Posts by happygeek

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So you want to work on any computer as you owned it, but without going through the whole remote access process? Thanks to an early-stage company established after the founders met whilst studying for PhDs in Computer Science at Cambridge University your wishes might just be about to come true.

Fonleap, one of seventeen companies showcasing exciting new technology at the annual Meerkats and Avatars event in Cambridge today, is launching a virtual machine in your pocket which uses your smartphone to transport a desktop, in its entirety, from one computer to another. In a nutshell, according to Fonleap co-founder Dan Greenfield, you can stop working on one computer and then resume on another one somewhere else with your own desktop, files and applications exactly as you left them.

OK, so remote desktops are nothing new and the whole remote access market has become somewhat saturated over the last few years, so what's different about Fonleap? Greenfield reckons the real innovation involved here is in taking the remote access out of the equation. "Fonleap will allow you to sync your computer with your phone, so you have everything from your computer available to use on any device. Your entire desktop gets transported with all your files and, crucially, all your applications" Greenfield says, adding "the latest version of your files are always accessible so there’s no danger of confusing different versions. You don’t need to keep your PC on – it’s all there on your phone.”

[URL="https://www.facebook.com/TeaMp0isoN"]TeaMp0isoN[/URL], a black-hat hacking collective, has announced that it is to collaborate with Anonymous on Operation Robin Hood which swears to take money from the banks (in the form of stolen credit card data) and redistribute the wealth from the 1% to the 99% in support of the Occupy Movement. But just who exactly are TeaMp0isoN and what impact is Operation Robin Hood likely to have?

[ATTACH=RIGHT]23129[/ATTACH]Let's start with the easy stuff first and get a handle on TeaMp0isoN. Although you might think that finding anything out about a hacking collective which does things the likes of the FBI and law-enforcement authorities the world over would, almost by definition, be pretty difficult the truth is almost the opposite. Whilst identifying the individuals behind the handles adopted by the core members of TeaMp0isoN is not straightforward, otherwise you can bet your bottom dollar that the Federal authorities would have been knocking on their doors in the wee small hours before now, the nature of political hacktivism is such that it feeds upon publicity. There is, the argument goes, no point in taking down a large corporate server if nobody outside of the normal internal corporate channels knows about it. Hacktivism is a double-edged sword which not only needs the world to know that a spanner has been thrown into the corporate wheel of technology but also who threw it and why.

So we know that TriCk, iN^SaNe, Hex00010 and aXioM are amongst the core teenage members, thought to number …

Done

Erm. What?

We are doing our best to keep on top of it, although some does slip through and reach the forums before we can zap it. Obviously we'd rather that none of the spammers got that far, but believe me the vast majority are not able to post anything before their accounts are taklen down and given a permaban.

We appreciate the support of the community during this time, and reporting any spam that you see really does help us to clean up.

If you've ever played a shooter such as Call of Duty, Battlefield or Halo in online multiplayer mode, then you will appreciate how difficult it can be to stay alive when everyone else has better weapons and knows the game maps so much better than you. But now there is hope for nOObs everywhere, as a new type of online entrepreneur in the form of the virtual bodyguard arrives on the scene.

One hard-core gamer who is offering his services as an online bodyguard caught my attention recently, advertising his services on the fivesquids website where he is charging five British pounds for 30 minutes worth of in-game protection. The advert claims he will stay "by your side the entire time and will fight for you, keeping enemies away from you, protecting you when you snipe, even SACRIFICING MY LIFE to save yours" for the following Xbox 360 games: Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty Black Ops, Halo Reach, Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield Bad Company 2.

DaniWeb spoke to the gamer who, in order to protect his in-game characters, is known only as Mr Smith and turns out to be a 15 year old student who when evening falls becomes "a defender of the brave" apparently.

DaniWeb: What gave you the idea to become an online bodyguard?

Mr Smith: "I remembered how hard it had been starting out in games like Call of Duty and Battlefield online, when everyone else had …

I'm sorry, but the simple answer is that you cannot. You have an editing window of 30 minutes, but after that your post remains as is and we do not delete posts unless they are spam or otherwise breaking the rules and determined by the moderation team to require removal.

We can see your IP alongside every message you post. The power of the admin. Muhaha :)

A password is defined as being a "secret word or string of characters" that is used to authenticate identity and enable access to a resource. The emphasise being on the word secret, although 'unique' is equally important when it comes to password security. Which is why the list of the most popular, and therefore worst, passwords used online this past year as revealed by password management specialists SplashData this week is particularly worrying. Well, it should be if your password is on the list anyway!

According to SplashData, the 25 worst passwords that you could be using include those insecure evergreens of 'password' at number one and '123456' at number two in the chart of shame, followed by the almost as easy to guess but one assumes treated as a more secure option by those who don't know better '12345678'. At number four in the list we find the bad password choice of 'qwerty' - yep, the first six letters on a keyboard, easy to remember and even easier for the bad guys to crack.

Mixing letters with numbers is always a good thing in terms of security, apart from when you use the likes of number five in the list which is, I kid you not, 'abc123'. At least number six is slightly less obvious, I mean who would guess your password is 'monkey' after all? Erm, well actually that bit of automated software which looks for dictionary words would, and it …

Kensington tells me that a new version of the KeyFolio Pro case is set to be launched within the next few weeks, which will feature a detachable keyboard. I've been promised a review unit to put to the test, so keep your eyes peeled for the review here on DaniWeb just as soon as possible.

As well as being Editor-in-Chief and Community Administrator here at DaniWeb, for the last 20 years I have also been a freelance journalist (writing for national newspapers as well as being Contributing Editor of PC Pro, the best selling computer magazine in the UK) and am fortunate enough to have seen more than 20 of my books published for good measure. To put that into some perspective, working on an average of 6,000 words per week for 20 years I have an output of more than 6 million published words to my name.

Keyboards are, therefore, pretty important to me. I break cheaply constructed ones, I simply cannot use badly designed ones and admit to being rather picky about what I consider a suitable keyboard to sit in front of for hours at a time.

So when DaniWeb had the opportunity to road test the Kensington KeyFolio Pro Performance Keyboard Case I was both a little sceptical and a little excited about biting the bullet and using my iPad 2 in order to produce all my professional output for three days. I had good reason for my reticence after all; firstly there's the iPad 2 itself which is not exactly blessed with what I would call 'writer-grade' word processing apps (Pages being the best of the bunch, and the one I used throughout the keyboard testing) and secondly there is the keyboard thing itself. Being a writer I have, naturally, already explored the iPad keyboard …

It may win the prize for being the research with the most surreal title, but the 'My dog ate my iPad' report comes with a very serious message attached and one that business would do well to listen to.

The full title of the independent research report, commissioned by SecureData, is actually 'My dog ate my iPad - security risks of the consumerised workplace' which addresses the hot potato that is summed up as BYOD or Bring Your Own Device.

Just how hot a potato? Well, according to this research at any rate, 98% of those surveyed were allowed to work from home at least once every month yet 96% of IT managers fear security risks when implementing policies for those remote home workers. That is, of course, if there is any such policy in place at all; the research suggests that 25% of businesses have no policies to cover BYOD working patterns.

The research itself was based upon a survey of 100 IT managers in large UK enterprises of more than 1,000 employees across the financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution/transport and commercial sectors. Here's what it found:

• 69% of those surveyed use smartphones and tablet devices not supplied by the company to work remotely at home or whilst on the move (44% smartphones and 25% tablet devices) leading to potential vulnerabilities as unregulated mobile devices are connected securely with the office network.
  
• 100% of employees in the financial services sector are allowed …

How can we help Dani?

Just keep on reporting spam when you see it, using the flag bad post tool. It really does help us keep on top of things.

The official figures are in, and there were 600 people at the DaniWeb party. Plus Elvis...

I'm sure everyone would want to wish Dani, The Queen of DaniWeb, a very happy birthday today.

If you were at the Ad:Tech after party which also served as Dani's birthday bash last night, at the excellent Playwright Celtic Pub in New York, then I hope you had as great a time as I did, and took the chance to say hi.

Finally, a word of thanks to Kerry (PRdude) for his brilliant wrk in organising the party. The place was full (I'm guessing 400-500 people) and everyone was having a great time. Much DaniWeb swag was given away including free T's for everyone, big screen TVs, Xboxes and more.

I'm certified insane... Is that what you meant? ;)

Cool.

Spammers are but a small part of the ITSec market, to be honest - even if you look at them purely from the perspective of malware distribution they are just a speck on the screen.

Intentional I can assure you :)

Thought Apple had the tablet market sewn up? Think again. And it's not Android but apathy that's the problem according to new research.

Yep, if you thought Apple had the whole tablet computing market sewn up tighter than a zombies' mouth, you would be wrong according to newly published research which, while confirming the iPad as market leader, points towards a far from certain future when it comes to convincing the average consumer (as opposed to early adopting gadget geeks) that tablet computing is for them.

A new study of UK consumers has shed some interesting light on the attitudes and aspirations of both those folk who have already jumper aboard the good ship tablet, and those who have yet to be convinced of the desirability of tablet devices. The research by media communications agency UM London , entitled 'Tablet in Touch' and involving more than 5,000 participants, perhaps unsurprisingly revealed that early adopters of the tablet computing revolution were pretty evangelical about their devices with more than a third actually going as far as to say their tablets have changed their lives. Some 43 per cent reckon tablets are addictive and 27 per cent even use them in the toilet. Interestingly, 65 per cent stated that tablets are "more useful" than laptops, which kind of suggests a different consumer demographic purchasing both computing devices.

Yet only 18 per cent of UK consumers actually own a tablet computer, or an e-reader. The latter …

Well done!

Language varies, patterns are spotted in such things as IP grouping, registration details, username etc and that helps us eliminate pools of spambot created accounts.

This particular attack, which we have beaten from the perspective of stopping new registrations but are still fighting with regards to clearing up spam (I estimate there are a couple of hundred accounts yet to post) has lasted over a week now. I would say 7-10 days from start to finish of the main attack phase is pretty average, but the drip effect continues long after.

If you are after help with a coding problem and it is urgent you won't wait, you will go try find the answer elsewhere.

I've been away from the computer for a few hours, but it's working OK here now.

Welcome and good luck mate!

That would be impractical as all moderators are volunteers and already devote a huge amount of their free time to keeping the community running smoothly. Throw in having to actively approve everyone who wants to post here, manually, one by one, would be a step too far when there are 100+ new members joining every day. Perhaps the other sites you mention either have fewer new members to deal with or are moderated by paid staff?

The linking to external websites where the help being offered is relevant to the question being asked and forms part of an answer being given on DaniWeb isn't problematical.

Linking to a site that you are the owner of in the above circumstances isn't problematical when it's not a regular occurrence, when it becomes a regular thing then the line between help and self promotion becomes somewhat blurred.

I only snipped the link in this case, and mentioned it to cwarn23, because there has been quite a lot of promotion for that particular site of late. Including a whole thread in Geeks' Lounge which was not answering any problem but rather just advertising the existence of the site itself.

The rule itself has been in place since I joined DaniWeb as an Admin in 2006, and has worked pretty well. I'm trying to be fair here, hence I have not been using the infraction stick but rather just snipping a link and pointing out that over-linking to a specific site owned by a specific member who is doing the linking treads a fine line between help and site promotion.

The rules clearly state: "Do not mention, plug or refer to any product, service, or website you are affiliated with anywhere outside of Business Exchange forums specifically designated for this purpose".

welcome

The difference is that it refers to a site that you own/operate, and which you are currently promoting quite a lot here on DaniWeb. The point being that self-promotion is treated as spam in the rules. Please note that I have not warned you or infracted you about this, but am just drawing your attention to the fact that self-promotion is not allowed on DaniWeb outside of a few specific forums in the business/marketing section.

I am sorry to say that DaniWeb is once again under concerted attack by Chinese and Russian spammers. The admin and moderator teams have been working around the clock these last 48 hours to delete spam postings and remove the offending accounts, and will continue to do so until the attackers have been defeated.

However, we are only human and some spam may slip through unnoticed - which is where you come in. Can we please ask the DaniWeb community to be extra vigilant at the moment and use the flag bad post facility to report any postings which are spam so that we can then deal with the accounts in question.

All spam accounts are being banned on the spot, no warnings will be given during this period of sustained attack.

Hmmm, and your promotion of this is starting to smell spammy. Just a heads up...

Welcome to DaniWeb Mandy...

Think of spam and chances are your mind immediately turns to China or Russia and messages about sexual dysfunction or a financial deal you cannot believe. Maybe, though, your thoughts should be closer to home. Especially if home is in the United States.

According to the latest research from security specialists Sophos which has just published the quarterly 'Dirty Dozen' league table of spam relaying countries, China doesn't even feature in the list and Russia is only fourth when it comes to those countries relaying, or distributing if you prefer, the most spam. So who is top of this unsavoury list?

Yep, you guessed it, the United States.

Again.

The USA has been the single worst offender when it comes to pushing spam around the planet, although South Korea is catching up with the greatest year on year increase meaning it is now responsible for relaying 9.6 percent of the world's spam. The USA is responsible for 11.3 percent.

If you look at the spam problem from a continental perspective, however, things do improve somewhat for the USA as North America drops to third place behind Asia and Europe. Indeed, North America and Europe together only contribute 35.6 percent of the world's spam content whereas Asia can be thoroughly ashamed of the 50.1 percent it throws around.

To put that into some historical perspective, this time last year Asia was responsible for some 30 percent of global spam whereas Europe contributes 10 percent …

A bit late, as he has already been banned!

I fought the law - The Clash

Welcome. Abide by the rules of the community (you have read the rules, haven't you?) and we won't need to ban you will we :)

With no actual Halloween-based security threats to report, it looks like the security vendors have had no choice but to start reporting scary stuff that might happen to your data instead. While I have no qualms about genuine warnings to 'be careful out there' this Halloween, a little reminder about not clicking like an idiot on something stupid just because it is seasonally apt is never a bad thing, I do have a bit of a beef when that advice is wrapped up in a press release in order to get some column inches for the vendor concerned.

I will come clean, I actually hate Halloween. Not because I am some Christian-fundamentalist playing the 'it celebrates evil' card, but rather because I am a Pagan and feel that the commercialisation of the ancient festival of Samhain and the Feast of the Dead (the Pagan new year if you like) just cheapens what is, for some of us, a very spiritual time. Needless to say, I am in the minority and the masses will be out there wearing their cheesy masks and bullying old folk into handing over candy in exchange for not having dog poop shoved through the letterbox. Yet others will seek to exploit Samhain in an altogether different, yet just as capitalistic, way: they will use the season to distribute phishing emails in order to lure the weak of mind to websites offering everything from witch-themed porn to money off vouchers for pumpkins, while delivering nothing more …

Black Velvet Band - The Grehan Sisters

I would say less than 10 percent, possibly around 5 per 100, going on the number of newly registered members I deal with for spamming.

Mind you, Bug Lens is certainly a Freudian slip given that it did bug me at times... :)

Not picky at all. Thanks for spotting the bugs that a spell checker and two read-throughs failed to pick up. :)

Reallusion is perhaps best known for developing a range of award-winning 3D cinematic tools, so it came as something of a surprise to discover that the company has just released an iPhone app. The surprise did not diminish any when the press release arrived on my desk and proudly, not to mention rather loudly, proclaimed that "Big Lens will turn your iPhone/iPad into a professional SLR camera". It has to be said that I pretty much choked on my coffee as, let's face it, you'd need something approaching a bone fide miracle to get anything approaching professional results from the extremely poor 0.7 megapixel camera to be found on the iPad 2. The iPhone 4, however, has a much better specced 5 megapixel camera with a backlit sensor design similar to that found in many high-end cameras. So I thought it was only fair to put the 'iPhone to DSLR' claims to the test using my iPhone 4.

The first thing I noticed after installing the Big Lens app was the sheer simplicity of the interface. Unlike many of the other photo-editing and tweaking tools I have used on my iPhone, this one is not a mish mash of myriad icons and menu options. Instead, Big Lens hits you with a start screen that asks you to either take a photo, use an image you've already shot or load a sample from the application itself. There are two other buttons on the main screen: Basic and …

Chilled is not hot, fire is hot ;)

Why not try typing CMS or Content Management System (that's a real big clue right there, by the way) into Google? Although I appreciate that taking the obvious route first and then coming to a community such as DaniWeb with specific and sensible questions would not allow you to advertise your signature links...

Facebook has the critical mass and nothing else comes close as a result. My love affair with Twitter has fizzled somewhat as it is simply impossible to maintain any kind of real conversation with a social group given the message size limit. I use it mainly for linking to published articles these days, whereas I maintain conversations on Facebook. Google + will got he way of Buzz I suspect. Everyone I know who has tried it has gone on to drop it after a few weeks.

The Unforgettable Fire by U2

For those who have asked, I'm afraid that Rinse doesn't work with MP3 databases, only an iTunes library. Sorry.

So here's the thing, it is now some 10 years since the first iPod was launched and the way we listen to music changed forever. One of the things that changed, if you are anything like me, is that your iTunes database became the centre of your musical life. Unfortunately, across those 10 years that database can get kind of dirty. A quick look at my iTunes database reveals a whole bunch of tracks with no album artwork, which is no big deal I grant you, but also a whole bunch of songs with spelling mistakes or where the import function has thrown a hissy fit and misnamed the artist for whatever reason. And then there are the duplicate tracks, or ones which simply have no name at all.

I know I could go through iTunes, with the help of the Gracenote music database service, and manually correct much of the mess that has accumulated over the years. But my iTunes database contains more than 10,000 tracks and I'm really not sure that I want to devote a day of my life to that kind of repetitive and monotonous task. Which is where Rinse, formerly known as TidySongs, comes in.

RealNetworks recently acquired the TidySongs product and has now launched it as Rinse. The name is pretty apt as that is exactly what it does: puts your iTunes database through a rinse wash and pops it out nice and clean the other side. In fact, it's …