jumped upon for political gain that is at the heart of this, frankly, silly suggestion for a change in the law. Last month an 18 year old, self-confessed video-games fanatic called Sebastian Bosse stormed into his old school and, well perhaps all too predictably went postal and shot a 11 people (none fatally, thankfully) before turning the gun on himself in the small town of Emsdetten. Tragic enough in itself, but more so when a politician, in this case the Bavarian interior minister one Gunther Beckstein, seizes upon the tragedy …

Here in the UK it is pantomime season. A peculiar form of traditional slapstick stage play that is performed during the Christmas season. In essence favourite tales such as Peter Pan, Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk and Aladdin are retold with the lead boy played by a girl and an ugly woman played by a man. There are stock phrases such as ‘it’s behind you’ and ‘oh no it isn’t - oh yes it is’ which the audience yell at predefined moments, and all in all the event is regarded as a must see at this time of year. Why am I mentioning all this? Because the Secunia Year End Report 2006 has been published and has more than a touch of the pantomime about it: you have to see it, you feel like shouting out loud while you are reading it, and it’s not in the least bit funny to a grown up.

Some of the content is predictable, such as the conclusion that system access has had the most impact during the year. Encompassing both system compromise and code execution, the stats show an alarming rise over the last 3 years which seems unlikely to slow. Secunia first started collecting such vulnerability intelligence in 2003, and back then the end of year number of advisories with system access as the impact was ‘just’ 1020. This rose to 1156 during 2004, or a jump of 13%, and to 1698 or up nearly 50%. Although, bizarrely, the …

Well not quite, but the Wikisari search engine could make quite a splash if Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Amazon.com have anything to say in the matter. Using the same basic technology as Wikipedia, and with a provisional launch date planned for the first half of 2007, will be a people-powered, network based search engine.

The name, as always, is interesting in that Wiki is Hawaiian for quick and asari is from the Japanese for rummaging search. If Wikisari can live up to being a quick rummaging search that brings in the people-powered concept then it will certainly be worth keeping an eye on. Whether it can truly challenge Google remains to be seen of course, and despite the multi-million dollar funding from Amazon.com (which has already tried and, at least when compared to the commercial success of Google, failed with its own A9 search) and a group of assorted Silicon Valley venture capitalists. As Google proved way back when, it takes more than money to change the world of search. It takes a truly revolutionary and brave approach to solving a problem.

The truth of the matter is that Google has long since solved the search problem for the vast majority of Internet users, so why look for an alternative solution at all?

Well, according to an article published in the UK newspaper The Times, Jimmy Wales thinks that Google has multiple and obvious flaws and is quoted as insisting …

J.K.Rowling has now officially announced that the latest, and last, in the Harry Potter series of books will be called ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ putting an end to the frenzy of speculation on the subject over the last few months. While it has been genuine fans interested in all things associated with their hero who have been speculating so far, you can bet that now the title is official there will be a new breed of speculator on the scene: the domain squatters.

With such a big franchise as Harry Potter, and searches on the final book and all things related to it almost certain to continue gaining momentum up to and beyond the date of publication, there is plenty of money to be made from diverting the unwary Internet tourist to an advert laden dummy site. But it would appear that efforts have already been made by the Christopher Little Literary Agency, which represents Rowling, to prevent this.

In what has most obviously been a very carefully planned game of cat and mouse, on the one hand wanting to protect the Harry Potter brand by registering the relevant domains, but at the same time not enabling anyone to jump the gun and use a WHOIS search to reveal the book title before the official announcement, a batch of domains were registered yesterday. These include deathlyhallows.com, deathlyhallows.info and harrypotterandthedeathlyhallows.com amongst many others covering a host of .com, .net and .info …

I took delviery of a BlackBerry yesterday, courtesy of RIM and the UK PR people, which has been preloaded with some applications that I wanted to review. They set up an email account as part of the process, of course.

When I switched it on there was a welcome message from RIM, introducing the applications that had been installed, and a total of 49 spams... All this on a brand new account that had never actually been used to post an email.

As you say, it's par for the course these days.

Don't forget to bolt the front door and brick up the windows :)

A browser with vulnerabilities that could lead to arbitrary code execution and cross-site scripting attacks. An urgent automatic update to patch eight such vulnerabilities, five of which are rated as critical and the complete set as ‘highly critical’ by security exploits tracker Secunia. And even then missing a password management vulnerability that has been known about since November which can exploit a reverse cross-site request to expose logins. The browser security supremo spinning the whole episode as ‘definitely a good thing’ proving that the client is ‘more secure.’

You might be forgiven for thinking it is the same old same old from Microsoft.

However, this is Mozilla Firefox we are talking about.

The eight vulnerabilities concerned are:

• MFSA 2006-76 XSS using outer window's Function object
• MFSA 2006-75 RSS Feed-preview referrer leak
• MFSA 2006-73 Mozilla SVG Processing Remote Code Execution
• MFSA 2006-72 XSS by setting img.src to javascript: URI
• MFSA 2006-71 LiveConnect crash finalizing JS objects
• MFSA 2006-70 Privilege escalation using watch point
• MFSA 2006-69 CSS cursor image buffer overflow (Windows only)
• MFSA 2006-68 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption

Continuing in the Mozilla becomes Microsoft mode, it’s also interesting to note that it has confirmed the rumors that official support for Firefox 1.5 will be discontinued as from 24th April 2007, or six months after the release of Firefox 2. If you have been slow in upgrading, at least you will now get a much more secure client than those of us who fall …

As I sit here shivering in the North of England cold and fog, it seems kind of appropriate to be writing about a technology that has been developed by Polar Rose who are based in the even colder region of Malmo in Sweden.

Using face recognition technology originally researched at the Universities of Lund and Malmo, Polar Rose have combined this with a 3D modeling process that creates the 3D image from a single 2D photograph using 2D to 3D polygon extrusion, to produce a unique visual search application. An open Beta phase will start early in the new year, taking the form of a free web browser client plug-in and featuring a royalty free API for partner integration, and should seamlessly enhance the people browsing experience.

Here’s the problem that Polar Rose has solved: currently if you do an image search in any of the available online engines for, say, John Smith then you will get a massive assortment of images including many John Smiths but probably even more which are not people at all but simple images that were located close to text saying John Smith. Polar Rose knows what a face looks like and will filter out everything that isn’t a John Smith so the results contain facial images only, and it will then group the individual John Smiths using that facial recognition technology. It is this ability to perform an automatic search for, as well as recognize, faces on a consistent basis …

WebSense security experts have published their predictions regarding the security threats that we will face in the new year, and perhaps unsurprisingly they revolve around the changing and dynamic nature of the Internet.

“Organized criminals are realizing that the Internet has been a largely untapped resource in terms of generating real profit. With financial gain on the table, attack methods are improving, and the number of people involved is escalating,” said Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research, Websense. “Tools and exploits to steal personal, business and financial information are the hottest commodities for cyber-criminals. Next year in particular, it’s highly important for organizations to have preventative measures in place to protect themselves from the next wave of increasingly covert and targeted attacks.”

So what are these predictions in full?

The Criminal Underground Economy

During the course of 2006 the malware landscape shifted away from the purely malicious and firmly into a financially driven, criminally led arena. Indeed, during a visit to the Symantec threat labs in Santa Monica I never once heard the term malware used, everything was referred to as ‘crimeware’ instead. WebSense expects underground cybercrime to become better organized and run a better economy, part of which will see the market for zero-day attack code becoming more competitive. This will result in an increase in the number of zero-day attacks and better attacks on both the client and server-side, they reckon.

Web 2.0 Security Issues Escalate

Whenever Internet …

A report published by the Social Issues Research Centre, combining data from a YouGov poll with the results of physiological tests on separate study group of Internet users, suggests that there is a link between badly designed websites and negative effects on human health.

Specifically, the reports links five key IT flaws in website design with problems relating to the immune, cardio function and nervous systems. The test was simple enough, requesting users to go find information from a variety of specific website locations while at the same time measuring both the physical and physiological reactions to the task. Brainwaves, heart-rate fluctuations, muscle tension and skin conductivity were all monitored.

The results indicated that websites which are badly designed can directly cause stress and anger amongst those using them. Something the report authors have coined as ‘mouse rage syndrome.’ And what, precisely, causes mouse rage? Well if you take the research as seriously as these guys intend, then it would seem to be slow to load pages, confusing navigation layouts, excessive pop-ups, unnecessary advertising and site downtime. But surely this is all old news for the website design professional, right? After all, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon, rocket scientist or even market researcher to tell you that people don’t appreciate bad design that gets in the way of a smooth user experience.

What’s more, the fact that the report was commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting suggests a rather vested interest in stating the obvious.

What …

But blogs should be an important part of DaniWeb, especially as the community aspect of the site continues to develop. It gives people an outlet to voice their opinions on IT and the breaking news surrounding it in a way that the forums do not.

The fact that we are running blogging competitions with some really rather good prizes on offer demonstrate that The Powers That Be at DaniWeb believe this to be the case.

Blogging, like all things that grow so explosively, will settle down. This is no bad thing, in my opinion, as I believe it will have the effect of increasing the relative quality of the blogs that remain.

Very few people want to read what I ate for breakfast, far more will be interested in reading intelligent analysis of some breaking news story.

According to an in-depth study by the Social Futures Observatory, anti-bank feeling is running so high in the UK that 74% of Brits would consider borrowing or lending money through a social lending community in preference to their high street bank.

In the ultimate case of old concept finds new medium, the process of person-to-person money lending is as old as the hills but traditionally has been restricted to very small, localized and close-knit private social groups. The Internet, and particularly the social networking side of Web 2.0 services, is facilitating a sea change in how people form circles of trust and as a result social lending is fast emerging a genuinely important new online financial phenomena.

The study determined that the aspects of control, community and individual entrepreneurialism, or minipreneurs as they have been named, together with the second wave of the Internet with Web 2.0 is driving a re-emergence of person-to-person money lending schemes at the expense of the high street banks.

One example of this is Zopa, www.zopa.com an online marketplace for people to meet in order to borrow and lend money which was, ironically, established by many of the team that launched online bank Egg. Zopa has more than 100,000 members in the UK, and it was these people that were interviewed in the survey.

Control, community, self-authoring and importantly, positive financial gain, were key elements that people linked with online Social Lending. 81 percent of lenders felt …

Just as the games console which has the honor of being at once both one of the most innovative entertainment devices to arrive in our homes and the most stupidly named, the Nintendo Wii, arrives on the market so a lawsuit starts that attacks the very heart of that innovation: the remote control.

Interlink, a California based remote control manufacturer, alleges that Nintendo has violated its patent as far as the motion-sensitive technology within the Wiimote is concerned. Although the Wii was only released this week in the UK, being a tech journalist I naturally have been able to have a play with one long before now. The thing is, that motion-sensitive remote is what really makes the Wii such an entertaining piece of kit. Forget reading instructions and then remembering what key combos do what for every game, simply use the Wiimote as you would a tennis racquet, golf club, boxing glove and so on. It’s great fun, it’s dead simple to use and this means that Nintendo has produced a console that does, for once, truly appeal to all age groups. It has also, according to Interlink, infringed upon US Patent 6,850,221 B1 which covers a Trigger Operated Electronic Device and was filed back in 2005.

There is an online community in the UK called Cix where a certain acronym has been very popular over the years, and I am going to invoke it right now: IANAL. This means, I Am Not A Lawyer and is …

Do you get a subwoofer with that? :)

I have always been fascinated by the fact that, in most areas of technology, physical size is constantly shrinking. The one exception being LCD displays, of course, which seem to get bigger every year. So I was excited by two pieces of news to cross my desk this week, the arrival of a 100Gb 1.8 inch hard drive and the first of the AMD 65nm processors.

Toshiba have announced that the MK1011GAH 1.8 inch drives, based on perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, will have a capacity in excess of 100Gb and go on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2007. But don’t get too excited as you won’t be able to buy them, as Toshiba are not going to sell them direct to the consumer to start with, these drives are aimed strictly at the device manufacturer market. Which is good news, in many ways, because with a 10 percent smaller footprint than the original 1.8” drives they are absolutely perfect for portable audio and video devices. Anyone for a 100Gb video iPod? Or better still, as far as I am concerned, a small factor, ultra-portable sub-notebook of the 8” screen variety with a couple of these drives under the bonnet.

AMD had been expected to make the announcement about the 65nm processors, so it came as no surprise but was welcome nonetheless. Codenamed Brisbane, these are effectively nothing more than a ‘process shrink’ from the 90nm Windsor core, but the truth is …

A UK company has launched what it claims to be the first search engine that lets you not only search for specific moments within a video, but click on and interact with moving objects during online playback. Coull.tv has adopted a community approach, which we thoroughly approve of here at DaniWeb, that brings true user-generated interactivity to video footage.

OK, so video search itself is nothing new, the likes of Blinkx and Google Video have long since offered video searching, not to mention YouTube of course. The difference being that these engines find the complete video clip containing your search term, coull.tv takes you straight to the relevant segment of that video to playback just the footage you were looking for.

Or at least it would if there were more content available. Unlike the other players in video search coull.tv does not trawl the Web looking for content from disparate sources, but rather is more of a YouTube competitor in that it only searches amongst the content that its community has uploaded to share with others. To put this into some perspective, I did a search for Bush and Borat at coull.tv and found only 6 and 4 hits respectively, compare and contrast with Blinkx (3000, 812), Google Video (5668, 469) and perhaps most strikingly YouTube (36478, 5052) considering the similarities in service concept.

There is potential here for brand owners and marketers …

If you believe the results of a study by those chaps over at the USC-Annenberg School Centre for the Digital Future, the answer to the question posed in this blog posting title is 43% of Americans. That is the number of people who took part in the survey, were already a member of a virtual community and who said that the virtual world is just as important as the real one.

The fact that the 2007 Digital Future Project reveals that 20.3% of virtual community members take actions offline at least once per year that are related to that online community, and that such online participation leads directly to social activism. Indeed, the survey suggests that 64.9% of those participating in social causes online are involved in causes that were new to them before that online participation started, with 43.7% participating more since they joined an online community. Some of the other statistics are, perhaps, less surprising: 56.6% login every day, 70.4% interact with other members while logged in (would be a pretty dull online community if they didn’t, although the figures also suggest that 29.6% must be confirmed lurkers of course.)

The same survey also found that people are finding ever more friends online, reporting that on average we meet 4.65 friends online who we have never met in person in the real world, and 1.6 people that we do end up meeting IRL. This is a growing trend, more than double the figure from …

According to my Finnish friends, F-Secure, Bagle looks like it might be back in business. Not that it has ever really gone away of course, as it is one of the most prevalent of worm families.

F-Secure have noticed new activity during the last couple of days, which sees a number of old Bagle update URLs activated again. This time they are making a new executable available, which can be downloaded and executed by those machines already infected by previous variant. Of course, one thing never really changes and that is the payload, so expect to see spams containing infected attachments, this time with filenames that refer to price lists as an inducement to open them. Handily, the spam also comes complete with an image that illustrates the password required to decode the attached Zip archives.

What has changed is that Bagle.GO, as F-Secure has christened it, will use an SSDT rootkit in order to hide the fact that it has installed upon an infected system. As well as ensuring your AV system is up to date with signature files, you might want to keep an eye on firewall logs for any access to either www.bronko-m.ru or bpsbillboards.com which are used by Bagle.GO

The worrying thing is that given the number of unpatched systems out there, and given the number of Bagel variants, and given the number of machines therefore infected with it the coming of another Bagel driven spam wave …

Not the case with all software at all, and the Internet has changed things to some degree so that people can download software at similar prices in many cases.

The smaller vendors are starting to see sense, knowing that the consumer is growing ever more informed about the global economy and simply will not stand for such differentials much longer. It seems the big guys have not.

The fact remains, that paying 72% more for the same software is a scandal, pure and simple.

As some of you may know, I am a Contributing Editor with PC Pro Magazine in the UK, which is why I am able to reveal that according to figures ‘obtained’ by the publication Microsoft Office 2007 will officially be a rip-off. If you are buying in the UK that is.

While we, on this side of the pond, have long been used to getting the grubby end of the stick when it comes to IT product pricing, this one really takes the biscuit. Just as nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, so nobody in the IT game over here expects to find their purchases costing the equivalent of the dollar price, based upon a straight exchange rate conversion. The business world does not work like that, and there will always be different overheads to take into account when selling into different international markets.

However, explain to me if you will, or indeed if you can, why it appears that UK users will have to pay a staggering 72 percent more than US users for Office 2007 Professional Edition? The suggested retail pricing of which, PC Pro has discovered from confidential Microsoft figures, is a phenomenal £449.99. Of course, these figures were never meant for public consumption prior to launch, and with the Ultimate version priced at £600 (62 percent more expensive), Small Business at £399.99 (69 percent hike) and Standard at £349.99 (67 percent more) you can understand why.

According to PC Pro, …

<hic> you could have a point, you are my best mate, time for a quick pint before the closing bell? </hic>

London taxi drivers have a reputation as being amongst the most opinionated and talkative in the world, and their grueling training and testing program ‘The Knowledge’ is equally well known. Now, it appears, the black cab driver has a new claim to fame: the place where more technology kit is lost than anywhere else on the planet.

Of course, it is not just technology that gets left behind in the UK capital. The Pointsec Global Taxi Survey also revealed that one gallant chap left his drunken girlfriend behind as a tip, and items ranging from £100,000 worth of diamonds in a bag through to false teeth (!) and wooden legs have also been left behind (how you wouldn’t notice you had left your false leg behind is, I must admit, beyond me.) But it was in the area of business equipment that this survey had its focus, and which proved to be highly interesting, unless you are a business traveler in a black cab that is.

Of the 2000 cabbies from 11 cities around the globe, London was far and away the place where you are most likely to leave your laptop, PDA, mobile phone or USB memory stick behind. Only Mumbai came close, and even then still lagged some way behind. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, in the last six months there were 54,872 mobile phones, 4,718 PDAs, 3179 laptops and 923 memory sticks left behind in London taxis.

To …

Well, software patents are true enough and there's a big fuss going in Europe (as I suspect you are aware) regarding efforts to get similar introduced here.

Jwenting: I know the Intel story isn't about software patents, I just used it to hook into something that was. Journalistic license, and all that :)

Chaky: interesting, thanks.

About five years ago the BBC carried a news story about a chap in Australia who had taken advantage of a new law which meant that patent applications only needed to innovation rather than invention. He registered a patent application for something known as a ‘circular transportation facilitation device’ or the wheel to you and me. Now, OK, that was done by an IP lawyer trying to prove a point, and the then Commissioner of Patents in Australia, Vivienne Thom, was quick to point out that all applicants have to declare they invented the thing, and so the patent in question would be invalidated as a result of this not being actually true.

There is no denying the validity of Intel’s many patents, but I would question the way they are being used as a big stick with which to beat off the smaller competition. Reports have started to circulate in Taiwan that suggest the CPU giant is putting the screws on Via Technologies to make a rapid exit from the CPU market in exchange for not stopping it manufacturing PC chipsets using Intel patented technology. According to The Inquirer the source is right there at Via but wants, perhaps wisely, to remain anonymous. You wouldn’t think that Via could be anything more than a very small fly in the Intel ointment, being primarily a chipset manufacturer after all. But Intel knows that it is very slowly losing market share to Via when it comes to the …

It's a bit like the argument for electric cars which always seems to avoid the question of the environmental impact of both the manufacture and disposal of the swathe of batteries required. A bunch of boffins in the UK recently calculated that it was more costly to the environment than running a normal car, although there was plenty of argument about the weighting/scoring of various elements in that research.

The printer kind of reminded me of those really old thermal fax machines...

Although it sounds too good to be true, Toshiba Europe has released details of what it claims to be the first rewritable printer in the world. Yes, you read that right, a printer that can print onto the same piece of paper as many as 500 times.

In what may be the ultimate in environmentally friendly office equipment, the Toshiba B-SX8R makes use of a specially coated glossy plastic paper which is then printed upon using a thermal imagine technique. The clever bit being that by passing the paper through a heated element, the pigment layer encapsulated within each sheet is altered enabling it to be redrawn. The print head itself contains no less than 300 temperature elements per inch, each individually controlled, and capable of rolling out documents at 12 pages per minute.

No doubt this will reduce the overall carbon footprint of the printer, but whether this will equate to real cost savings as well is less clear cut. The special paper will cost something in the region of £5 per sheet, the printer around £5000, oh and let’s not forget the cost of a separate paper cleaning machine at another £3000. Ah yes, paper cleaning machine is required to ‘wash’ the reusable paper that’s been used too much. If a sheet actually gets handled by too many people, in a typical office environment, then the oils and dust from that human contact will have to be removed to allow the printing process to work properly. …

Kaspersky Lab has released its latest Malware Evolution report, covering the period between June and September 2006 and, as usual, it makes for interesting reading.

Alexander Gostev, Senior Virus Analyst, Kaspersky Lab comments that the first six months of 2006 was “notable for the complexity of the technologies which antivirus companies had to deal with, a large number of new proof of concept programs, and the ever increasing interest shown by hackers in Microsoft Office.”

While there was no great exploit epidemic during this latest quarter, nor any new proof of concept viruses for that matter, or even much activity on the virus front at all that is not to say it has been a dull three months from the perspective of the security professional. Of most interest to me has been the continuing unwanted attention paid to the MS Office suite of applications, or perhaps to be more precise the fact that nothing has really changed from the first six months of the year in this regard.

To put this into some perspective you have to look back to the last report from Kaspersky Lab which highlighted the problem of OLE documents, as created by Office applications, which took centre stage during a whole host of vulnerabilities (in excess of 100) that were discovered and publicized before Microsoft was able to produce even a temporary patching solution. At the time Kaspersky Lab were vocal enough in pointing out that in order to …

Webmasters are becoming increasingly aware of the power of the sitemap as an SEO tool, enabling search spiders to crawl more pages in less time with the end result of getting more or your links indexed faster. Because sitemaps require only those pages that have changes to be visited, valuable bandwidth can also be conserved.

The news that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have all finally agreed to support the single Sitemaps 0.90 protocol will only make this process ever easier. Given that, according to most sources, the big three have around 85% of the search engine market share, this announcement should not be undervalued. And by support, of course, they mean not only use sitemaps but also help with a joint development program. Think of it as being an open standard for SEO and you are not far off the mark.

Indeed, the protocol has been released under the Creative Commons license in the hope that other search engines will also join the party. You can find the full Sitemaps 0.90 protocol details at the jointly maintained sitemaps.org website.

So what, exactly, is a sitemap? Broken down to the basics it is nothing more complicated than an XML file listing the URLs for a website plus associated metadata such as that relating to the last update, regularity of changes and relative importance to other URLs at the same site. The XML schema for the Sitemap protocol consists of XML tags, and all the data values …

Rackspace Managed Hosting has today sent me the formula to create the perfect website, and being a nice chap I felt I had to share it with you, so here goes:

Pwebsite = { ((14.14* EaseNav) + (13.56*Speed) + (13.11*CleanDes) + (10.89*Func) + (10.89*Up)) – ((12.63*Pops) + (10.32*Ads) +(5.21*MultiM)) } / 6.26

There, now you can all go and create the website of your dreams, guaranteed to pull in the punters, monetize your investment and allow you retire a happy bunny sometime next year. Or maybe you require just a little more of an explanation? I did, and here’s what I got.

Apparently the key differentiators within this perfect website formula are ease of navigation, high speed of page downloads, a clean and simple design, functionality and the site always being live with excessive aggressive advertising seen as a detractor.

Rackspace came up with the mathematically unfriendly way to perfection after commissioning research from the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) which incorporated a YouGov nationally representative online survey of 2,500 adults, in-depth interviews and in-house qualitative research. Or put another way, 50 participants were sent on a virtual treasure hunt that asked them to seek out specific pieces of information from a variety of websites, all the time SIRC recording their comments and preferences as they tried to navigate the various set sites before them.

What this revealed was that 83% saw ease of navigation as being the most …