Posts by happygeek

A very, very interesting take on things - and one that I will now go away and ponder over a large bourbon :)

Google Labs has launched a new search engine just for you, software developers that is. Google Code Search can help all programmers by quickly filtering billions of lines of source code, all from the default and familiar search interface, to reveal reusable code-snippets. Be it a specific programming term or language, or diving headlong into some compressed code on a hunt for very specific features, Google Code Search would seem to have it all.

Including the ability to focus a search on code based upon specific licensing requirements, which could mean that it is just as much a friend to the lawyers as the programmers when it comes to defending potential patent litigation.

So what exactly can you search for, and how exactly do you do it?

Well how about regexp for a regular expression search such looking for the likes of go{2}gle hello,\ world and ^int printk for starters. Then there is the exact string search for something like ‘compiler happy’ for example. Maybe you want to search only in files or directories matching regexp, in which case you could use file:regexp for file:\.js$ XMLHttpRequest. Whereas package:regexp will search packages with names matching regexp, where a package's name is its URL or CVS server information so something like package:perl Frodo or package:linux-2.6 int\ printk. Then there is lang:regexp to restrict the search only for programs written in languages matching regexp such as lang:lisp xml or lang:"c++" sprintf.*%s, and license:regexp to restrict just for …

Google has announced the availability of more than 1000 ‘Google Gadgets’ that can be run on any web site, differentiating them from the existing desktop gadgets which could only work locally by way of the Google Desktop software or on a personalized Google homepage.

These bits of cobbled together HTML and Javascript code that act as dynamic applications when installed on your web page are also different from the Widgets that Yahoo has had available ever since it acquired Konfablator last year. Those 3000+ plus mini-applications only run if you download and install an 11Mb host application first, and then only on a Windows based PC. Apple and Microsoft also have similar requirements, for now. It seems highly unlikely that Google will be allowed to maintain the lead in independent widgetry for long.

Indeed, they already have competition from the likes of Netscape co-founder Marc Andreeson with Ning that enables entire sites to be built from widgets, and Widgetbox that offers an open marketplace of the things.

What I find most interesting, however, is the fact that this really is a case of letting the users not only decide what they want but letting them build it as well. Surprisingly, only 2% of the gadgets available are Google developments, the rest all come from third part programmers. Indeed, given the exposure offered by the Google brand, this could be a great way to get your spare time programming fun projects distributed to a …

Why do you think they played the prank on Mozilla and not Microsoft? I suspect the Seattle legal machine would have been in full flow by now...

Just days after telling delegates at the ToorCon hacking convention in San Diego that Firefox was critically flawed, and the online reporting hysteria that followed, one of the two coders who gave the damning presentation has now admitted that it was just a joke. Neither Mozilla, nor the reporters and bloggers now busy wiping the egg from their faces, are laughing.

Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi claimed that the way in which Firefox handles Javascript was so deeply flawed that key sections of the core code would need to be re-written, patches were not sufficient to save the browser from this vulnerability. They said that it mattered not which OS was used, the flaws could still induce both a crash and enable remote code execution on the target computer.

Now Spiegelmock has made a statement through Mozilla.org to put the record straight:

"As part of our talk we mentioned that there was a previously known Firefox vulnerability that could result in a stack overflow ending up in remote code execution. However, the code we presented did not in fact do this, and I personally have not gotten it to result in code execution, nor do I know of anyone who has. I have not succeeded in making this code do anything more than cause a crash and eat up system resources, and I certainly haven't used it to take over anyone else's computer and execute arbitrary code. The main purpose of our talk was to …

More than 7 million Sony batteries have now been recalled since the middle of August when Dell made its big 4.1 million battery recall announcement, a figure which has risen to 4.2 million over the weekend interestingly enough. Toshiba has now joined the feeding frenzy by recalling 830,000 laptop batteries; Fujitsu is also doing the recall thing but refuse to comment on numbers. This following the earlier announcement from IBM/Lenovo that it was recalling over half a million Sony batteries, and let’s not forget that Apple has been busy doing the same.

So where does this leave Sony?

The perhaps predictable answer is on the slide. Certainly, that’s what has happened to the Sony share price, which has dropped by 8.6% since the Dell recall, in contrast to the Nikkei itself having gained 1.7% in the same period. Apart from the adverse impact upon the brand image because of the admittedly rare problem of short circuits within the batteries concerned, there is also the raw financial cost of bearing the brunt of funding all the recalls. From what I can gather, it is Sony that will be paying for these.

The true cost of recalling 7 million batteries is not being revealed, although Sony has previously stated that the Apple and Dell recalls would cost anywhere between $175 to $250 million. Or put another way, anything up to 25% of the entire net profit for the current Sony business year. However, analysts are predicting the long-term effect …

And, like London buses, two come along at once.

Here is the Kaspersky Lab virus top twenty for September 2006 that has just landed in my mailbox:

• 1 Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.c (20.00%)
• 2 Email-Worm.Win32.Nyxem.e (16.22%)
• 3 +1 Email-Worm.Win32.LovGate.w (9.71%)
• 4 New Email-Worm.Win32.Scano.gen (5.88%)
• 5 -2 Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.b (5.45%)
• 6 +3 Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.t (5.08%)
• 7 -2 Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.u (3.62%)
• 8 New Email-Worm.Win32.Scano.aq (2.52%)
• 9 +7 Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.t (2.40%)
• 10 -3 Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.w (1.63%)
• 11 -3 Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.y (1.56%)
• 12 -6 Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.q (1.48%)
• 13 -1 Trojan-Spy.HTML.Bankfraud.od (1.44%)
• 14 -4 Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.cg (1.33%)
• 15 New Trojan-Spy.HTML.Bayfraud.io (1.25%)
• 16 Return Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.ar (1.21%)
• 17 -6 Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.a (1.15%)
• 18 -1 Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.h (1.13%)
• 19 -6 Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.x (1.09%)
• 20 New Net-Worm.Win32.Mytob.dam (0.95%)

This morning Sophos published details of the most prevalent malware threats and hoaxes that have been causing problems for users of its IT security products across the globe during the month of September 2006. Interestingly, despite the sadly predictable news that the number of new threats discovered by Sophos had doubled compared to the previous month, there were no new entries in the chart, one re-entry, and the top five retained their exact positions from August.

The good news is that the overall proportion of infected email has dropped to an all time low of just one in 300, or 0.33%, according to Sophos. Unfortunately, it also identified 4,080 new threats, compared with just 1,998 in the previous month, bringing the total of malware protected against to 190,745. What this would clearly seem to indicate, at least based on this particular set of statistics, is that those involved in cyber crime are moving away from mass mailed attacks in favour of a more targeted approach focussing on small groups of users.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, told us "the new malware we are detecting can be much more sinister than the old timers that dominate the chart. It often aims to steal sensitive data and information - something that can be extremely damaging to both a company's reputation and its bottom line. We recommend that all organizations should put in place a consolidated security solution that protects against both known and unknown malware threats."

Well I think that is what Toshiba would like, Sony might think differently.

Toshiba have announced the first notebook HD-DVD Write Drive, which can read and write HD-DVDs as well as standard DVD and CD. Of course, announcements and availability are completely different beasts, so do not expect to see this little beauty until nearer the end of the year.

The SD-L902A, don’t you just love those snappy product names, will integrate a blue-violet laser diode offering support for high-density HD DVD-ROM discs, including high definition movie and video images. For me, however, it is the fact that at 12.7mm in height it really does deserve the little beauty tag that makes it a really interesting device.

Why? Because it meets the stringent space specifications for slim drives integrated into sub-notebook PCs. It manages this thanks to HD DVD discs having the physical structure as standard DVD, allowing use of an optical pick-up head with only a single objective lens. In effect, in the real world, it will give you the flexibility of a super-dooper-drive (should I trademark the term, maybe not) within a sub-notebook format.

Any DaniWeb members in Japan who happen to be attending CEATEC JAPAN 2006, at Makuhari Messe from October 3 to 7, will be able to see it in action at the Toshiba booth (1A09) and the HD DVD Promotion Group booth (1A06). Well, you never know. Moreover, if anyone does see it, please report back here and let me know what you think...

In the meantime, here are all the juicy technical specs:

PGP Corporation will announce on Wednesday the availability of numerous application upgrades across its entire portfolio. I have persuaded them to let me break the embargo and bring the news to DaniWeb members a couple of days early.

With global organizations increasingly facing highly publicized data breaches, regulatory pressures, and compliance concerns that negatively affect brands, there is more need than ever to deploy integrated, corporate-wide encryption solutions. Nevertheless, many of the available approaches present problems as serious as those they aim to solve: numerous applications to manage, the resulting content silos creating costly and unnecessary burdens on IT teams being perhaps the biggest.

Unlike these point products addressing single threats or those cobbled-together product suites that lack true integration, PGP is hoping that the PGP Encryption Platform will deliver the single, leveraged infrastructure to enable enterprises to reduce IT operational costs, eliminate duplicative tasks, systems, training, and support issues that plague other approaches.

The announcement covers new versions of PGP Whole Disk Encryption, PGP Universal Server, PGP Universal Gateway Email and PGP Desktop. On top of this, there is also the new PGP NetShare application that brings team management and sharing to encrypted network files. In other words, it allows enterprises to protect valuable data that is commonly shared across multiple project teams and among employees and outside contractors and partners. PGP NetShare automatically encrypts files saved to shared network folders, ensuring that only authorized users can read or modify the content.

The General Public License is not something to be messed with lightly, after all it is ‘the law’ as far as many open source projects are concerned. Which is why the Free Software Foundation is running into trouble with plans to introduce a proposed version 3 of the GPL to include changes dealing with DRM. When I say running into trouble, perhaps a better description would be driving a 10-ton truck of trouble right into a concrete wall of dissent would be a more apt description.

In a survey set up by Linux supremo Linus Torvalds, for example, 29 of the leading kernel coders were asked to rate the GPLv3 proposals on a scale ranging from -3 to 3. The highest it managed to score was 0, with 28 of those coders concluding it was worse than the GPL it is meant to replace. A lot worse, with the average score being a rather worrying -2 in fact.

The publication of a paper entitled ‘The Dangers and Problems with GPLv3’ and authored by 10 leading Linux coders would suggest that this really can no longer be treated as just a Torvalds hobby horse, but instead is a serious rebellion against the GPLv3 proposals. This paper argues that there could be a balkanization of the open source movement with Linux seller splitting projects between both versions, and goes on to suggest that ultimately it could jeopardize the survival of open source.

So where is the beef? Well mainly, …

According to reports from both the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) 2006 is proving to be a bumper year as far as online advertising spend is concerned. Showing a 37% increase over the same period last year, US Internet advertising revenues were up to $7.9 billion. In itself this is a new record, but the fact that the second quarter figure alone was $4.1 billion, a 5.5% increase over the first quarter and representing the seventh consecutive quarter of growth, is pleasing news for anyone in the advertising revenue driven web business. Moreover, that includes Microsoft.

Not only is the Seattle software giant planning to leverage its not inconsiderable user base by exposing it to advertisers through the new Digital Advertising Solutions program, but if the rumors are true then a totally free, advertising sponsored and web based edition of Microsoft Works could be on the cards as well. The latter is not particularly surprising, given the interest being shown in the spate of web-based productivity tools coming out of the Google camp of late (Writely, Spreadsheets, Calendar to name but three) but the DAS program pretty much came from leftfield.

The system will, I am informed, enable advertisers to target their audience across multiple devices. As long as Microsoft software is powering them, the user base will be exposed, be that on a desktop PC, PDA, Smartphone or even the Xbox.

This answers the problem that it is now pretty much impossible to reach …

I can recall having great fun talking with ELIZA more than a decade ago. Fun yes, serious AI no. It didn’t take long to get bored with the repetitive question and answer looping even if it was wrapped up in the guise of being intelligent machine driven conversation: an oxymoron then, and still one now.

Not that times and technologies have stood still, far from it, but with the announcement of the winner of the annual Loebner Prize in the form of ‘Joan’ which picked up a bronze medal and a couple of thousand dollars, have things really changed that much? I would venture that the answer is no.

We are told that Joan, a veteran Loebner entrant (its first stab being in 2003), has been evolving over the years, becoming ever increasingly human by learning from thousands upon thousands of previous ‘conversations’ but I’m afraid I just don’t buy it. Moreover, neither, I venture, do the Loebner judges seeing as the gold medal and accompanying $100,000 prize remains unclaimed some 16 years after being first dangled in front of the AI development community. Could the reason be that the criteria for a machine to be indistinguishable from a human during the course of a conversation is a technological leap too far? Well yes, frankly.

Despite British entrepreneur Rollo Carpenter’s best efforts with Joan, it still cannot pass the Turing Test required to win Loebner gold. Rollo knows what it takes to win the annual …

Larry Sanger may have co-founded Wikipedia, and I say ‘may’ as Jimmy Wales seems to dispute this somewhat and prefers to refer to Sanger as merely an employee, but there is no doubt that it was Larry who came up with the name Wikipedia. A great name, it has to be said, but perhaps we all only have one great name inside us. Certainly that might explain why his latest project, a ‘progressive fork’ of Wikipedia with the distinctly naff name of Citizendium.

Described as being a “citizens' compendium of everything" Citizendium will be an experimental new wiki project, combining both public participation and expert guidance. And the ‘progressive fork’ thing means what exactly? Well according to Sanger not a great deal to begin with at least, as initially it will just be a mirror of Wikipedia. However, the hope is that people will soon start making changes to Citizendium articles, although if the original Wikipedia article changes then that will get updated as well (provided the Citizendium one hasn’t if you are still with me at this point.) But I have to say that I am slightly confused by the usage of ‘fork’ in this context as Wikipedia isn’t an open source application for crying out loud, it’s an online knowledge collective. Citizendium isn’t a fork as I understand the term, it isn’t anything yet because it has yet to launch but it certainly isn’t a fork: it is Wikipedia with a twist, namely …

In what has been called by some commentators the ‘most significant update in five years’ the latest version of Python finally come of age. Python 2.5 not only apparently fixes some 450 bugs discovered since the 2.4 release was, err, released, but also throws in some 350 patches for good measure. Hey Microsoft, there’s a new patch king in town and it’s the Python Software Foundation.

Although officially ‘suitable’ for production use, the changes that help improve the way Python supports 64 bit systems might break certain C extension modules, so you might want to take that particular definition of suitable with a pinch of salt.

That said, the use of Buildbot to continuously test across platforms does enable the Python development team to uncover potential problems during development in a more timely fashion that ever before, hence all those big fixes and patches. As well as being more reliable, because of the Buildbot effect, Python 2.5 is also claiming to be faster. Much faster, with major speedups in exception handling and string operations, as well as a number of other changes to improve performance.

But I guess that the new language features will be of most interest to those of you reading this: features such as the fact that the compiler now converts the source code to an abstract syntax tree (AST) before producing the bytecode; the 'with' operator replaces a common try/finally idiom that results in much cleaner and safer code; generators have …

Looks like a Korean outfit, ETRI, might have one answer to the overheating battery problem: an electronic switch that uses a Mott Metal-Insulator Transistor in order to prevent laptop batteries from 'swelling' and consequently exploding following an overheating episode. The Critical Temperature Switch can, apparently, act as both a transistor and an insulator, although at this stage detail is scant so please don't ask me how it works!

I suspect a bit of Googling in the days to come will supply all the answers...

I’m the trouble starter, notebook instigator.
I’m the Dell addicted, Sony illustrated.
I’m a fire-starter, notebook fire-starter.
You’re the fire-starter, notebook fire-starter.

With apologies to The Prodigy for ruining a perfectly good lyric, but it does serve to highlight the problem de jour: that of flaming laptops. If you thought it was safe to participate in a spot of mobile computing now that Dell had recalled all their machines thought to be at risk from overheating Sony lithium-ion battery packs, think again or you may never have children chaps.

The Yahoo Mission Campus was evacuated after a Dell went up in smoke there yesterday. The irony of the owner not having the relevant recall information, considering the building he was in, does not escape me. It didn’t escape Yahoo observers that corporate policy at Yahoo HQ is apparently ‘HP all the way’ so the thing shouldn’t even have been there in the first place either.

And talking of escape, it appears that a number of people were rather lucky to do just that over the weekend after another laptop went up in smoke just as someone was boarding a flight at LAX. Lucky because the chap managed to run screaming back down the jetway with his hot portable, leading to the departure lounge being evacuated. This was no Dell lappy either, it has been confirmed that it was a Lenovo ThinkPad T43, although Lenovo refuse to confirm if it was a Sony lithium-Ion battery …

Indeed. I remain equally unconvinced that just because it is Apple and likely to be called an 'i' something that it will be a runaway success.

The much vaunted, overly hyped and hugely anticipated Apple iPhone, a handset merging mobile phone and iPod into one unit, looked like being a step closer to reality when a French magazine featured a ‘leaked’ image of the thing on its front cover. Unsurprisingly, this was picked up by PDA France which featured the images and reported that a final version of the iPhone would be launched at the Paris Apple Expo, which ran this week.

Of course, it was not, and for good reason: the photos were fake.

In fact, French Farce is all too apt a description because the photos were actually a mock-up designed for the cover of the most popular UK Apple magazine, MacUser, and published way back in May. Things get even more hilarious, although not perhaps for ’20 Minutes’ the French magazine that used the same image on its cover, when you look closely at the telephone number showing on the front of the iPhone. It is actually the number of Dennis Publishing, the company that publishes MacUser and a number of magazines I happen to write for.

Laugh, I almost wet myself!

This kind of sloppy reporting takes me back nearly 20 years when I was writing about the Amiga computer and a colleague presented an excellent April Fool’s Day joke about a velocity sensitive keyboard that handled formatting depending upon how hard you typed a word, hard’ish for italic, harder for bold, really hard for …

Well the spec is hardly earth shattering for starters, a clock speed of 1GHz, 256MB of DDR memory and a 40GB hard drive. No Intel Inside either, or AMD for that matter. Instead your cheap PC will be driven by the BLX Godson CPU, a chip whose architecture is very similar to MIPS and said to be 95% MIPS-compatible. Perhaps the biggest catch is that you will have to be a school or local government in China to get one of the machines, manufactured by ZhongKe Menglan Electronics Technology Co., Ltd.

That and the fact that it will cost as much as $200. Apparently, the first batch of 2000 units will cost that, with the price dropping as the numbers increase.

But it’s not all bad news, because the YellowSheepRiver "Municator" is available now, well they will build you one with a three month lead-time, for $150. Wait a bit longer and the MIT ‘One Laptop Per Child’ vision of the $100 lappy could well be a reality if production at the Quanta Computer of Taiwan plant ever gets started. Mind you, Intel Chairman Craig Barret has already described the OLPB design as being a one hundred buck gadget, rather than a proper computer. Oh, and lately that $100 price tag seems to have climbed up to between $130 and $150.

What about UK inventor Trevor Bayliss, the man behind the clockwork radio? He has been known to be working on ideas for a cheap wind-up PC …

Perhaps the thing that makes me most angry, in my case, is that I won't just walk away to the competition as I would nine times out of ten. Becuase this particular provider has by far and away the best value tariff for my usage requirements, especially on the Internet data side of things.

Assuming they will ever let me have that tariff of course :)

Makes my problems with T-Mobile pale into insignificance!

Purchased a new handset/tariff via the website in the UK. Handset, MDA Vario II (very nice) arrived a couple of days later, but no contract documentation. A couple of days later still, a letter arrives welcoming me to a completely different price plan to the one I had purchased.

Phone customer services, and after playing extension tag for half an hour, eventually get through to someone who says I have to fax my contract over. Which I don't have, as they haven't sent me one yet.

Luckily I managed to find an email from the web sales folk which stated the price plan I had ordered, so have faxed that instead.

Hopefully, they will see sense and get this sorted pronto. Although I am itching to write about it anyway, and imagine it might well crop up in my review of the MDA Vario II next week anyway.

Oh boy, do I hate mobile phone service providers.

My existing contract ended recently, and the upgrade to the handset/tariff I wanted would cost over £100 more than cancelling and starting again. Eventually, they said they would match the online price of my starting afresh, but without the 500 free texts per month for life bit. When I said OK cancel then, the sales droid actually said she couldn't believe it as I don't use 500 texts per month. When I asked her what she would do given …

The impossible has been achieved; in as far as Google Earth has just got even better. The Beta 4 release seems pretty stable here, certainly no mishaps since I’ve been using it and using it I have been: a lot. Not only has the map rendering become much speedier than before, but additional little things such as the time-stamped image support for KML files making it possible to see the same map image but at different times really do make all the difference.

Well, not all the difference, if you are in Japan I’m pretty sure you would reserve that accolade for the fact that there is now a fully localized version complete with Japanese language support and a dedicated Japan data layer. If you have coughed up the $400 for the ‘Pro’ version you might prefer to think it refers best to the ability to create HDTV movies of your Google earth explorations. If you make use of the application for producing driving directions, although why you would when there are much better solutions to that particular problem in my never at all humble opinion, then ‘all the difference’ can be seen in the improved printing layout.

For me though, I guess it would really have to be the addition of web mapping that enables third parties to overlay map data on any GE view. This, in turn, brings in the new ‘featured content’ functionality.

Turn this layer on and you get a completely …

...and the Microsoft AJAX Library, err, and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Yep, Microsoft has not only finally come up with an official name for the AJAX technologies which until now have been known collectively as ‘Atlas’ but has also split it into three individual products. All are expected to ship by year-end.

ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions cover the server-side functionality, while the Microsoft AJAX Library handles the client-side stuff and integrates with the server-based extensions, naturally. The final part of this triumvirate is the self-explanatory ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Together, the intention is to simplify ASP 2.0 web development where advanced JavaScript and XML functionality is required. Now I am no such developer myself, but I know a man who is and he tells me that the whole Atlas concept is actually rather good in real world use. In particular, that it does away with the need to bother writing JavaScript code.

But you know what, nobody seems to care about that online. The big fuss seems to be on the naming convention: what was wrong with Atlas? Why not call it iAjax? Why is Microsoft so boring these days? It is branding that counts, that’s why the x-box is a success.

Doh!

Is it just me, or does what a technology can do matter more than what it is called? Especially in the corporate domain where something like ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions is destined to live? Personally, I rather like the name, it …

Hehe. You up for organising that?

Sometimes, I get wind of something that has all the makings of an April Fool’s Day prank: but not often in September. Which is why I took a second look at the story about an IBM supercomputer in the making, with ambitions to break the petaflop speed barrier, which will use the heart of a, well, a, I’m honestly not joking, a Sony PlayStation. Hmm, a games console within 12,000 square feet of floor space and 360 server racks? Perhaps a little large for the average home user.

Roadrunner is a project jointly developed by IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory where it is destined to be ultimately installed. The two phase build is progressing well, and phase one is due to be delivered to Los Alamos next month. This $35 million phase consists of a Red Hat Linux 4.3 driven base cluster of IBM System x3755 servers using AMD Opteron technology.

Impressive enough stuff, and sufficient to keep me and my online gaming sessions satisfied no doubt. But it won’t break that 1000 trillion calculation per second barrier, that’s for sure. Which is where the second phase comes in, scheduled for late next year at the earliest. Nobody is saying how much phase two will cost, but I suspect it will be more than the upgrade to Cell processors, originally designed for use within the Sony PlayStation 3 games console, might suggest. What IBM are saying, is that by combining both cluster types , Roadrunner will …

Since writing here about the release of a new 'privacy preserving web browser', I have now had a chance to test Browzar for myself and can make the following additional comments:

I do not buy the 'Browzar is adware' comments that have been doing the rounds of the blogosphere, at least it's not adware in the usual sense of the word. What Browzar actually does is push users to its own search interface by default (although there is nothing stopping you from typing the Google URL and going to search there instead, as usual) and then serve up context driven ads courtesy of Overture within the results. The contentious issues being, and the cause of the adware complaints, that these sponsored results are presented within the search results and not separate from them. Naughty, not nice, but not adware in my book.

I do not buy the Browzar is a browser claim that the developers make for it either though. It isn't, as it merely wraps around the Internet Explorer shell in much the say way as a multitude of others including Maxthon and (my favorite of such things) NetCaptor. It would be more truthful to describe it as an IE skin, or a custom wrapper, than a browser in its own right.

I do not buy the promise of a footprint free web, with the promise that cache, history, cookies and auto-complete forms are all automatically deleted once you finish your browsing …

AOL has announced its AIM Phoneline Developer Initiative that will allow voice application developers and device manufacturers to create new tools to extend the functionality of the still relatively new AIM Phoneline service. Examples of the new APIs for call personalization (or ringtones as mere non-marketing mortals might say), untethered devices (that will be cordless handsets then) and incoming call management (caller ID and the like) will be on show at booth 449 at the Fall 2006 VON conference, running from September 11th - 14th at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

A move that makes good sense if AOL wants to seriously challenge Skype in the emerging voice markets, not least because they are already playing catch up and then some. Sure, AOL has those 43 million AIM users, but that is less than half the number of Skype users. What is more, Skype have massive market penetration of the kind AOL could only once dream about. Analysts have suggested that Skype accounts for anywhere between 40 and 55 percent of all VoIP calls placed in North America, for example.

However, if the Open AIM Phoneline initiative can successfully build on that of the Open AIM program that has over 50,000 developers registered, then AOL could make some progress I guess. In order to try and kick-start this registration process, AOL has also announced the Open AIM Phoneline Developers’ Challenge. This simply asks developers to create the most innovative and useful applications to …

AOL has announced its AIM Phoneline Developer Initiative that will allow voice application developers and device manufacturers to create new tools to extend the functionality of the still relatively new AIM Phoneline service. Examples of the new APIs for call personalization (or ringtones as mere non-marketing mortals might say), untethered devices (that will be cordless handsets then) and incoming call management (caller ID and the like) will be on show at booth 449 at the Fall 2006 VON conference, running from September 11th - 14th at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

A move that makes good sense if AOL wants to seriously challenge Skype in the emerging voice markets, not least because they are already playing catch up and then some. Sure, AOL has those 43 million AIM users, but that is less than half the number of Skype users. What is more, Skype have massive market penetration of the kind AOL could only once dream about. Analysts have suggested that Skype accounts for anywhere between 40 and 55 percent of all VoIP calls placed in North America, for example.

However, if the Open AIM Phoneline initiative can successfully build on that of the Open AIM program that has over 50,000 developers registered, then AOL could make some progress I guess. In order to try and kick-start this registration process, AOL has also announced the Open AIM Phoneline Developers’ Challenge. This simply asks developers to create the most innovative and useful applications to …

This one nearly escaped my radar, and does not seem to have ruffled many news source feathers either. Which is surprising, because in my never humble opinion it is actually quite an important bit of news. The Virginia Court of Appeals has upheld the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes (the 8th most prolific spammer according to Spamhaus at the time of the arrest) who, way back in November 2004, was the first person in the US to get jail time for spamming. Indeed, on the double spammy whammy of distributing bulk email of ‘disguised origin’ and possessing a stolen database of some 84 million AOL subscriber details, Jaynes was sentenced to 9 years.

Of course, this did not stop his attorneys from appealing despite not actually arguing about the facts of the case. Instead, the appeals went ahead based on the somewhat spurious argument that the law that convicted Jaynes was ‘unconstitutionally vague’ which is a new one on me. Unfortunately, and rather sadly I feel, both the American Civil Liberties Union and the US Internet Service Provider Association filed what are known as ‘friend-of-the-court briefs’ in favor of the appeal!
Thankfully, the court panel disagreed with this, as well as the other grounds for appeal that included Virginia lacking jurisdiction over the matter because the emails were sent from the Jaynes home in North Carolina. The AOL servers that the spam was routed through, however, are firmly stuck in Loudon County, Virginia and the court saw enough sense …

Well, maybe for a week or three anyway. That is the theory being bandied around wherever more than three geeks assembly for longer than 10 minutes, or so it seems. Perhaps it is just the company I keep. However, is there any merit in the idea that Vista, and specifically its support for IPv6, will cause the Internet to stutter and possibly even fall over?

Well there is certainly a good basis for the story that is circulating, because it came about after one of the people on the original team that invented the Domain Name Server system, Paul Mockapetris, mentioned that the extra load that Vista will place upon DNS could be enough to cause brownouts. “It is going to be mud season on the Internet, where things will just be kind of slow and gooey" were his exact words in fact.

However, just why should Vista even be in the frame for such an effect?
It all boils down to Vista supporting the IPv6 network layer protocol as well as the existing IPv4, which is actually a very good thing seeing as this positively elderly protocol (originally proposed in 1981) is on its last legs. The problem being that back then, when the Internet remained the plaything of military and academic researchers, the 255.255.255.255 IP address notation that provided 32 bits for describing all addresses seemed plenty. Seriously, who would have thought that the theoretical maximum of 4,294,967,296 could ever be consumed? Surely …

The line ‘free crypto browser extension for Firefox’ contains six of my favorite words within its seven-word construction, which is not bad going. In case you were wondering, for is the word that doesn’t float my boat, although others such as complexity, ‘key management’ and PGP which usually rub me up the wrong way when talking about client side encryption are noticeably absent. That is because Freenigma has no place for them in its lexicon.

Simply put, it is a free extension offering encryption for your webmail account when accessed via the Firefox browser and which works with Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo as well as some lesser-known services.

The less simplistic description would probably add that it is an OpenPGP standard supporting, GNU Privacy Guard implementing system that uses a JavaScript based user script to integrate Freenigma functionality with the desired webmail client, while leaving key management (did I really just say that) to the Freenigma server itself.

There are some limitations, such as the fact that it is only free because it is in Beta and there are absolutely no guarantees that it will remain that way once the Beta expires. In addition, the encryption only covers the mail content and not the webmail from/to headers, or attachments for that matter. Moreover, do not expect Gmail contextual advertising to be, well, very contextual when displayed alongside random text.

It is early days for sure, but if you want simplicity with your webmail security …

This is, I would suggest, perhaps the biggest privacy issue of the day. I have lost count of the number of press releases, leads, emails and telephone calls that have come my way this year regarding how search engines treat the data you enter when performing a search. Be it the act of serving up contextual advertising, through to archiving of search strings (and requests for access to those archives from law enforcement agencies) and even ‘accidental’ publishing of research databases such as the recent AOL debacle. Although there is some merit in the argument that if you are not searching for anything illegal then you have nothing to worry about, there is much more merit in the ‘what has it got to do with anyone else’ one.

A couple of press releases have recently spurred my interest in the debate, because they offer potential solutions to the problem rather than just endless debate. First up was the missive from the people behind Ixquick. A metasearch engine that has announced, as from July in fact, it will permanently delete all personal search details gleaned about users from the log files. This is actually rather a neat solution because you still get to search some of the most popular engines, including Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves and Wikipedia (although not Google) but without any of the inherent privacy risks you might otherwise encounter. Whereas search engines routinely register everything from a date and timestamp of your search, keywords used, …

The Internationale Funkausstellung is not a jazz-fusion music event. Nope, the IFA is apparently the world’s largest consumer electronics show these days, and it runs until 6th September in Berlin. Once over the disappointment that the only music was Muzak-alike piped hell, the race was on to discover the best gadget of the show. All in one day. This was made somewhat more difficult than usual as Sony were amongst the list of notable non-attendees. But never mind, there was plenty else to pick from. So, would I choose one of the 1920 x 1080 HDTV flat screen televisions, or maybe one of the many Blu-Ray devices, perhaps even a Skype enabled cordless telephone? Nope, surprisingly the gadget I liked best was the dinky V-Mate from SanDisk.

This video flash memory card recorder, there must be a better name, simply enables you to record video from your TV, cable or satellite set top box, DVD, VCR, TiVo or other PVR etc, directly onto a memory card. And there is none of the usual proprietary cards only nonsense that some manufacturers (notably absent) might have included. The V-Mate supports recording onto SD, MMC, MMCplus, MMCmobile, SDHC, MiniSDHC, MicroSDHC, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick PRO Duo.

Phew!

It is this wide card format support that appeals to me, because it makes this a very versatile device. Coupled with the fact that it handles the analog to digital conversion, compressing video into MPEG-4 …

I have now had the opportunity to put Browzar through its paces, rather than just write about the release and concept as I have done here.

Thought it merited a whole new blog posting, rather than just another comment.

The adware claims are spurious to say the least, referring to the inclusion of sponsored ads (on a contextual basis) within the search results when using the Browzar search function. Hardly adware by any definition I am familiar with.

As for it being fake, well again I'd like to see the evidence of that. As far as I can see one person claims to have found a way to locate footprint records while using Browzar and the developers have contacted him to discuss this in order that they can close any hole should one be found.

But, as I say in my posting, I am less than convinced Browzar is anything truly new and exciting, and certainly not the revolution in secure browsing that Ahmed would have us believe.

Trouble is, for many people now the 'work computer' is just a laptop in the 'home office' which in turn is the study, spare room, bedroom, corner of the lounge whatever.

Not everyone works for a corporate with a network security infrastructure, especially if they work for themselves or a very small family business for example. In which case the security infrastructure is often nothing more than a software firewall, and then badly configured.

It's all too easy to forget that very small home based business is becoming big news, and bringing with it a whole new threat landscape.

:D

I rather liked:

"I must have been about 14 and was using my Mum’s work computer. For some reason I decided to check what was in her web history. It was mostly benign stuff until the middle where she had: divorce.com, divorce.net, Ask Jeeves, advice about divorce. Yes, I found out that my parents were going to get divorced before my Dad did.”

Once upon a time, back in the late 1990s, Ajaz Ahmed was the founder of an ISP that literally changed the shape of the UK Internet. The reason as to why is hinted at in the name: Freeserve. Ahmed had the vision to understand that free access to the Internet could not only be a success, but a hugely profitable one. Freeserve has long since been history, originally acquired by French ISP Wanadoo for $3 billion (making Ahmed a very rich man in the process) and more recently rebranded as part of the Orange empire. But Ahmed has not lost the urge to create culture changing free business concepts, and his latest venture was officially launched this week: Browzar.

So what is it all about, other than a particularly awful pun? Well how does clicktrail free web browsing grab you. Yes, I know, hardly a new concept really. After all, there are myriad ways of achieving this to one degree or another. However, most of them will cost you money of course, and that is something that Ahmed seems passionately against. So Browzar is free, and small for that matter with a miniscule 264k footprint. Did I say footprint? Sorry, that is a word that is not in the Browzar lexicon, banned along with others such as installation (it requires none) and registration (ditto.) Browzar also does away with cache, history, cookies and auto-complete forms, auto-deleting them all once you are done. What it is not, of course, is …

Privacy International a human rights watchdog, has announced it is to run the second Stupid Security Awards in order to reward the numbnuts responsible for some of the most ridiculous security measures on the planet. If it is annoying, pointless, intrusive, illusory, self-serving and above all else just plain stupid, then it could be a winner.

The five categories are:

• Most Egregiously Stupid Award
• Most Inexplicably Stupid Award
• Most Annoyingly Stupid Award
• Most Flagrantly Intrusive Award
• Most Stupidly Counter Productive Award

Want some inspiration? Privacy International are only too pleased to help. How about an airport that just last month emptied an entire, packed, airplane because a passenger was drinking from a lemonade bottle. Or maybe the British schools fingerprinting children to stop the theft of library books. But you only have to look back to the inaugural awards back in 2003, a runaway success with no less than 5000 entries, for some real stooopid nominations.

• US soldiers heading to Iraq on commercial airliners had their knives confiscated due to ‘security regulations’ but were allowed to keep their firearms.
  
• T-Mobile required users of ‘pay-as-you-go’ mobile phones to send two credit card bills and full details of the phone service provider, through the mail, before they would allow a user to top up their phone using a credit card. Apparently, this was to prevent anyone else from covertly topping up the phone.
  
• The University of Texas employed campus guards, but only between …

I have long been a fan of Blinkx the video search engine that, as far as I am concerned, pretty much prompted the whole genre and introduced the idea of live video search and stream done properly. So I was interested to receive word from Blinkx founder and CTO Suranga Chandratillake today that they have entered a partnership deal with Lycos.

Now usually, I admit, such news bores me senseless. But this is different, because it doesn’t involve coughing up millions to serve up web search and listings to Face Party, as Microsoft have done, or $900,000 to do the same for the 100 million odd users (and I use the term sagely) of MySpace as Google has done. Instead, in return for serving up access to 5 million hours of video content via that oh so lovely dedicated video search engine to 25 million Lycos users, Blinkx has opted for an ad revenue share model.

That is why this is so interesting because it could be the kind of deal that answers many of the monetization questions raised when dealing with a Garage TV operation. Oh, and Garage TV is another Chandratillake invention: by it he means user generated content. The point is, that a Garage TV setup can often generate a hug audience in terms of bums on seats, but prove to be very difficult to actually generate real revenue from. Of course, Blinkx isn’t the only service to understand this, and only last …

McAfee publish a list of the top 10 spam subject lines, because of the work done by their threat research and filtering labs as well as customer feedback, and the latest for July shows how the spammer is now concentrating more on ID theft and less on helping you achieve sexual satisfaction or financial security. Certainly comparing the current subject lines with those from other surveys that have crossed my path over the years makes for interesting reading, in a spam threat evolving without end kind of a way.

Let us get July 2006 out of the way first, the 10 most popular (not with me buddy, but there you go) spam subject lines were:

1. Message from eBay Member
2. PayPal Notification
3. Restore Your Account Access
4. Chase Online Banking Service
5. eBay Member aw-confirm@ebay.com
6. eBay Item Not Received Dispute Opened for Item
7. Question from eBay member
8. Question from eBay Member
9. Barclays International informs you
10. Amazon.com – Account maintenance – Profile Update

Interestingly, if you compare this with the 10 most common subject lines received by McAfee from customers reporting spam during the 24 hours prior to me writing this posting the threat spread is a little wider in focus:

1. Regular verification of Internet Banking Accounts!
2. more than any other guy
3. Separate yourself from other men
4. you have new mail from Natalia
5. cheap oem soft shipping //orldwide
6. Say No to pain
7. Need S0ftware?
8. text
9. Message subject
10. ...

But go back to last year, …

Sure. I try to post a good balanced mix of news and opinion here, but am happy to up the tech ante every now and then :)

I was reading the Google Code Blog and noticed that Google software engineer Matthias Zenger happened to announce the availability of the updated Google Base Data API last week.

This lets you develop applications that can dynamically interact with Google Base, obviously. Perhaps a little less obviously it also allows you to query other users' published content, making domain-specific search mashups a possibility. The API is ReST-full and based on the GData protocol, which combines XML-based syndication formats with feed-publishing, using a mix of Atom and RSS.

What excites me even more, although I admit to being fairly easily pleased, is the fact that this means that Blogger now has a GData API as well, allowing client applications to both view and update content as GData feeds. There is a very useful official document that not only is packed full of handy sample code, but also has plenty of links to downloadable client libraries for C# and Java developers. The API works with both the current and Beta versions of Blogger, meaning a seamless transition for any client application should be a reality.

What if you are editing it?

I remain unconvinced that a hyper-scrolling, free-spinning, motorised mouse wheel is the way to best achieve quickly getting from point A to B in a long document though.

I managed to edit that out of the orignal, but have put it back in now. Well spotted!

Some press releases grab your attention for all the wrong reasons, although from the PR perspective if it has grabbed my attention it has obviously worked. One such scurried across my desktop the other day: Logitech rolls out its coolest mouse ever, the headline proclaimed.

Oh crikey, thought I, here we go again. Another day another mouse and another press release desperately trying to convince me that my mouse is not any good and this mouse will change the way I work. It is a new mouse revolution, I was promised enthusiastically. I can fly through long documents with hyper-fast scrolling I was assured, hundreds of pages with a flick of my finger indeed. A precision scroll wheel that will spin freely for up to seven seconds they announced, forgetting to explain why this should be of any interest to me at all. I later discovered this means it can apparently scroll through 10,000 pages in that time. But hey, it is fast, smart and fully loaded according to Logitech so it must be worth investigating further.

Therefore, I did.

Apparently, I am informed, the average person scrolls the mouse wheel a whopping 26 feet during an eight hour day, which I can quite believe as I have worn out numerous mice and the scroll wheel is usually the first thing I kill. As an aside, I also kill keyboards with alarming regularity, either completely removing any trace of key markings or more often any …

>new codding session

Fishing for compliments? :cheesy:

The trouble is that there are far too many wannabe journalists, and not enough experienced, trained, professionals.

While I am all for the whole blogging concept (duh) and even have a certain respect for many of those participating in 'people journalism' the problem seems to be that far too many people are willing to accept anything 'published' online as fact. This is compounded by the Google effect, where a search reveals a large volume of hits all saying the same thing. That the thing is wrong doesn't matter, by virtue of volume it has become the accepted truth.

This is where professional journalists used to come in, acting as filters for the rumor mongers and gossip spreaders, removing fact from fiction (on the whole) and presenting the former whether wrapped in opinion or straight from the bottle, facts nonetheless.

Yes, I am biased.

Yes, I am a member of the National Union of Journalists in the UK.

Yes, I am bitter about how a profession is being devalued.

Yes, I wish that lazy journalism, Google journalism, could be stopped - but I doubt that will happen any time soon. Expect things to get much worse before they get any better.