Posts by happygeek

It’s bad enough, as an individual, to discover that the domain name you wanted has been snapped up by some corporate pirate looking to make a mighty profit by sitting on it and selling it on. It is even worse when these cyber-squatters snap up a domain you had been using but somehow managed to let lapse by not renewing the registration in time. However, the problem gets a whole lot more complicated when you are a corporate whose brand and business is being devalued by a typo-squatter.

Type-squatting is, as the name suggests, the practice of using the misspelling (or a variation) of a domain name in order to drive legitimate traffic away from the intended destination and onto what could be either a pay-per-click ad farm, porn site or even a phishing expedition for your clients personal and financial data or, indeed, their custom.

Microsoft has decided that enough is enough, and amid claims that thousands of such domains are registered every day with the single aim of profiting from the intellectual property that is a corporate trademark, has started to fight back. It is taking legal action against 324 domains, owned and operated by four individuals and companies, in the first batch of filings. Seeking injunctions, damages and forfeiture of the domains in question, Microsoft means business. Microsoft attorney Aaron Kornblum, along with Microsoft Trademark and Internet Safety Enforcement, says that there has been a surge in domains illegally containing the Microsoft trademark, comparing it …

You are now officially more popular than Bill Gates :D

It seems to search for mentions of your name in other blogs as well though, and mentions of your website.

My ego rating is based upon a search of Davey Winder with www.happygeek.com for example.

Doing a search for Davey Winder at Google returns 'about' 87,800 hits apparently. I have not counted them all to see if it is really 87,826 or whatever though. My ego is not that big... :D

I admit it; there are times when I have gone to Google (and Yahoo, MSN, Ask and even occasionally a decent Meta-Search such as Dogpile) for no other reason than to see what people are saying about me online. I like to think that I have an excuse, what with being a professional journalist and all, in that I am looking for illegally copied versions of my work, potentially libelous comments and even the odd bit of praise here and there. Of course, the truth is I am doing what huge swathes of us do even if we do not, or will not admit it: ego surfing.

The trouble is, exactly what metric do you apply to such an activity in order to truly gauge the size of your online presence? The number of hits from an enclosed in double quotes Google search? The number of positive postings minus the number of negative ones? Maybe how many comments your blog posts have attracted, or how many page views your vanity home page receives? The point being that there is not a metric that works, possibly until now that is. I have recently discovered that rather excellent, if admittedly pointless, ego surfing calculator that is designed to determine your online popularity, and nothing else.

Just enter your name together with web domain or blog address, choose the search engines you want to interrogate (from a basic google.com search through to all encompassing deep searches that …

But that's the whole point, McAfee are leaving control to you - Site Advisor simply helps you make an informed choice about what you click before you click it. It blocks nothing, merely discretely flags the results.

Earlier this year McAfee sponsored a rather interesting survey of search engine safety. Safety, that is, from the ‘how safe are the links they deliver and you click’ angle. Now, for the longest time, I have harbored a passing suspicion that the dodgiest links you can follow from any search engine are those that fall into the paid for placement category. You know, those links that appear at the top of the results heap no matter what; those that always fill the contextual advertising sidebars; those that try to tempt you away from the real search algorithm deduced deal.

The ‘Safety of Internet Search Engines’ report was more than supportive of my theory. Based upon a survey of the five major engines conducted between January and April, it confirmed that these sponsored results are nearly three times as likely as non-sponsored hits to lead to unsafe sites. Which makes something of a mockery of the much vaunted claims by the search supremos that such sponsored placements are subject to rigorous editorial policy. The evidence as presented by the survey results suggests that search placements are not checked, or at least not checked adequately enough. To put it into some perspective, the survey revealed that a Google advert is actually more than twice as likely to lead to an unsafe site as an organic search hit, and the figure for an sponsored Ask placement is nearly four times as likely.

Of course, there was as always an …

Thursday 24th August could be a date for your diary if you happen to be in the market for compilers and development tools for the high-performance computing arena. Especially that which nods towards parallelization and optimization functionality in order to squeeze multi-core processors to the max.

The Portland Group have named Thursday as the release date for its new version 6.2 PGI workstation compilers for C/C++ and Fortran, as well as development tool sets.

By providing a uniform optimizing and parallel C/C++ and Fortran application development environment across both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, on either AMD or Intel multi-core processors, and running either Linux or Windows, PGI users have the opportunity to maintain a single source-code base and build environment across something like 65% of the technical computing market platforms.

For those in the market for such tools, this latest release adds support for native 32-bit Windows users, enhances the PGI unified binary feature (a single x64 binary executable can contain code sequences which are optimized for both AMD and Intel x64 processors), support for SUSE 10.1 and RedHat Fedora Core 5, interoperability with Microsoft Compute Cluster Server 2003 interoperability and an improvement to the same for Microsoft Visual C++.

About the only thing that Portland is not shouting about loudly to the press is the pricing. I guess we, and you, will have to wait until Thursday for that...

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, that rhyming slang appeals to me :D

Of course, I could be barking up the wrong tree (excuse the pun) but my assumption was 'dogfood' = 'screwed'

I had assumed the term was being used as an euphemism, for something that happens to rhyme with dogfood funnily enough... :D

I suspect that there will something of a flurry of activity from third parties looking to enter the in-air ISP business and fill the void as it were. While Boeing might not have been able to make it profitable, there is a niche business market that still wants it and, one assumes, is willing to pay for it. Take the consumer out of the loop and you can charge a lot more, of course.

The news that Boeing is to scrap its Connexion in-flight Internet access service will surprise many people. The fact that it had an in-flight Internet access service will surprise many more. Unless you were a business traveler, flying in Asia where the service was most prevalent, and then one who really could not get by without email and the web for a couple of hours, it simply would not have found your radar.

Anyway, it was something of a non-starter at anything from $10 for 30 minutes upwards. Actually, that is not quite true: if you flew by German carrier Lufthansa, you could get the service free. This is where it all went wrong, as far as I am concerned. If offered as a value added service, bringing a truly useful service to the masses as part of the airfare, then in-flight Internet could have been a flyaway success. The fact that the FAA passed the cost of both testing and approving the necessary wireless devices onto the individual carriers pretty much guaranteed that it was never going to be universally free.

Launched in 2001 it simply never made the kind of impact it could have done. Between the pricing issue (so much for value), the fact that you felt lucky to get a consistent 128k connection (so much for high speed) and the fact that the 9/11 attacks happened just a couple of months after it started (so much …

It has been a busy week for both W3C and anyone who is serious about XML. The W3C XML Core Working Group has published the fourth edition of XML 1.0, and second editions of XML 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.0 and 1.1.

Forming, as they do, the bedrock for W3C-defined technologies used in the querying, transforming, displaying, encrypting, and optimizing of XML their importance cannot be overestimated. As well as correcting ‘all known errata’ according to a W3C release, the revised specifications also clarify where before there was ‘potential for misunderstanding’ although I have to admit I have yet to read them in full and compare to the previous versions so cannot actually comment on the particulars. Hey, sometimes life is just too short and pool too inviting to spend time going over XML specs with a fine toothcomb!

Not so for the folk at W3C of course, they have vowed that by the end of this year they will have published their recommendations for XML Query 1.0 and XSLT 2.0, as well as revising the XML Schema which is heavily used in SOAP-based Web services, and planning additions to XML Query that go beyond the 1.0 version. If that wasn’t enough, the XML Processing Model Working Group are also expected to publish the first draft of an XML language for specifying sequences of operations on XML documents, such as transformation, validation, inclusion and decryption, based on existing XML pipeline products …

It surprised me as well. Not least because it has hardly caused a ripple of comment online. You would think it would be getting plenty of publicity, but no...

Please forgive me if I am a little slow in flagging this up, but it has only just floated across my radar: you can now implement Google AdSense for search results on your own page, displaying the all important revenue generating adverts alongside the search results without directing readers off-site. There are two distinct pieces of code involved, one for the search box and the other for the results, and by doubling up like this you get full control not only over where the search is conducted but also where the results appear. Am I alone in finding this a rather exciting and hopefully profitable move?

Implementation could not be easier, as long as you have created the search results display page before you get cracking. Blogger users, and anyone else where the web host does not allow the creation of a separate URL for search results cannot, sadly, play along. Everyone else just needs to login to their AdSense account, choose AdSense for search from the setup tab, and scroll down to the ‘more options’ section where the ‘open results within my own site’ checkbox should be ticked. Enter either the full, or relative, URL and then copy the generated search box and search results code into the source HTML for the pages concerned.

I was born in London, and although I no longer live there (having swapped the rat race for a life of rural seclusion) I am a regular business visitor. Unsurprisingly then, I tend to travel a lot by the good old London Black Cab. While more expensive than taking the tube or bus, it is a door to door service and thanks to the knowledge of the London Cabbie, it is also often much quicker.

Outside of the capital, not a lot of people are aware that in order to earn your license to operate a London Black Cab, the taxi driver has to pass a grueling examination known as ‘The Knowledge’ which involves memorizing every street and location of public buildings within a six mile radius of Charing Cross railway station. On top of this, they have to know some 320 specified routes through the city that include all the points of interest within a quarter of a mile of the endpoint, and know this off by heart. Think that is tough enough, well there is more: all the major routes in and out of the London suburbs need to be memorized as well. And to pass The Knowledge, and get that coveted license, they have to pass a rigorous exam which includes reciting a precise route from any two points that the examiner fancies. No wonder it can take at least 3 years to pass, and often much longer. If you see people on scooters with a …

Apple uses the same Sony batteries I believe.

As alc6379 says, at least Dell are taking action on the issue. But my concern remains, whether finger pointing at Dell or Sony or anyone else, that the number of battery recalls for fire related problems over the last few years is way too high.

When you are the world's biggest PC maker, your problems tend to be on the large scale when they hit. Such is the case of what the US Consumer Products Safety Commission is calling the biggest recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry.

The problem is that a batch of lithium-ion batteries made by Sony and installed in Dell notebooks between April 2004 and July 18th this year could, err, explode in flames after just a couple minutes of usage.

Given the potential danger that such a scenario could cause in the office or at home, let alone if you happened to be using your laptop on an airplane at the time, I am bemused and worried in equal measure that none of the other manufacturers using the same Sony batteries have issued a recall. What is the difference between Dell and Toshiba and Lenovo for example? The fact that it has taken so long for this recall to actually happen, when rumors regarding battery safety have been circulating for many months, is also worrying. Sure, it is not going to be a cheap exercise and some analysts reckon it could cost Dell as much as $300 million: but what price can you put on saving your customers from serious injury?

Of course, this is not the first time that Dell have been hit by battery problems. In 2001 they recalled 284,000 batteries for a potential overheating and fire hazard problem, and another 22,000 batteries …

Rumbled! :D

Truth be told, I would apply myself if I didn't have a young family to consider.

OK, so that would just be silly, would it not? Nobody in their right minds would accept a job working in IT on Mars. Yet so far 70 people have applied to the Mars-500 project in Russia, for the unusual position (literally) of an IT Manager willing to be sealed inside a metal container simulating a manned flight to Mars.

The State Scientific Centre of the Russian Federation - Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SSC RF - IBMP RAS) not only has an extremely long name, it expects then successful applicants for the half dozen vacancies to spend an extremely long time in a metal tube for relatively little pay. In return for spending a minimum of 520 days sealed within the 550 sq meter simulator, which might be extended by 180 days if there are orbital problems (I kid you not), you will get a basic Russian salary and an overwhelming desire to be on your own for a bit. Oh, you will be filmed by CCTV the whole time, naturally enough.

If this still has not put you off sufficiently and you happen to be between 25 and 50, speak both English and Russian fluently, and meet the professional qualification requirements, then get your application in as soon as possible.

Me, I think I’ll be giving it a miss…

Dunno, I think it is a win-win thing to be honest. Lots of people want to work at Google, and it wants the cream of the crop so such a competition is a great way of finding just that.

The race is on to find the best online coder, as registration for the 2006 Google Code Jam US heat starts. You have until September 5th to sign up if you want to prove you are king of the American coders by solving a series of problems to test both your programming skill and creativity.

Last year more than 14,500 coders took part in the global event, covering 32 countries, and the results are already in for both the European and Indian heats.

The top 100 contestants will be transported, all expenses paid, to the New York offices of Google Engineering on October 27th for the grand finals where a prize of $10,000 is up for grabs, as part of a total prize pool of $155,000. But this really is not about the money, it is about showcasing your coding prowess and winning that title.

The competition presents contestants with a series of problems meant to test their programming skills and creativity. This year's grand prize is $10,000. Smaller amounts are awarded to the top 100 developers. Google gives away a total of $155,000 in prize money.

Of course, Google has an ulterior motive: it wants to attract the cream of development and engineering talent to work there. And get through to the finals and cream of the crop really is a deserving title. For example, at the European heat finals in Dublin competitors had to devise their own algorithms and gain points …

Looks like the threat level is being lowered today, and one item of hand baggage will now be allowed back as carry-on to include laptops, cellphones and PDAs.

The situation regarding medicines, drinks and toiletries is unlikely to change.

Nobody could argue that whatever measures are put in place are wrong if they potentially save lives, no matter how much hassle they cause. I think we just all have to admit that the nature of international travel is changing, and now might not be a bad time to re-evaluate our options. If that means cutting back on the amount of travel we do, and as a by product lessen the negative impact upon the environment, I'm not sure I would complain too much.

I was caught up in the travel nightmare that has been unraveling in the UK this week, the result of a major gambit in the ongoing ‘war on terror’ being foiled. Like many business travelers, I had been due to fly, short haul across into mainland Europe, when the news broke that flights were being cancelled and cabin baggage severely restricted on those planes still flying.

The purpose of my trip was to attend a press conference, demo a new hardware product, interview the CEO, then fly home, and submit my copy about it all. Copy that requires me to take photographs, record an interview, and type up copious notes during my time there.

Now I understand the need to react decisively when a terrorist threat is exposed, and the very nature of this latest one (with the difficulties in detecting liquid bombs before they are taken on-board and assembled) required that only essential carryon items would be allowed. Electrical items most certainly not amongst them as the flash of a digital camera or signal from a mobile phone could apparently produce enough charge to detonate the highly unstable liquid devices. The truth is, I suspect, that there is no going back to the days of taking my mobile office with me onto the airplane and working from my seat.

Yet there is no way I would trust the many thousands of dollars of equipment I need to work upon arrival, to travel in the hold with …

Born August 12th 1981, the IBM Personal Computer changed the world. Hard to imagine now, but back then it really was the start of a revolution. All those personal computers that came before it were nothing more than toys in the eyes of the business world, the marriage of Microsoft to the IBM Disk Operating System pretty much proved the point.

I promised myself I would not get all emotional and sloppy over the thought of that original IBM 5150 with its 4.77MHz processor, 56kb of memory (if you could afford the upgrade you could have as much as 256kb) and an expensive and very optional 160kb capacity floppy drive. And, oh, that 83-key adjustable, external, keyboard. Sheer joy! Within a year, Time Magazine would even name the PC as its Man of the Year, bizarrely enough. And what about the cost, back then it was a very reasonable investment: $1500 if I recall correctly. A lot of money, equivalent to about $4000 today, but a whole heap less than the $9 million an original IBM computer from twenty years prior would have cost (and let’s not mention that it required a quarter-acre of air conditioned space to operate in.)

Sad, in a way, that IBM is no longer in the PC business, having sold that particular part of the company to Chinese company Lenovo a couple of years back. The same cannot be said of Bill Gates who is, so I am told, still involved in the …

Those with an addicitive personality, perhaps. But I think there is a real danger in blurring the boundaries between addiction/unhealthy obsession and what for want of a better term you might call a healthy obsession.

A game without that 'must play' factor is not going to make any money. That does not make it a bad thing nor the developer irresponsible.

I guess my real beef here is the idea that somehow just because a few people have suffered seriously at the hands of a game addiction that has impacted upon their life to an extreme degree, that does not mean that anyone who spends a lot of time playing one game is an addict about to do the same unless someone comes along (with a clinic and a program) to help.

I would love to see some figures about just how serious a problem gaming addiction really is, backed up with the necessary scientific study procedures in place. My guess is that it is not a big problem at all.

Not that I am saying you disagree with any of this Mike, just extending the debate a bit :)

Sometimes, the cleverest of folk say the dumbest things. Case in point, I am sure that Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack is very clever, as a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts you would have to assume as much. So why has she claimed that as many as 40 percent of World of Warcraft players are addicted to the game, and done so in a way that suggests such an addiction relates to a loss of control?

Maybe the fact that Dr. Orzack is both founder and coordinator of the Computer Addiction Service has something to do with it. Please do not get me wrong, I am sure that both the kind Doctor with more than 10 years of research into the phenomena behind her, and the service she runs, do good work for all the right reasons. I am even sure that there are a great many people who display obsessive behavior when it comes to computer gaming, behavior that can impact upon their social life, family relationships and even work.

I am not convinced that words like ‘addiction’ are properly used in this case, nor that the numbers add up. Heck, there are millions of people playing this game, and do I really believe there are also millions addicted to it in such a way that their lives are out of control? No, of course not.

Nor do I think that the millions of people who would be lost without their Internet connection, their email …

The Intel Open Source Technology Center has officially released open source graphics drivers for the 965 Express chipset in a move that while not exactly unprecedented is, nonetheless, a most welcome display of commitment to the provision of free software drivers.

Moreover, it is a display of that commitment in a relatively high-end capacity: the 965 supports OpenGL vertex sharing as well as hardware transforms. In addition, Intel stand-alone in releasing source code for their Linux drivers, currently you do not find the same open approach from either NVIDIA or ATI. A situation that may have to change if they wish to keep pace with Intel, now that independently developed drivers with high end feature support are likely to become more commonplace as a result of the Intel move.

Certainly more than the odd one or two kernel maintainers have been fairly vocal about the legitimacy, both moral and legal, of proprietary graphics drivers. While I firmly believe they are wrong in the legality argument, as those proprietary drivers tend to interface with the kernel using an open source shim to get around the GPL, there is less to debate when it comes to the moral ground. There is also little to debate when it comes to Intel gaining a competitive advantage by going open source like this, as I would certainly be inclined to base my graphics hardware purchase upon driver software licensing issues when all else is said and done. The fact that 965 Express kit …

I love IT wars, always have. Back in the day, I was a columnist for a couple of Amiga computer magazines and more than happy to throw my opinion around concerning just why an Atari was such rubbish by comparison. Things have moved on since then, but also stayed much the same. I was there during the web browser wars and lived to tell the tale (many times over, and got paid for the telling.) I have been there as the PC Vs Mac battles have been fought, and survived without too much emotional damage.

Which is why I am quite saddened to see the longest running bit of computing combat coming to an end: I predict that the release of Mac OS X 10.5 or ‘Leopard’ will, once and for all, win the Great OS War, with Microsoft Vista having no option but to admit defeat in the face of a much stronger, much more worthy opponent.

Now, before all the Windows troops start taking aim at me I should come clean and admit that I am a Windows fan, a Windows user and have never actually managed to get along with any of the Macs I have owned over the years. I am also something of a technological masochist, which probably explains why.

So why am I waving the white flag before Leopard has even been released, before Vista has been released for that matter? Simple, in my never at all humble opinion OS X …

I've been called delusional before :cheesy:

However, I think in this case you have allowed the Google red mist to descend and it is clouding your judgement. If someone did come up with such a system to extract the full text of a book from Google excerpts then I would expect action to be taken against that someone. If Google didn't take the necessary steps to prevent such an extraction, ditto. None of which changes the fact that Google isn't infringing my rights as stands.

What we should be debating, methinks, is how the publishing world is changing and how both technology and business models will impact upon current copyright legislation - and what should be done to allow publishing to move forward into this new digital age without bleeding authors dry.

I don't follow your argument at all. The whole point is that punters cannot get my entire book online for free, at least not via the Google Book Search project, becuase only excerpts would be available.

I am not advocating piracy in any shape nor form, and anyone scanning my book and then attempting to distribute it online wholesale would find themselves on the end of a legal pointy stick.

What I am saying is that exposure leads to sales, and the type of exposure that both Amazon and Google are suggesting for works that are in copyright is not the same as piracy by any measure.

My wrapping up para was meant to be making the light hearted point that yeah, sure, things could change and us authors might get screwed at some point in the future - but it would just be a different type of screwing to the one we are already getting.

One thing is for sure, publishing models are changing and will change, and copyright law is going to have to change at some point to keep pace. I am not saying that this is a good or bad thing, just an inevitable thing.

I am a writer by profession. Over the last two decades, I have been fortunate enough to have seen more than twenty of my books make it into print. Some have even sold enough copies for me to earn royalties over and above my advance. With publishing house marketing budgets ever increasingly being squeezed, and us little authors in niche markets such as IT being most squished as a result, it can be difficult to sell enough copies to earn a living. Which is why, outside of the big name bestselling authors, the rest of us do other things to support our families. I am also a successful technology journalist, my main source of income, and a reluctant IT consultant who chooses clients based more on a belief in what they are doing than how much they can pay.

You might be forgiven for thinking, therefore, that news regarding the decision by the University of California to join forces with Google and allow the contents of several million of the 34 million titles in its libraries for inclusion in the Google Book Search project would be about as welcome as gas in a spacesuit hereabouts. With 100 libraries across 10 campuses spread around California, UC is apparently the largest research and academic library on the face of the planet. Assuming you do not include the Web, of course. By joining other great names in getting into bed with Google, names that include the likes of Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, …

Rockstar Games is no stranger to controversy, after all the Grand Theft Auto series of hugely successful video games revolve around the concept of robbing and killing your way to victory. But with the confirmation that it will release the long delayed ‘Bully’ in October, originally slated for a PS2 exclusive release in July 2005, many critics are saying it has gone too far this time.

Why so? Well the game is based around the life of 15 year old Jimmy Hopkins, a boarding school kid who uses baseball bats and bags of marbles to defend himself from bullies. The usual round of criticism that Rockstar is glorifying violence, in this case actually going so far as promoting violence in schools, has followed. Yet none of the groups condemning the game have seen it, because it hasn’t been released yet and Rockstar has deliberately been keeping a low profile for once.

Perhaps the official Rockstar game description reveals a different perspective upon the game play in as far as it states that "as a troublesome schoolboy, you'll stand up to bullies, get picked on by teachers, play pranks on malicious kids, win or lose the girl, and ultimately learn to navigate the obstacles of the fictitious reform school, Bullworth Academy."

Perhaps those people who have seen the game demonstrated remark that there is no blood splatter in the fight scenes, and none go as far as ending in death, might mean that it will stand a chance …

More bad news from the Las Vegas Black Hat Convention, this time for the blogging community. Most RSS reader software is vulnerable to malicious JavaScript insertion attacks, and web based readers are not immune either. With typical JavaScript based attacks targeting passwords and personal data, it is something that should be taken seriously, Yet when I did a quick pop quiz amongst family and friends, not a single one (those in the IT security business apart) was aware that such software was a potential risk.

The fact that this kind of attack can be easily launched from even a trusted site, by way of blog commenting with rogue code included, makes it all the more dangerous. It is not something restricted to rogue bloggers by any means.

Although it is easy to lay the blame at RSS reader software developers for not building in better security checks from day one, the real problem runs deeper than that. The root of the problem is, it has to be said, not RSS software at all but rather the lack of understanding of IT security at its most basic of levels, and an apparent inability for the average user to realize the very real risk to their very real personal data by not getting it.
If you can, then disable script and applets from in-feed launching.

Combining this with general safe computing practice, including running a firewall and anti-malware scanners, represents the best defense.

The "researchers" you are talking about are the crackers who would use such tools to steal corporate secrets and commit sabotage.

That is, to be fair, unfair.

No, it is not a trick question and, yes, your security could be compromised by the fact that you trust your printer almost implicitly. At the Black Hat Security conference this week, Brendan O’Connor proved just how insecure embedded software can be, by exploiting a vulnerability affecting Xerox printers and intercepting data from content printed by one. O’Connor managed to map an internal network, and gain access to all information printed, copied or faxed by the multi-function device, not to mention the ability to run unauthorized software on the printer itself.

So how come a printer can be targeted by such exploits, you may ask. But if you apply a little sideways logic and think of a workgroup printer as being just a Linux server inside a copier, things start to become rather clearer. And as these kinds of devices become ever more complex, then the security risk to the data that passes through increases. And as the volume of data, sensitive and often commercially so, is immense perhaps it is time you started taking this kind of ‘at the edge’ hardware security issue a lot more seriously then at present. After all, it is not a new threat, and I am sure I am not the only one who recalls reading about exactly this kind of hardware vulnerability many years ago in publications such as 2600.

In fairness to Xerox, this particular vulnerability, known as the WorkCenter Printer Bug, was patched way back in February. Unfortunately, the …

Hey, I'm a journalist: more than one is many :)

Yes, I truly believe WEP is that bad. Better than no security at all, but only just.

As I say, it will keep the clueless accidental network tourist away, but not anyone who knows what they are doing or can use Google to read the instructions of someone who does.

If your neighbour was borrowing your wireless Internet connection, without your permission, and you wanted to teach them a lesson, what would you do? Pete decided to have some fun with a fairly simple Squid proxy and turned their online life upside down.

Literally.

What Pete did was split the network into two parts: trusted and not trusted, each with a different netblock. Using the DHCP server to identify mac addresses and hand out the relevant addresses accordingly. Initially he used iptables to redirect all unauthorised traffic to Kittenwar but that really is not fun enough, or at least was not fun enough for Pete. Oh no, he had a much better plan.

By setting iptables to forward everything to a transparent Squid proxy running on port 80, and using a trivial redirector to download all images and then apply Mogrify from ImageMagick to turn them upside down and serve them out of the local webserver, he literally turned the Internet upside down for any intruder hijacking his connectivity. Using various Mogrify commands, Pete also served up a flipped version with all text running backwards, and even a blurry web, which should have all hijackers worrying about their eyesight. Visit the page linked to above for some images of exactly what Pete served up to his victims; it will bring a little pleasure into your life today!

Of course, while this is all highly amusing, considering the chap has enough …

According to Spread Firefox the Internet Explorer alternative has been downloaded 200 million times. Which sounds impressive enough, until you factor in the small matter of downloads not being the same thing as actual users?

Yet while Spread Firefox admits as much and reminds us that the 200 million figure includes downloads of version 1.0 and 1.5 (not to mention all the incomplete downloads and repeats) it still insists on making strange claims such as 200 million people seeking Firefox being a huge accomplishment. Did they not just admit that there is no 1:1 ratio of downloads to users and then ignore that completely?

Not that it matters, oh lordy no, what matters to me and I suggest should matter to them is the fact that Firefox only has somewhere between 12.5 and 15 percent market share despite all the media attention, despite being a far safer browser client than Internet Explorer, despite being open source, despite being free, and despite being downloaded 200 million times!

Please do not get me wrong, I am not a Firefox knocker. Far from it, I love the thing. It is my everyday browser client on all my machines, and I would be lost without it. It is because of my passionate regard for this piece of software perfection that I get angry about it making such little real world impact on the web using public. Crowing about 200 million downloads, to an audience of converts, is going to …

How can so many people be so wrong all at the same time? That is the question I am left asking myself following the 410 to 15 vote in favor of the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (also known as HR5319 or DOPA.) The answer is, of course, that they are politicians so cannot be expected to think rationally, nor at all, when it comes to matters of the Internet.

Well done to the 15 that managed to find their grey matter, and a big yah boo sucks to the remainder.

The very idea that you can delete online predators kind of sums up the entire inability to understand how the Internet works at the most basic of levels.

Yes there is an obligation upon both schools and parents to ensure our kids have a safe learning environment, but knee jerk reactionism is not the answer. Pedophiles and predators exist outside of the Internet, indeed many exist outside of the school itself so perhaps we should ban the sidewalk, the park, the cell phone, the coffee shop or anywhere that such people are to be found. Heck, why not go the whole hog and lock our kids up until they are 18, ensuring they can communicate with only those responsible adults approved by the government? See how daft this argument becomes once you start exploring it?

There is a sensible point to be made, addressing the fact that students should not be using school networks …

Hehe, that touched a nerve here as I run a spyware reviews lab here in the UK for PC Pro magazine and am responsible for reviewing anti-spyware software both in standalone and labs/group test format.

One of my real bug bears, because it is so wrong and becuase it results in more work for me answering emails from readers who think I am some numb-nuts newbie who knows nothing becuase they got screwed, is the way the scammers pretend to be the leading application by using a very similar name, often in paid for search engine ads as you say, and then use a 'free' evaluation version to discover thousands of bits of malware which can only be removed if you cough up the cash and buy the app. Of course, the fact that you also get an additional payload of the thing installing malware of its own is just the icing on the cake.

Trouble is, people are running so scared of the malware menace, and on the whole are far too trusting of anyone claziming to be in the security business, that they fall for this stuff every single day.

One wonders it the likes of Google should take more active responsibility in policing their keyword ad placement systems to prevent the bad guys from getting away with it?

Says who? Says me :cheesy:

Beta software is just that, unfinished, in testing, not ready for sale. If it ain't ready to be sold don't sell it, not even for a buck fifty. If it is ready for sale, take it out of Beta.

This is not a difficult equation to master...

How much money does Microsoft need? As much as possible would appear to be the answer, considering that it has announced a $1.50 fee to download the Office 2007 Beta as from August 2nd. Claiming a requirement to cover server costs as a result of the 3 million people that have already participated in the trial in just a couple of months.

This is, according to Microsoft, 500 percent more than was expected and hence the need for “a cost recovery measure” for future downloads although the online test drive version will remain free. Well whoopee doo on the generosity front there.

If I understand the situation correctly, Microsoft would appear to wants to have its cake and eat it. There is no denying that, Windows OS apart, Office is the big Microsoft money spinner. Equally there is no denying that by letting users download, install and use the Beta version of the suite free of charge for a few months it can get its hooks into a lucrative upgrade revenue stream. Three million downloads would suggest quite an interest, and certainly provide generous return on the server bandwidth investment if even just 25% took the paid upgrade path.

Which leaves me thinking that either Microsoft is feeling the financial pinch (unlikely) or are acting like mercenary, money grabbing buffoons (more likely.) It is never morally right that the consumer should be expected to pay for Beta software, nor even the online mechanism to deliver it. This …

In what could be an important week for anyone with the slightest interest in online chat, Microsoft and Yahoo began a limited public Beta which sees users of the two IM systems being able to talk to each other for the first time. My inside man tells me that the Beta should be very short, after which cross-network IM will be available to all, but not voice chat as both companies are keeping that little pot of glory under wraps for now.

This is not, feel sure, being done out of the goodness of their hearts. This is a business decision pure and simply. Just look at the market share: AOL's AIM service has 56 percent of all IM users, MSN Windows Live Messenger 25 percent and Yahoo Messenger 19 percent. By joining forces and allowing this kind of interoperability, they are literally taking aim at AIM.

As usual, out here in the real world of online geekiness, cross network IM interoperability is a reality already: sort of. There are numerous third party clients that enable multiple conversations on different networks within the single application, albeit not true cross network chat. This is why the announcement is important in the world of IM, as far as I am concerned. It will be important as far as the other IM networks are concerned as well, because the combined market share and added usability will no doubt push them into joining the let us all talk together movement. I hope.

Microsoft's Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group have created an automated tool, as part of the larger Strider Search Defender project, to combat sources of comment spam that is the scourge of blogs across the web. Because sites can get high legitimate search rankings while at the same time serving up spammed ads, it is a problem that has to be dealt with. Microsoft is on course to be the unlikely hero of the hour.

SpamHunter does this by creating a list of doorway sites, hosted on legitimate blog or forum sites and feeding ads from a central spammer target page. Rather than adopting the usual content reading approach to spam discovery, Microsoft is thinking contextual analysis of URL redirection instead. By crawling the web using search engine queries to locate sites within the same network, SpamHunter can pass the information across to the Microsoft Strider URL Tracer which then puts the pieces together and determines where the central domains fed by those doorways are. Because networks of thousands of doorway pages can serve ads from a single domain, it is possible for Search Defender to take down an entire operation in one hit. Indeed, the system has already had some measure of success during testing, determining that 97 percent of the 5,500 spam sites at Blog4Ever were the work of a single comment spammer who was using the same AdSense affiliate identifier for example.

The real clever part is that the more comments there are …

I wouldn't get too excited about it, personally.

See my blog posting for my take on it all...

Who would have thunked it, the Sony PS3 has run into yet more trouble before it has even made it into the shops. Well I would have for a start, the project has been plagued with bad planning, bad marketing and bad luck since the get go. The decision to showcase shiny new technology when existing, or at least somewhat modified existing technology, would have been sufficient (ladies and gentlemen I present the Xbox 360 in evidence) was always a little baffling. Sure, you can understand Sony wanting to show off, wanting to flip the bird to Microsoft. What I cannot understand is why it would want to risk the very thing that gives it that position of power in the first place, the stranglehold it has on the console marketplace, the joined-at-the-heart bond it has with teenagers everywhere.

That is what looks like being chipped away, ironically by the here and now Xbox 360, as would be PS3 users become disenchanted and realize that they cannot play games on vaporware. Yes, both Blu-ray and the Cell processor are very real technologies. Nevertheless, no, both cannot be produced in high enough numbers to satisfy launch demand if the rumors widely circulating in the games development community and technical press alike are to be believed.

First, there is that Cell processor which, according to the VP of semiconductor and technology services at IBM, is slow going with only a small fraction of Cell CPUs coming off the line being …

Surveys, I often find, manage to arrive at the most unexpected of conclusions. This could be down to the questions that are asked being worded in such a way to solicit a politically or commercially acceptable result. It could be down to the fact that people do not tell the truth (has the average man really slept with 423 women, and if so why has the average woman only slept with 4 men?) However, I suspect the real reason, more often than not, is simply that I try to second-guess what the public are thinking: and that is always a dangerous game to play.

However, why not play along anyway? Here is the question, in the following three categories which company has the most loyal customers?

• Computing
  
• Consumer Software
  
• Online Services

Who do you reckon it might be? In computing, I guessed Dell (the business was built on wafer thin margins and brick thick word of mouth, and continues down the same path.) Consumer Software surely had to be Microsoft look at all those folk who religiously upgrade their Office suites, only ever use the IE browser, and are Windows OS junkies.) Moreover, as for Online Services who else but Google (which remains the search engine everyone recommends to their elderly parents, and uses every day even if they claim not to.)

I got one out of three, and that was Google. Apparently, according to the results of this particular survey by Satmetrix, …

It all started late in 1998 when the European Commission received a complaint from Sun Microsystems arguing that Microsoft had refused, perhaps understandably, to provide the information they had requested that would enable the Solaris OS to interoperate with Windows PCs. In less than 2 years the EU had charged Microsoft with withholding technical information in order to maintain dominance of the server software market, and within a year also charged with violating antitrust laws by wrapping WMP into the OS so tightly as to try and squeeze RealPlayer out of the market.

Fast forward to March 2004 and the EU fined Microsoft $613 million as well as demanding Media Player is unbundled from the OS, the first appeal from Microsoft coming just two months later and gets thrown out of court in December. A year later and the EU starts to get stroppy with Microsoft over the time it is taking in providing the protocol documentation, as ordered, to rival server software developers. A formal objection is filed by the EU together with the threat of fines in the order of $2.37 million per day, to be backdated a year.

After much legal argument during the following year, eventually on July 3rd the EU member states representatives responsible for antitrust regulation unanimously voted to uphold that daily fine, and today (12th July) the inevitable happened: the EU commission hit Microsoft with a silly big bill (every pun intended) of $358 million and warned it that if it …