Posts by happygeek

Barack Obama is the very definition of an Internet politico-geek, not least as I just invented the term. However, there is no denying that the President-Elect of the US has understood the power of the Internet, the power of social networking, better than any other political candidate for high office. His application of that understanding helped drive his campaign, and ultimately Obama himself, all the way to the White House.

From appearing in Xbox 360 games to developing an iPhone Obama application, the campaign has been geeky all the way. It has used Twitter and taunted Lamer McCain.

But now things are getting really interesting. Nope, I am not talking about the decision to broadcast the weekly Presidential address directly via YouTube. That was, given the campaign strategy of the last year or so, pretty much to be taken for granted. It is another technology ground breaker for sure, marking the first time that such Presidential addresses will have been delivered in a video format and moving forward from the Bush administration which went with audio but not as far as video. Plus, of course, the fact that doing so via YouTube will reach the younger demographic that is all too often overlooked by politicians but which has been spurred into action so smartly by Obama and Co. In fact, Obama is not even waiting until he takes up office to start the YouTube broadcasts. The President-Elect starts today, via …

The Google Press office today brought to my attention an unusual and totally unexpected bit of Google trivia: the modelling of real-world phenomena using patterns in search to map the spread of influenza across the US.

Google is proving to be far more than just a search engine these days. In fact, today it repositioned itself as a time travel machine which allows users of Google Earth to travel back to 320 AD and explore more than 6700 buildings as they stood at the centre of the Roman Empire back then. The biggest collection of 3D buildings on the Google Earth map, together with the input of noted historians, makes this possible.

Anyway, back to the flu thing. It is really an extension of the Google fascination with trends in online search queries. we saw it with the recent US Presidential election, we have seen it with the annual Zeitgeist 'what's hot' listings and now we see it with patterns of influenza distribution.

In many ways, this latter trend mapping is more important, if a lot more boring, than the others. I doubt many casual users could really care less that more people in Maine have the flu than they do in New York, for example. Yet influenza is responsible for thousands of deaths every year, as many as half a million worldwide in actual fact. By comparing aggregated search queries during 'flu season' with data supplied by the U.S. Centers for Disease …

As long as that? I'd be dead in the water after twenty seconds! :)

According to the fourth Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report from Arbor Networks, published today, malicious attacks on networks are continuing to rise at an alarming rate. While that is no great surprise, the fact that during 2008 Distributed Denial of Service attacks have peaked at 40 Gbps most certainly is.

Arbor's fourth annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report includes responses from nearly 70 IP network operators in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. It has revealed that during the last couple of years the largest sustained DDoS attacks were 24 Gbps and 17 Gbps, and according to Arbor Networks this represents a 67 percent increase in attack scale over 2007 and nearly two and a half times the largest attack reported in 2006. If you want really impressive numbers, it is a 100-fold increase since 2001.

Even at the lower end of the sustained attack scale, some 36 percent of survey respondents have reported observing them larger than 1 Gbps during 2008. That in itself is double the previous years figures. And, of course, a 1 Gbps sustained DDoS attack is damaging enough.

Danny McPherson, chief security officer for Arbor Networks told us "The growth in attack size continues to significantly outpace the corresponding increase in underlying transmission speed and infrastructure investment. While most ISPs now have the infrastructure to detect bandwidth flood attacks, we found that many still lack the ability to quickly mitigate these attacks; only a small percentage of the providers we surveyed …

The Pirate Bay is a website which claims to be the biggest BitTorrent tracker on the planet. So big, it seems, that it is even considering pitching for an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Certainly, putting politics and legal arguments aside for a moment, there is no doubting that popularity. The Pirate Bay regularly manages to be listed around the 100 to 125 mark when it comes to sites with most traffic by services such as Alexa. Not surprising when so many of our children are proud pirates, according to Microsoft.

But this latest play is as a direct result of the number of peers that the site has. According to its own blog that number has been growing rapidly, perhaps as a result of the publicity last week when it hit 22 million and the notion of a world record stake was first put forward.

Now, The Pirate Bay says, it has broken 23 million peers within a week of that last milestone. "And it's not like 23.000.000 something" a spokesman says "it was 23.3 million peers." As I write, the site is reporting 23,495,837 peers!

What's more he claims that "We're going to break 25 within the week if this keeps on going!" That looks very likely indeed at this rate.

Perhaps the most worrying thing is that this bunch of pirates are, indeed, pursuing that official world record dream. "we just applied for Guinness and …

Cool!

A Firefox developer has revealed that pre-release versions of Firefox 3.1 have been updated with a new feature. Officially called 'Private Browsing' it will be more familiar to many as the much talked about Porn Mode that caused such controversy when Microsoft announced it was being included within the forthcoming IE8 browser.

I am not at all surprised to discover that Firefox 3.1, AKA Firefox Shiretoko, is adding this functionality as one of the things that I have always liked about the Mozilla browsing experience is the control over user privacy that it provides.

Indeed, you might ask in the light of this how is the new Porn Mode any different to the existing Clear Private Data function which deletes your browsing history, cookies, cache etc after a session at the press of a button or even automatically when you close the browser itself if you have it so configured as I do?

The answer would seem to be that it provides a best of both worlds scenario where you can ensure that no trace of your private browsing session is left on the computer but without impacting upon the non-private parts of your browsing activity. By which I mean that at present it's really an all or nothing, hit it with a lump hammer type affair. Get rid of everything to maintain privacy, but lose the benefit of that historical clicktrail for retracing steps when you need it later for …

We all knew it was going to happen, and that there was nothing we could do to stop it. In fact, it was only a matter of time until the polls had closed and Barack Obama had officially become the President-elect of the United States of America. It is not the election of Obama himself that I am talking about, but rather the inevitable malware that was quick to emerge as a result of that election process.

I stayed up late to watch the results come in, despite not being American, despite living in the UK, like many across the world I have a real interest in the US political landscape. Not least because the small matter of who is President impacts upon my life almost as much as it does yours if you are an American.

And so it was I sat in awe at the historic announcement, at 4am GMT, that Obama had got enough electoral seats to have won the Presidency. So it was at 5am GMT that I wiped away a tear during that truly historic speech.

At 8am GMT I went to bed for a couple of hours of sleep, only to discover when I awoke that my mailbox had already got its first taste of Barack Obama malware in the guise of a spam purporting to have news of the historic events of the night before.

Of course, what you get is a link to a faked up news website …

According to the results of the first annual Green IT survey, IT departments in the UK are guilty of greenwashing with only 20 percent of businesses actually measuring the IT-related energy spend.

Extreme Networks and Data Integration, behind the survey, revealed that analysis of the needs of UK public and private sector organisations show that some 64 percent of respondents cited Green IT as a requirement when purchasing new IT equipment.

However, it also found that only 20 percent of them were actively measuring the IT-related energy spend which is a vital component when determining actual carbon footprint reductions. It would seem, therefore, that many are doing Green IT for the sake of it: greenwashing in other words.

Additional findings included:

• 49% of organisations cited reduced operational costs as the main driver for greening IT operations.
• 43% of businesses cited Green IT as important to their organisations
• 78% of participants say they recycle their IT equipment
• 51% of respondents say they are unsure whether their organisations have sustainability goals for Green IT, suggesting that not all organisations are aware of the benefits and return on investment of their Green IT equipment.

“The fact that 78 percent of organisations recycle their IT equipment suggests that there is a high level of awareness of the WEEE regulations that were introduced at the beginning of 2007" says Extreme Networks’ Regional Director for UK and Ireland, Paul Phillips. "However, it is essential that businesses measure the …

It has been something of an up and down ride to get here, but AT&T seems to have at last succeeded in rolling out free WiFi access for iPhone users in the US. This after popping up back in May only to vanish without trace very quickly for reasons unconfirmed. Then in July the AT&T website published information on free WiFi for iPhones but as before, it vanished soon after.

Now, not only is the information back but the free service is actually working.

"Free AT&T Wi-Fi access is now available for Apple iPhone at thousands of hotspots nationwide, including Starbucks. Users can relax and access music, email and web browsing services with their favorite blend in hand from the comfort of their nearest location" AT&T says.

Of course, it is a little convoluted and AT&T make you work for your WiFi dinner. First connect to an attwifi network at a hotspot, then fill in an online form with your iPhone number, wait for a text message containing an activation link, click on it and at last your WiFi is active and free. Now repeat for every location you want to use the service at, oh and repeat every day as the access expires after 24 hours.

Still it is free, it is working and for iPhone users in the US that has to be a good thing.

With only a couple of weeks left until the Wrath of the Lich King expansion officially launches in many regions around the world, on 13th November to be precise, Blizzard Entertainment has announced a huge milestone for an online game. Yep, it would appear that global subscriptions to World of Warcraft have now gone past the 11 million player mark.

Blimey O'Reilly! That means that WoW really does deserve the Massively bit of the MMORPG tag, unlike many of its imitators it has to be said. It also means that the online virtual world has a population to surpass many major real world cities and even small countries. It is, quite frankly, huge.

What's more, this huge online gaming population explosion within WoW has taken place all within a time frame of just under four years. World of Warcraft originally launched in North America on November 23rd 2004, although for many it does seem like it has been around forever of course.

According to Blizzard, it was the bestselling PC game of both 2005 and 2006, finishing in second place behind the first WoW expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, in 2007. That expansion pack, by the way, holing the record for being the fastest selling PC game of all time with 2.4 million copies sold in the first 24 hours and 3.5 million in the first month of release.

"It's been very rewarding to see gamers around the world continue to show such strong …

According to a new report by FaceTime, an Internet applications control specialist, the number of data leaks and malware incidents continues to rise as employees continue to embrace the whole Web 2.0 thing within the workplace. In fact, FaceTime says, the use of such applications is so widespread that some 60 percent of all companies surveyed now have at least eight of them in use on their corporate networks.

"For all four years that FaceTime has commissioned this survey, end users have claimed they have the right to download and use whatever applications they choose to help them do their jobs. This year's study also reveals their social media habits have extended into the workplace and may be contributing to security and data leakage incidents," said Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing and product management at FaceTime.

Unfortunately, one side effect of this growth would seem to be that IT managers are now reporting an average of 34 security incidents, including data leakage, every month. Another, at least for the larger enterprise, is the small matter of the costs associated with malware are now averaging out in excess of $125,000 per month according to the report.

Some of the other findings that leap out of the report include:

79% of employees use social media such as Facebook and YouTube at work for business reasons

51% access social media sites at least once per day

73% of IT managers report at least one …

Wow. Let me say that again but with added exclamation marks: wow!!!

Google has officially released a Google Earth client for iPhone and iTouch users. It's available right now from the iTunes App Store, and best of it is free.

Actually, scrap that, because the real best of all bit about the iPhone Google earth client is just how jaw-droppingly stunning it is. Most paid for apps on the iPhone leave you with a little taste of disappointment mixed with resentment in a kind of 'I paid how for what now' sort of a way.

Google Earth for iPhone is the kind of application that is worth money, real money, a decent wedge of real money in fact. Yet it is free. You know, it makes me kind of want to give Google a hug again after having been kicking it in the Googlies for so much of the time recently.

According to Google Earth product manager Peter Birch "Since we launched Google Earth for the desktop in 2005, we've had over 400 million unique downloads" and now with the free download "you can fly through the same 3D immersive world of Google Earth you've come to love, without having to fire up your desktop computer."

There really are so many reasons why he is right on this one, from the touch interface just marrying up with the Google Earth interface so perfectly, to using the auto-tilt function to move the horizon into …

Dell has been pretty busy of late in the netbook market, what with the high profile launch of the shiny little Inspiron Mini 9 that caught the attention of media and public alike.

About six weeks ago I was writing about how Tesco, the British supermarket giant, had slipped up and put details of a 12 inch Dell netbook on its website. At the time, the Tesco website had some details of the specs and a note saying "available week commencing 6th October."

Now it seems that Tesco got it kind of half right in getting it all wrong. Dell has finally come clean and released the Inspiron Mini 12 into the Japanese market. No word of any US or European launch date, but you can imagine that these will follow by the end of the year or early next at latest.

If it does launch at the price that Tesco was originally showing, UKP £299, that would be quite some deal considering the Ubuntu powered Mini 9 is selling for UKP £269 in Britain. This would seem likely, given that the release date apart Tesco did have the spec pretty much spot on.

Talking of which, the Inspiron Mini 12 (which is hardly mini to be honest, when compared to most of the netbook market) comes with a 12 inch screen running at 1280 x 800, is powered by 1.6GHz Atom Z530, weighs in at 1.2Kg, packs 1GB RAM and 80GB …

How many times have you bought something on eBay and the sale didn't go quite according to plan? What did you do, just bite your lip and say nothing or make use of that eBay tool called the feedback system to leave a negative for the seller so that other potential buyers would be aware of the problems you encountered? For the first few years I would imagine the majority of people would have left the negative feedback. Then, it seems to me, more and more people stopped doing this because it resulted in tit-for-tat negative feedback being posted about them for no good reason.

Then eBay brought in a change to the system which prevented sellers from leaving any negative feedback about buyers. This has prompted some to ask if eBay is fed up with the auction business. It's a good move as far as dealing with that juvenile tit-for-tat negativity stuff is concerned, but a bad one when you look at the bigger picture. That picture includes the fact that just as many buyers are bad people, trying to rip off the sellers, as the other way around. Yet now there was no way to warn other sellers that a buyer was a problem.

I guess it was only a matter of time before sellers started taking matters into their own hands, as it were. Although, rather like innocent eBay buyer Chris Read, I was not expecting what happened to this chap. Apparently Mr …

With speculation about it entering the netbook market rife at the moment, you might imagine that we would hear the usual stony silence from Apple regarding the matter. After all, keeping quiet and then leaking droplets of information as a launch approaches has worked well for pretty much every other device it has produced.

However, Steve Jobs has apparently decided to speak out on the netbook issue and dash hopes that it might be about to throw a mini-Macbook in our direction.

According to reports Jobs came clean during a conference call with a bunch of Wall Street analysts, responding when asked about Apple entering the netbook arena that "we choose not to be in certain segments of the market."

This follows Jobs insisting just the week before that "not a lot" of netbooks were getting sold anyway and the market was "nascent."

The straight talking Jobs even went as far as to suggest that while notebook prices will drop and features sets rise, Apple has no idea of how to make a computer that sells for $500 which "is not a piece of junk."

I suspect, given the economic climate and the fact that netbooks are making an impact (albeit a small one right now) on the notebook market that Apple might have to revisit this no sub-500 bucks notebooks ideology. It is one thing arguing that the iPhone and iTouch are as good as any netbook, quite another convincing folk who …

Security outfit MessageLabs today warns that as the credit crisis worsens so there has been a shift to the online arena for making money via spoofing banks for phishing scams. Between August and September this kind of phishing attack grew by 16 percent, but during September and October it has leapt up 103 percent.

With seemingly never ending change prevailing in the global banking system, the crafty scammers are quick to take advantage of the merger and bailout feeding frenzy by targeting the likes of Bank of America, Wachovia, Chase Manhattan and Washington Mutual.

On one day, the 16th October, MessageLabs reports that it intercepted a rather worrying 7,000 phishing attacks that were exploiting the Bank of America. That's 1.2 percent of the total phishing activity seen for that day, and all in the space of just a 2 hour spike.

On October 17th, those same phishing emails rose to 15,000 and then continued through the weekend untill hitting a total of 125,000 emails or 16 percent of all phishing activity for that weekend.

On October 20th the feeding frenzy turned towards American express with a phishing run that started at 5am and hit 35,000 emails (or 17 percent of total activity) by the end of the day.

"During a trying time like this when banks are making global headlines, we would expect spammers to latch on to the credit crisis to take advantage of vulnerable investors and anxious consumers who have been sorely affected …

The quick answer is no, at least according to well respected security guru and Chief Research Officer at F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen.

The slightly longer answer is that dealing with organised crime on the Internet is not as easy as you might imagine, and bringing cyber criminals to justice can be a huge challenge. The lack of online borders coupled with the lack of local resources make tackling international Internet crime is hugely frustrating for all concerned. Apart from the criminals it would seem.

F-Secure quote examples as varied as that of Jeremy Jaynes, a well known US-based spammer whose conviction was overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court after it ruled the state Anti-Spam Law was in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution and so impacted upon his right to free and anonymous speech. Or how about the New Zealand teenager, who despite having pleaded guilty to authoring banking Trojans netting millions of dollars for an organised criminal gang walked free from court?

Mikko Hypponen argues that international courts and law enforcement agencies are struggling to stem Internet crime tide, and the formation of an Internetpol is the way forward. "We should consider the creation of an online version of Interpol that is specifically tasked with targeting and investigating the top of the crimeware food chain" Hypponen says.

"Even if the locations of online criminals are discovered, the investigations rarely uncover the full scope of the crime. The victims, police, prosecutors and judges …

According to the Sunday Times today, anyone in the UK who wants to buy a mobile phone will need to produce a valid passport as a form of ID soon.

The story is wrapped around the planned introduction of a national database to help combat crime and terrorism. The proposed database would contain details of every telephone call and every email sent in the UK along with information coverage individual Internet access usage.

Now it seems that in order to push ahead with this state surveillance scheme, the government is considering a compulsory national register for every owner of every one of the 72 million mobile phones in the UK. "Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies" the Sunday Times reports.

It appears that the passport identity requirement is aimed squarely at those purchasers of prepaid mobiles, of which there are some 40 million or so in the UK alone. Currently these can be bought by anyone with the ready cash, and there is no record of the purchaser. No name, address or credit card details to link them to that purchase. This, the government argue, makes them wet dream material for criminals and terrorists.

Of course, it also ties in with the move towards that Big Brother database which would store details of all email, telephone and web browsing …

Sarah Palin is always keen to talk about open and transparent government, indeed it was one of the main focal points of her campaign when she ran for the office of Governor in Alaska. Of course, she continues to talk the transparency talk now that the campaign has ramped up a notch or three to Presidential level. But some are asking with increasing urgency if Palin can actually walk the walk.

Especially considering the whole hidden email debate that has raged ever since the Palin Yahoo webmail account was hacked. With emails coming from gov.palin@yahoo.com with subjects such as 'Court of Appeals Nominations' amongst those revealed, it is hardly surprising that questions are being asked as to just how open Palin is being.

Now a state judge in Alaska has ordered Palin to ensure that the contents of that account are preserved for the public record. And, of course, Palin is only too happy to oblige.

So, how much might it cost if you wanted to exercise your right to access an email or two? The answer is more than you would expect. According to the Office of the Alaska Governor, the cost will be $960.31 to search an employee's email account, plus the 10 cents for every sheet of paper used as the office cannot apparently provide copies of electronic mail, er, electronically.

The figure is based upon it taking six hours for a programmer, charged at $73.87 …

A recent 'heart attack' story which was false, and quickly denied by Apple but not quickly enough to prevent the stock price falling, proves that anything related to Steve Jobs leaving the helm of Apple is a hot potato right now. And while the Fake Steve Jobs is dead, the real chap has neither departed from this life nor is he terminally ill as some reports have suggested.

However, now reports are starting to appear in respected online news journals that suggest Steve Jobs is preparing to quit while he and Apple are ahead of the game. While The Inquirer takes the less than serious position of Jobs as some kind of cult leader and suggests he might be ready to ascend if not to heaven then to "a nice retirement home" the reports seem to have stemmed from Gizmodo which analysed the Jobs speech at the recent new MacBook launch.

"Steve Jobs is leaving Apple. Not tomorrow, but probably very soon" Gizmodo says, and bases this around the fact that he did not take centre stage at the launch but instead let other key members of the Apple team do much of the talking. It concludes that the event was used to get the message across that if Jobs moves on then nobody should panic and Apple will survive.

Unsurprisingly, Apple did not respond to my request for a departing comment from Steve...

I'm for anything that keeps the little darlings quiet. Mind you, I do have a cold and my kids are being a PITA right now, which might influence my judgment. :)

The latest Apple Event has been and gone, and we are left with some exciting new Apple products as a result. First and foremost the shiny new MacBook with the all-metal enclosure crafted from a single block of aluminum.

Apple says that this means not only a thinner MacBook but, importantly, a much more durable one.

It doesn't look bad either!

Inside the beautiful new body things have also changed. There is the addition of state of the art NVIDIA graphics for a start and large glass iPhone-inspired Multi-Touch trackpads to finish.

Let's look at the NVIDIA graphics first then. This is actually the all new NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 3D integrated graphics processor. It comes with 16 parallel processing cores, delivering up to five times the 3D graphics performance as previous MacBooks could ever hope to achieve.

The amazing glass Multi-Touch trackpad on the MacBook increases the tracking area over previous designs by some 40 percent. Which means you can do all that iPhone inspired gesture stuff like pinching, rotating and swiping. The entire trackpad surface is also a button, allowing users to both track and click virtually anywhere on the trackpad. Cool huh?

"Apple has invented a whole new way of building notebooks from a single block of aluminum. And, just as important, they are the industry's greenest notebooks," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "The new MacBooks offer incredible features our users will love - like their stunning all-metal design, great 3D graphics …

Some are feeling the pinch of the credit crunch and cutting their spending accordingly, others continue to spend, spend, spend. Symantec would appear to fall into the latter category as it has announced a definitive agreement to acquire online messaging and Web security specialist MessageLabs for a purchase price of around $695 million in cash. This breaks down to a couple of payments, one for $154 million in US Dollars and another for around £310 million in UK Pounds Sterling.

Not that MessageLabs isn't a good buy. It apparently generated $145 million in revenue during the financial year ending July 31, 2008. That represents growth of more than 20 percent over the previous fiscal year.

The idea behind this latest Symantec acquisition would appear to be a step up the ladder, well a few steps right up to the top for all intents and purposes, as far as the rapidly growing Software-as-a-Service and messaging security markets are concerned. It absorbs the eight million MessageLabs end users at more than 19,000 clients, and can now capitalise on cross-selling and up-selling its existing SaaS offerings of backup, storage and online remote access into the MessageLabs customer base.

John W. Thompson, Symantec Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, says that "by combining MessageLabs with our Symantec Protection Network team, we have one of the strongest portfolios of cloud-based infrastructure services and a great foundation on which to grow." Adrian Chamberlain, Chief Executive Officer at MessageLabs adding "Together, with Symantec, we can …

Sounds like my late father :)

Wow! Now that really is a hard question to answer isn't it? If you listen to what 'Barmy' Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO and 43rd richest person on Earth, has to say then you might be forgiven for thinking it is Google (I'm going to f****** kill Google), or maybe Apple (I've got my kids brainwashed... you don't use an iPod) or even Linux (... a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.)

For while I even thought it was me, given my recent experiences with an Xbox 360 which I have been without for the best part of a month thanks to red rings of death and a Microsoft repair which resulted in the return of an even more broken games console.

But now, it seems, the answer can be revealed. At least for this week. Engadget reports that Microsoft really hates DHL.

It would seem that DHL managed to break even more Xbox 360 consoles than Microsoft itself, although in fairness it did have a train wreck to help out whereas the whole Microsoft red rings problem could be said to be a train wreck for the Microsoft publicity machine. But anyway, getting back on track, some 21,600 Xbox consoles are said to have been written off by a combination of impact damage, wetting and pilfering following the crash.

No problem, surely? The courier, whose freight train was involved, would simply reimburse Microsoft …

How on earth can you 'lose' the names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses and, one has to assume, the mobile phone numbers of some 17 million of your customers? It's a good question, and to get the answer you might want to shout it in the direction of T-Mobile because it has apparently managed to do just that.

The Der Speigel newspaper reports that the records were actually stolen two years ago, and relate to German customers of the mobile phone network. It would appear that amongst the data lost are 'secret' addresses of German politicians including a former Federal President as well as a whole assortment of celebrities.

An official statement says that the data, and the storage device upon which it is contained, is in "the hands of unknown parties" although it insists there is absolutely no evidence to suggest any of the compromised data has actually been compromised. In as far as it has not been used since 2006 when it went missing.

That said, the data has been offered for sale through underground online channels. T-Mobile are upbeat about this as well, claiming that nobody had bought it.

Well, that's OK then...

Where would we be without satnav? Good question, as most of us seem to have lost the ability to drive anywhere without some annoying slightly posh woman barking instructions at us every few minutes. Of course, satnav is not all gravy: who could forget the crazy satnav directions that led drivers wanting to travel between Swaledale and Wensleydale in North Yorkshire, England via the suitably named village of Crackpot. Along a steep and twisty unlit track, which runs along the edge of a sheer drop down a 100 foot cliff, the maps were sending people. And just to make matters worse, drivers got stuck on the narrow road and then attempted to reverse perilously close to the edge. Or how about the equally incredulous tale of the lorry driver delivering goods from Turkey to Gibraltar who was sent on satnav inspired detour of some 1,600 miles via the UK?

Of course, getting updated maps is the key to avoiding all the wring places. Not that this has always gone smoothly as some Windows users of the TomTom Home service, designed to provide just such updates, discovered when they connected their TomTom Go 910 devices to the PC only for it to infect them with a bunch of viruses. Yes, TomTom had let a batch of virus infected satnav units loose on an unsuspecting public. A news story I broke here on DaniWeb and which not only won the 'Best Information Security …

If you were offended by that headline, or perhaps felt intimidated by it, then you are not alone. In fact, a new study published by the Journal of School Health has revealed that cyber-bullying is so common amongst teenagers who use the Internet a lot (so that's most teenagers then) that it suggests an astonishing 72 percent have fallen victim to just such an incident during the last year alone.

And that's just the percentage of teens who both took part on this survey and reported the cyber-bullying incident in the first place. The true figure could be much, much higher as many victims of bullying, cyber or otherwise, stay quiet for fear of making matters worse. Indeed, the report says that "Most of the bullied teens did not tell their parents about the online incidents. They felt the need to deal with the problem on their own and were fearful of parental restrictions on internet use."

It also says that online bullying was, unsurprisingly, associated with "increased distress" as well as with physical bullying at school. Some 85 percent of the respondents who had reported at least one online incident, went on to report a bullying incident at school as well.

The findings were based on an anonymous web-based survey of nearly 1500 youngsters aged between 12 and 17.

"Just as school-based bullying is considered a public health concern, online bullying should be recognized as an issue that needs attention," the authors conclude. "Because of …

Earlier this week Apple was adamant that it would close the iTunes Store if the Copyright Royalty Board raised the royalties paid to music publishers, rather than be forced into either accepting smaller margins on the music downloads it sells or be forced into hiking prices.

The way these things work, Apple pays something in the region of 70 cents on every dollar of music sold to the record labels concerned. The record labels pay around 9 cents of this to the copyright holders of the music, the music publishers.

With me so far? Good. Trouble is, the National Music Publishers Association in the US wanted more. In fact, it wanted the share that music publishers rake from the deal to increase from that 9 cents to 15 cents per track.

As iTunes is thought to dominate the music download market with anything between an 80 and 90 percent market share, Apple obviously has a rather powerful position when it comes to negotiating such deals.

And so we arrived at the situation earlier in the week whereby Apple effectively told the Copyright Royalty Board that if it went ahead and granted the royalty rise, then it would pull up the shutters and shut up shop. Well, shut the iTunes Store at any rate.

Let's face it, that's a pretty powerful threat. Even though nobody really took them seriously. I mean, it is one thing arguing that you make 'very little profit' on music downloads, but …

MDY Industries developed a popular World of Warcraft bot by the name of MMOGlider. Popular because, I would imagine, it took much of the donkey work out of progressing through the virtual world by automating repetitive tasks. You know, the boring stuff such as slaying monsters and scavenging for loot. Jeez, why play the game at all if you let some automated software process do all that for you? Half the fun is in the levelling up, unless you are some numpty player with no soul, that is.

Anyway, the Glider might just go down in history as the most expensive gaming bot ever after World of Warcraft operators Blizzard sued MDY Industries on copyright infringement charges and won a damages award that totals $6 million.

Back in July, a US District Judge gave his ruling that MMOGlider was in breach of the licensing terms that every player has to sign up and agree to when they get into the World of Warcraft game.

The BBC reports that MDY Industries founder Michael Donnelly is "thought to have sold more than 100,000 copies" of the bot which sold for $25 a pop.

It seems that there will be another day in court in January to settle some outstanding legal issues, and Blizzard may also yet appeal against a judgement not to allow a claim for triple the amount of cash in damages.

According to the Beeb there remains a problem concerning the US Digital …

Ever looked at something, done a double-take, looked again and yes, that is what you saw but your brain told you it could not be? That is exactly what just happened to me when I read the NASA press release which informed me, in no uncertain terms, that it was snowing on Mars. As if that wasn't confusing enough, NASA even has the data to prove it.

So what's going on, exactly? Good question, and the answer according to NASA boffins is that the Phoenix Mars Lander has "detected snow falling from Martian clouds" a statement which, I have to say, simply blows my mind.

The Phoenix Mars Lander used a laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars, to detect the snow from clouds some 2.5 miles above the landing site. The gathered data shows this snow vaporising before it hits the surface.

Unsurprisingly, the lead scientist for the Meteorological Station on Phoenix, Jim Whiteway says "Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars, we'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground."

Meanwhile, Peter Smith the Principal Investigator for the Phoenix Project says of the calcium carbonate and particle of a clay-like substance also found on the planet that "we are making good progress on the big questions we set out for ourselves." Big questions such as is this stuff not that same as the carbonates and clays that …

Researchers tell us that, in the UK market, there were some 1.5 billion 'legal' music downloads last year. That's covering all bases, different devices and download services, but discounting the illegal file sharing trade. The Goddess alone knows how big the figure would be if you factored in dodgy P2P business and back bedroom file swapping. However, the point is that one research firm, TNS Technology, now reckons that it doesn't matter as the real big numbers will come from mobile phone music downloads via the Sony Ericsson and Nokia portals. How does 2.1 billion downloads of 'mobile music' in the UK grab you?

The idea that partnerships such as that of Sony Ericsson with Omnifone and PlayNow Plus, together with services such as the Nokia 'Comes With Music' all you can eat unlimited music downloads will revolutionise the music market when they go live real soon now.

Indeed, TNS Technology research suggests that more than a quarter of all consumers are keen to adopt such a system of unlimited mobile music downloads. Which is good news for the mobile phone networks and bad news for the CD business which is already feeling the squeeze from computer based digital downloads, mainly thanks to the undeniable presence of Apple and iTunes in the musical marketplace. Some 45 percent of people who currently but CDs have said they would buy less if the mobile music schemes take off.

While Apple is probably happy enough with its mobile music downloading …

After being told for years that using mobile phones on airplanes will cause them to crash and burn, it seems that one airline is experiencing a change of heart. The Irish budget airline, Ryanair, is expected to introduce the first cell phone friendly flights within a matter of months.

Of course, there is a catch.

Of course, it involves money.

It appears that 14 of the 166 strong fleet of planes are to be equipped with an in-flight mobile phone booster cell. Unfortunately, due to the relatively low power of the device, only a maximum of six people at any given time will be able to make voice calls. However, I understand that texting and BlackBerry email polling will not be restricted. Apart from by cost, that is.

Ah yes, this is no charitable exercise. Expect to pay at least £2 per minute while in the air, with the Ryanair taking a cut from every call of course.

What if all you want is to fly from A to B without the joy of listening to some suit jabbering away to some other suit? What if you just want to sleep? Or read your book?

Ryanair's chief executive, Michael O'Leary, says users looking for a quiet flight should use another airline: "Ryanair is noisy, full and we are always trying to sell you something" he says.

A researcher has revealed that people are far more likely to tell lies using email than they would do if they were writing on pen and paper it seems. In two studies, Liuba Belkin reached the conclusion that people lie 50 percent more often in emails.

This, of course, is no real ground-shaker. After all, if you cannot embellish the truth while enjoying the remote safety net of email communication then when can you? Well, maybe in a text message on your mobile phone, but that's besides the point. What is rather surprising is that the studies tend to suggest that people feel quite happy, quite justified in fact, in telling whopping great porkies in their email messages.

Belkin, an assistant professor of management in the college of business and economics at Lehigh University is concerned that email is getting a reputation as an untrustworthy medium. “You’re not afforded the luxury of seeing non-verbal and behavioral cues over e-mail. And in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception” she says.

Indeed, in one study that involved 48 full-time MBA students being given $89 to share between themselves and a fictional party, only aware that there was between 5 and 100 bucks in the pool, saw students using email fib over 90 percent of the time compared to those using pen and paper who 'only' lied around 60 percent of the time.

…

Sometimes I really love living in the English countryside. The fresh air, the sheep and horses at the bottom of the garden, the lack of crime, the sense of community that still exists in a small village, the lack of seriously fast broadband. Ah, yes, that's not so good is it?

In fact, most of the time the relatively slow broadband speed I get here is pretty much the only reason I have to wish I were living back in London. Well, that and numerous restaurants covering all cuisines, the public transport system and the night life if I am being honest.

However, some news has just popped my way which makes me feel much happier about the 2Mbit/s speeds that I currently enjoy, compared to those city slickers who in some cases can get a cable driven 20Mbit/s or faster. That news being that in Japan some outfit has just launched a 1Gbit/s broadband service. That pretty much puts London, and just about everywhere else, in its place.

Certainly it is much faster than the 100Mbit/s through the sewers service proposed for Scotland, and the UK will have to wait a while for fibre to arrive as we reported earlier.

Of course, a gigabit-class fibre based broadband service is something to slobber over, and I have been dribbling just a tad ever since hearing about it. The lucky Japanese will be able to enjoy that crazy Internet connection from …

Sun Microsystems managed to fix multiple security vulnerabilities in JDK and JRE months ago now, so why has it taken Apple so long to finally plug pretty much the same Java holes in Mac OS X?

Apple has known that its Java implementation has been, quite frankly, screwed since way back when. At least since April, because that is when Sun Microsystems started shipping security updates that fixed the flaws it had uncovered. Fast forward through the summer and, at long last, Apple has finally managed to sort out the problems with its own version of Java and announce updates to plug at least two dozen security holes in the OS X versions.

There are, in fact, two updates available to download from Apple. The first applies to Java for Mac OS X 10.4 and updates J2SE 5.0 to version 1.5.0_16, as well as Java 1.4 to version 1.4.2_18. The second applies to Java for Mac OS X 10.5, and promises "improved reliability and compatibility for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X 10.5.4 and later" by updating Java SE 6 to version 1.6.0_07, J2SE 5.0 to version 1.5.0_16, and J2SE 1.4.2 to 1.4.2_18.

Apple notes that the release of J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 supports all Intel and PowerPC-based Macs, while Java SE 6 is available on 64-bit, Intel-based Macs only.

The big question that Apple has to answer is why so long? I mean, if Sun can …

It was always going to generate plenty of publicity simply because it was the new Michael Moore documentary movie. It was always going to generate even more publicity because Moore decided to release it for free, on the Internet. The first time, as far as I am aware, that a real major feature-length 'blockbuster' movie has gone straight to Net, as it were.

However, Michael Moore probably wasn't expecting to get the additional publicity from the release online today that Slacker Uprising will bring. That comes as a result of what appears to be a simple slip up, a mis-understanding of the technology involved no less.

I mean, the movie is meant to be available only to residents of the United States and Canada today, it says so quite plainly on the Slacker Uprising website. "The free download is only available to those residing in the United States and Canada" to be precise, followed by a check box to be sure.

But the film, covering the events leading up to the 2004 United States Presidential election, was made available as a Torrent, via the Pirate Bay tracker. All above board and legal like.

I cannot imagine that the legal beagles at Brave New Films will be liking it though, as what this means is that anyone, anywhere, in the world can now download the Torrent and enjoy the movie. Geographical restrictions just do not apply in the brave new world of P2P networks, dontcha …

Some people, I have concluded, just have way too much time on their hands. Steve Jobs is probably not one of them, but I suspect that 'Grammar Girl' most certainly is.

I also expect that this posting will fall victim to the grammatically correct squad, so have dropped a number of gaffs into my flowing prose to keep them busy. Which is a great get out clause in case anyone does discover that my written English is poorer than a church mouse. Not that I actually pay much attention to folk whose time is spent telling me my writing sucks, when at least I do have a life.

Anyway, dragging myself back to the point: it seems that when Steve Jobs gave his keynote address at the Apple Let's Rock event the other week, he used the word 'funnest' when talking about the new iPods. The problem being, screamed a bunch of grammar nerds online, funnest is not a word at all.

Then the Grammar Girl weighed in with her discourse on the subject. A long and rambling posting that reminded me of being back at school, in detention, and having to produce a written case for something that no sane person could give a toss about.

And so it was that I found myself reading about how fun started life as a noun, and then became an adjective. I am not sure I could care less whether "modern sources grudgingly accepted" …

Can you get a tune out of a hosepipe with a funnel on the end as well?

I can't stand the trombone either, in case you were thinking of creating an iPhone version of that as well :)

Some things are just made to appeal to weirdy beardy nerds. Take the 'musical' instrument invented by the Russian nutter Leon Theremin in 1919 for example. I say musical, but anyone who has ever listened to the sounds coming from this truly bizarre combining of metal antennae and the hands of the player will probably agree that an old saw is just as melodic. The instrument in question was used one hand to control the frequency and one for volume. It's all very clever stuff, I guess, if watching someone move their arms around like a bad magician on a bad trip while producing sounds suitable for use in bad sci-fi b movies and precious little else are produced, is your definition of clever.

Wikipedia handily informs me that the theremin belongs to a subset of the quintephone family known as the electrophone. Perhaps that is why someone took it upon themselves to transfer this pointless technology onto a subset of the smartphone family known as the iPhone.

That someone being an outfit called Leisuresonic which has made the new version of the old instrument available via the App Store in the form of the Cosmovox. This uses the built-in accelerometer of the iPhone to reproduce the sound control of the theremin. So as you move it one way you get one awful pitch changing noise, and rotate it the other for a variation on the same theme.

"Cosmovox can convincingly imitate the sound of …

Yesterday I was having breakfast in Madrid, as you do, enjoying the 30 degree heat and the ice cold orange juice. I was also enjoying the opportunity to be my usual grumpy self and throw awkward questions in the direction of my breakfast companion, Con Mallon the Director of Regional Product Marketing, Symantec Consumer Business Unit. I tried to conceal my disbelief when Con, in response to my hackneyed 'does it uninstall cleanly' question, said it sure did. In just over a minute. "Go try it yourself" Con told me. So I did.

Unfortunately I had to wait until I had got back from Madrid, as my Acer Aspire One netbook has no optical drive. And anyway, I wanted to try it on a test machine that sees real world action amongst the security products of this world. Which knows how to make claims like 'it uninstalls cleanly' disappear in a puff of marketing promise.

But, you know what, I think I have to say that Con was right. That Norton has finally cracked the clean uninstall conundrum.

God knows it has taken long enough.

It has also taken more complaints than I can actually recall, both from the media and angry consumers.

And it for sure has taken plenty of broken promises from Symantec along the way. With every release of NIS journalists were told, both at launch events and at the technical review workshops we are sometimes invited to (my invites dried up …

Well it is here at last, and this time it seems to be all gravy as they say. Apple has made the iPhone 2.1 upgrade as promised at the Let's Rock event available, and oh boy is it a little beauty!

The full list of bug fixes and improvements, according to Apple during the install, is:

• Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
• Significantly better battery life for most users
• Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• Faster installation of 3rd party applications
• Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
• Improved performance in text messaging
• Faster loading and searching of contacts
• Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
• Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
• Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
• Genius playlist creation

However, the ones that have really hit home here have to be the battery life improvements, 3G signal accuracy and third party app overload stability.

Battery life has always been a bit of bug-bear with the iPhone although obviously you cannot expect miracles from a GPS satnav swinging, web browsing, music playing winder. You can expect not to have to charge the damn thing twice a day though. Well, iPhone 2.1 seems to have improved battery life for me by around 15 percent. Not a lot, but a welcome improvement …

I must try and see if I can squeeze 'Balderdash and Piffle' into a story :)

The UK Government's broadband advisory group has published a report which suggests the cost of deploying fibre based broadband in the UK will be as high as £28.8 billion...

The Broadband Stakeholder Group report, produced by Analysis Mason, looks at the various costs of various technological options for providing next-generation fibre based broadband to the UK population.

{mosloadposition davey}The report (PDF) breaks down the cost options based upon how much of the country actually gets access into the home, and how the cost varies if fibre is only provided to 'the cabinet' instead.

Because of the variety of options considered, both in terms of reach and technology, the actual costs involved in rolling out fibre broadband across the UK would be somewhere between UKP £5.1 billion at the bottom end and that incredible UKP £28.8 billion at the top.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the costs of deploying to rural areas would "far exceed" the costs of urban areas it concludes.

The cheapest option would be to provide fibre to the cabinet, in itself still around three times as much as the telecoms industry spent deploying the broadband services infrastructure enjoyed in the UK today. The top end figure assumes access for everyone, in the home courtesy of 'point to point' fibre.

Antony Walker, Chief Executive of the BSG, says that the "scale of the costs looks daunting but the report does shed light on how some of these costs can be reduced …

I want more toys *and* a bigger/faster car, does that make me a bad person? :)

You've got to love this one. A Bangladesh government website, for the Rapid Action Battalion, was hacked last week. It was one of those hacktivism style affairs, with the home page defaced and a message left in its place.

The message, in this instance, read:

"GOVERNMENT DOES NOT TAKE ANY STEP FOR ICT DEVELOPMENT. BUT PASSED A LAW ABOUT ANTI-CYBER CRIME. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS THE CYBER SECURITY OR HOW TO PROTECT OWNSELF. LISTEN. HACKERS R NOT CRIMINAL. THEY R 10 TIME BETTER THAN YOUR EXPERT. WE ARE GINIOUS THAN YOU CAN'T THINK. DEFACED FROM BANGLADESH."

Trouble is, this particular 'ginious' started the defaced page announcement with a bloody big banner saying "HACKED BY SHAHEE_MIRZA" which is not exactly brilliant thinking in terms of hiding your identity. Especially when that is your real name.

Nor, for that matter, is adding your real email address at the bottom of the page...

According to Graham Cluley "Within 24 hours, the authorities had arrested 21-year-old computer science student Shahee Mirza, and three of his friends in connection with the hacking. According to RAB, Mirza has confessed to hacking the website and the sites of at least 22 other organizations. Mirza claims that he had no malicious intentions in defacing the websites."

The vibrating rabbit is back, and this time it means business.

The buzz is that the plain vanilla rabbit is being given a makeover, with the help of some 60 different fashion designers, artists and style gurus.

Personally, I have never seen the appeal of Nabaztag the vibrating WiFi rabbit that lets you know when your email has arrived and reads it to you. It can even, apparently, read books for you. I prefer doing that myself, funnily enough.

I will admit to owning a dancing plastic penguin with a linking for Linux though.

Nabaztag, which is Armenian for rabbit I am reliably informed, or at least as reliably as you can get when you ask and Armenian about a talking rabbit, is to debut its designer line in October.

Where else than the Paris Fashion Week, after which the vibrating rabbit will be following the super models to New York, Milan, Berlin and Tokyo.

At the end of it all, the designer Nabaztags will apparently be auctioned off for a good cause.

The long summer holidays are over here in the UK, and our kids have pretty much all gone back to school this week. Which is good news for providers of anonymous proxies and bad news for the school network admins trying to prevent students from accessing inappropriate sites.

One UK web content filtering specialist, Bloxx, is warning that educational institutions should be aware that every year kids are becoming increasingly savvy with regards to bypassing filtering systems. As that knowledge of technology, and in particular the Internet, continues to evolve so the threat to school filtering evolves alongside.

Bloxx warns that students are finding new subversive ways in which to access non-work related sites during school hours. Of course, the easiest and therefore also the most popular method continues to by connecting to an anonymous proxy server to access those sites which may otherwise have been blocked.

"Teachers notice when students are spending too much time gossiping in the classroom, whereas quietly surfing the Internet is not quite so obvious, yet it has the potential to expose children to inappropriate and even harmful material if not properly regulated," warns Bloxx Managing Director, Eamonn Doyle. "Students are incredibly tech-savvy and each year they becoming more knowledgeable about how to successfully evade web filters by using anonymous proxies. Hundreds of anonymous proxy sites are created every week and blocking them using traditional web filters, which rely on URL black lists, is simply no longer effective" he continues, …