Posts by happygeek

My blog posting points to ZDNet which has plenty of substantive links to reports of power consumption of XP and Vista.

My blog posting is an opinion based upon a news story, and while my opinion may well differ to yours that does not make it any less valid nor does it mean that it is propaganda.

No, I would not consider the demands of Vista as being part of the natural evolution of the OS, and I am quite aware of the features of Vista without relying upon Wikipedia as my reference - I have attended numerous Microsoft technical workshops, press conferences and one on ones during the development cycle and since release. heck, I have even been a Vista user since the earliest of Beta releases. None of which has changed my opinion that, when you come down to it, for your average user Vista is XP wearing a pretty dress.

And finally, this is a blog posting, nothing more. Read it, disagree with it, get over it ;)

The difference being that by upgrading to Vista, from XP, most laptop users will be using more power but with no performance or productivity advantage beyond a prettier interface.

So, costs more to upgrade to an OS that costs more in terms of electricity used, provides less uptime out on the road and does not increase producitivity. And that isn't madness?

Aye, it is consumerism gone mad. We want the pretty interface even if it means a slower and less productive experience or splashing cash on hardware we don't really need.

Madness.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – how can an operating system be environmentally unfriendly I hear you ask? User friendly, security friendly, productivity friendly even, but environmentally unfriendly? Well that is exactly the claim that I am prepared to make considering reports from the likes of ZDNet regarding the sorry state of battery life on mobiles running the Microsoft flagship Windows OS. I rather like the comment of Rob Bushway, a blogger at Gottabemobile who says “And don't even get me started on battery life with Vista - certainly not a mobile friendly experience there at all. When a consumer has to buy an extended battery to get what they use to get out of a standard battery, something is really wrong.”

And there lies the rub, more power consumption to do essentially the same thing as XP but with a prettier user interface. Are we really that shallow and uncaring that we are prepared to hammer a few more nails in the coffin of Planet Earth just so as to enjoy an opaque windows effect and a 3D windows manager as offered by Aero Glass experience? The answer would appear to be a resounding yes, which is really sad news indeed. Especially when you consider that the Aero UI does nothing to actually add to productivity at all, in fact there is a good argument to suggest it does exactly the opposite unless you happen to be running a top of the range laptop with the …

I wonder who came up with the Walk-in Intellectual Property Poaching (WIPP) tag? Looks like it has the touch of the marketing department to me. :)

As DaniWeb reported back in February, the trouble with asking what your customers want is that they have a habit of letting you know in no uncertain terms. When Dell did that at their IdeaStorm site, the masses yelled ‘what we want is Linux pre-installed’ and the Michael Dell yelled back ‘we are listening’ and then it all went very quiet indeed.

The official Dell response included such snippets as “there is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux” and “we don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another.”

Until now, that is. Dell has announced that it will be selling certain consumer PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed and by so doing admitting that
Linux is actually ready for the mainstream consumer big time.

Something that Michael Dell himself has known for quite some while, considering he himself uses a Dell Precision M90 laptop running Ubuntu 7.04!

But the real news here is not that Linux is hitting the radar of Joe Consumer for the first time rather than flying under it for the benefit of the geek crowd alone. No, the real news comes in the fact that for the first time your average consumer is being given a real choice over OS rather than having to decide between PC and Mac hardware in order to get flexibility over operating system software. If this does not give the whole PC marketplace a boost then that …

Should spammers have civil liberties? ;)

Ipswitch Inc has published the seventh Spamometer survey results, revealing that spam is now at its highest rate since recording began. How high would that be? Well for the same spring period last year the measure was some 62% of all received email, that has risen to an incredible 93% of all email received according to the network monitoring specialists.

Of this number, 34% can be attributed to the growing scourge of pharmacy spam, narrowly pipping financial and phishing on 33% to the top (dis)honor. Gambling on 7% and Pornography on 5% make up the top four spaces, assuming that we discount the actual third place category of ‘undecipherable’ on 12%.

This report comes hot on the coat-tails of an IDC study which warned that more than 40 billion spam messages would be sent worldwide during 2007, courtesy of a combination of the success in getting image-based spam past filtering mechanism and the increased response rates via email sender ID spoofing.

Just to add to the email problem, MessageLabs which operates a managed email service has revealed that there is a growing coming together of spam and virus activity, with cyber-crime being the driving force. Criminal gangs are starting to act ever more like structured businesses, looking to milk every bottom line dollar from the spamming service they provide. And so it is that MessageLabs have been intercepting messages which contain pump-and-dump stock scam spams along with links to malware laden websites. Visit …

That depends, to be honest, on which Internet you are talking about. For most of us mere mortals the answer will vary, depending upon how fat the pipe connecting us to the Internet is and how many people are downloading video streams over it at any given moment in time. For the uber-users at the University of Tokyo with access to the second generation, university and researcher feeding Internet2 there are no such constraints.

Which is why they have managed to break the Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) in both IPv6 and IPv4 categories, as announced by Internet2 this week. The I2-LSR is an open and ongoing competition for the highest bandwidth end-to-end networks, representing the fastest rate at which data is transferred multiplied by the distance it travels.

So just how fast did the Tokyo team data go? Well as far as IPv4 is concerned, the team managed 264,147 terabit-meters per second, transferring 2.98 terabytes of data across 30,000 kilometers of network in 45 minutes at an average rate of 8.80 gigabytes per second. Things got hotter when it came to IPv6 as you might expect, seeing 272,400 terabit-meters per second, transferring 585 gigabytes of data across 30,000 kilometers of network in 30 minutes at an average of 9.08 gigabits per second. Those 30,000 kilometers crossed no less than 6 international networks, or 75% of the circumference of the Earth.

Kei Hiraki, professor at the University of Tokyo and LSR team leader said, "These …

Microsoft has released the first public Beta version of Windows Server ‘Longhorn’ Beta 3 which can be downloaded from here. This is part of what Microsoft is referring to as the ‘Second Wave of Innovation’ to be delivered during the next 12 months. It started with Vista and Office 2007, continues with Longhorn, and will carry on with Visual Studio ‘Orcas’ and SQL Server ‘Katmai.’

What this announcement means is that developers and the curious who are not TechNet subscribers can, at long last, get their hands on a legal copy of Longhorn to play with. The big question is why bother? Well Microsoft is claiming that when it comes to such things as the automation of daily management tasks, increased availability and better security it makes for big improvements on Windows Server 2003R2.

Being a security man myself, let me focus here for moment. There is much to be applauded in the work that Microsoft has done to reduce the server footprint and what it refers to as the ‘potential attack surface’ with the help of the new Server Core installation option. Not to mention the ongoing health monitoring and compliance via myriad new features including Microsoft Network Access Protection (NAP), Read-Only Domain Controllers and the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.

Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, the newest version of Microsoft’s Web server, also gets something of a security makeover with a more extensible platform for efficiently managing and reliably hosting Web applications and …

GPS satellite navigation devices have become an indispensable part of everyday life for millions of drivers the world over. Without these little technological route planning miracles, many of us would literally crash and burn as we struggled to regain control over that map while driving too fast and drinking a large cup of coffee simultaneously. OK, so that might be exaggerating things a little, but the truth is that most 21st Century drivers are dependent upon satellite navigation to get from A to B. Efficiency is the key here, and systems that incorporate Radio Data System (RDS) Traffic Message Channel (TMC) data have become de rigueur over the pond in Europe and gaining strength in North America as well.

Which is why the tech and automobile world get more than a little fidgety when word of a spanner in the satnav works leaks out. Take my revelation in January that some TomTom Go 910 devices were being sold complete with a Trojan or two pre-installed, with the full knowledge of the manufacturer which had decided not to come clean and ‘fess up until pushed by the global fuss this blog entry caused. Yet that was a security exploit that merely used the satnav device as a distribution channel, a means by which to get onto a Windows based host computer where it could do some damage. The satnav device itself, running on a Linux based OS, was safe from actual harm. Imagine then, if someone could come …

I've deleted the links in that first comment as they all pointed to a single blog, which starts to make it look suspiciously like blog spam. By all means, Jack Ripoff, make your points but make them here please within this comment thread.

According to a Wall Street Journal report the huge crash that left thousands of American Blackberry users without web or email connectivity for ten hours, or ‘a lifetime’ as most of them described it, was caused by a simple, non-critical software upgrade that just had not been tested properly before rolling out.

OK, so the thought of a bunch of suits, lawyers, marketing folk and the idle rich pretending they are important professionals being without their mobile email for a bit does not really equate to a breakdown of business in America. Email is pretty easy to come by without a Blackberry, wherever you may be in the US. Ditto web access. Indeed, you could argue that the real breakdown was amongst those professional users who discovered that they really are addicted to their crackberries.

Leading psychologist Professor Graham Jones of performance development consultancy Lane4 certainly thinks that it was evidence of a growing trend towards gadget addiction and warns not to get hung up on them in case they hang up on you.

“The virtual office has indeed revolutionized the way we do business but what about the unwanted side effects when the line between business and pleasure becomes blurred? Managers may have the luxury of being able to manage their workload whenever wherever, but increasingly they’re losing their grip on a healthy work life balance,” said Professor Jones in a press release today. “Today’s mobile manager is never ‘away from his …

And a very valid opinion it is too. Can't say I disagree with too much of that, upon reflection.

Yes , it was a pun - on the name of the company who revealed the figures. The whole point being that the Hitwise report reveals a shortage of content creators compared to consumers, something that would appear to be at odds with the hype surrounding Web 2.0 which is 'sold' as an interactive and participatory social experience. Certainly it is something you might not have realized had someone not pointed it out.

The figures are not mine, they are Hitwise originated.

This is just a blog posting reporting on a news story, and bringing my opinion into the mix. Is that such a crime?

Many apologies for wasting your time. Here's a hint, next time you see a posting with web 2.0 in the title don't bother reading it. However, I'll carry on writing about this figment of the media imagination as long as there are news stories worth reporting and which I think will be of interest to others.

A newly published study by web audience measurement outfit Hitwise has revealed that despite the media frenzy surrounding Web 2.0 sites and services, when it comes to the actual public only a minuscule number actually participate in the social networking and information sharing revolution when they visit.

For example, how many visitors to YouTube, which Google acquired for an arm and both legs last year, do you reckon actually upload videos and therefore fully participate in the video sharing process? 10% perhaps, maybe 5%?

Well, according to Hitwise the number is nearer 0.16% in fact. The numbers are hardly much better when it comes that other darling of the media headline, the Yahoo owned Flickr, which sees only 0.2% of visitors uploading new photos.

Some Web 2.0 sites do manage to buck the lurker trend identified by Hitwise. To be precise, one Web 2.0 site, and that is Wikipedia. Even then only 4.6% of visitors edit entries rather than just read them.

Of course, as long as there has been an online community there have been ‘lurkers’ to accompany it. These are the folk who read messages but do not post them in the forums, who absorb answers but do not ask questions on support site, and who pull down whatever data is available without ever thinking about putting something back. Not that there is anything wrong with this, it is an inevitable consequence …

Cool. Nice to see someone acknowledge the importance of admitting to, and learning from, mistakes in IT!

If there is one thing that I am 100% sure of in the security business, it is that you will never prevent users from clicking on links. Unless, of course, they learn by experience. Security education is getting to be like data backup these days, nobody believes you until they lose their data without a backup the first and only time.

My friends over at security specialists Sophos have warned me to be on the lookout for Sandra and her stiletto shoes when using Skype. Usually it would be my mother offering this advice, but then she would not understand the implications of getting infected by the Pykse-A worm that exploits the Skype IM chat system to infect your PC.

Of course, as always, it relies on a certain amount of user stupidity. In this case that would be just why Sandra would want to send you a picture of herself wearing nothing but high heels. Still, enough people will link click at the slightest provocation, and that invitation probably counts as more than slight. If you do click on the link in the Skype message then you will, indeed, be presented with Stiletto Sandra. By this point you will have also been infected with the downloader Trojan and, as a consequence, the worm payload will have been installed.

On the good news front, if you can call it that, this is hardly the first worm to target Skype users. Better yet, none of the previous ones have been widespread in comparison with other malware outbreaks. Not that it is a reason to ignore the Sophos warning, as Sandra and her shoes could be the Skype worm breakthrough that the malware writing scum have been waiting for. Last year Sophos conducted a poll of system administrators and found that 86.1% of those who expressed an …

The Infosecurity folk do the swap your password for some chocolate thing every year around Easter to drive up publicity for the InfoSecurity expo/conference which takes place in London next week.

Always interesting, although I don't have the result of last years survey to hand I suspect the percentages are much the same. Last year they offered people an Easter Egg for a password and the majority said OK.

The statistic I liked most was the huge drop in people prepared to tell their boss the password if asked :)

Pretty much what I said in my piece with "But is the death of XP such bad news any way? The truth is, no it is not. Vista is the more secure OS, and as such a natural evolutionary path for Windows based computing."

Interesting point, although I suspect that while official support continues so will the activation servers.

Suggestions for a suitable epitaph are welcome, although I suspect ‘good riddance to insecure rubbish’ will stand the test of time as well as any other when it comes to the death of Windows XP.

Yes, despite the fact that Vista has hardly set the world on fire if recent reports such as the US Harris Interactive poll which revealed only 12 percent of the 87 percent of users who had heard of it planned to upgrade to Vista in the near future, Microsoft has taken the decision to kill off XP sooner rather than later. How soon? How does February 2008 strike you? That Harris poll is important; because of the people questioned some 79 percent were actually using XP.

As from the end of January 2008, new PCs will no longer be available with the Windows XP operating system it has been revealed. And that means the versions for Tablet PCs and Media Center devices alike. Of course, the Microsoft confirmation is only half the story, because while it will certainly impact upon the likes of Dell and HP who will not be able to buy the relevant licenses required, small computer building organizations will no doubt find a way around the restrictions and fulfill customer demand, should there prove to be any, for a new system with XP pre-installed.

Indeed, a Microsoft spokesperson has already confirmed that PC makers will be able to get suitable licenses through 2009 if they go via a third …

China has officially declared war on Internet porn, and set a target of purging the web of sexually-explicit images, stories and AV clips within a six month timescale. According to the China View official online news agency the Vice Minister of MPS, Zhang Xinfeng, is quoted as stating “the boom of pornographic content on the Internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds. The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace.”

Looking deeper at what Zhang has said, one could be forgiven for thinking that this is just the same old same old spectre of Chinese state censorship that has led to the ‘Great firewall of China’ debacle. Not least because it would appear that the official campaign will target a lot more than just porn and sexually explicit stories. Indeed, Zhang has made it very clear that illegal on-line lotteries, contraband trade, fraud and then the all too expected bombshell of “content that spreads rumors and is of a slanderous nature" will be included in the crackdown. Exactly what is considered 'spreading rumors' is, one assumes, up to the State to decide.

Not that Chinese attention to online porn is anything new, some months back in November 2006 one Chen Hui was arrested and convicted to life imprisonment for running the largest pornographic website in China which was said to contain nine million images and articles and have a membership of …

I can't see it doing much for the 'do no evil' image that Google wants us to foster, given the not exactly shining reputation DoubleClick has always 'enjoyed' with regard to privacy issues.

I was thinking that it meant most people would not be at risk from the exploit. I cannot say that I would want Paris Hilton, naked or otherwise, anywhere near my computer ;)

'From the lab to the fab' oh dear oh dear oh dear. ;)

Even if you do happen to live in Utah, the chances are you will not have noticed a little law by the name of SB 236 which was passed without so much as a whisper of complaint or fuss last month. If you happen to run a web based business in Utah, however, then Senator Dan Eastman is most likely not going to be your favorite person when you discover just what this law means.

Like many politicians, the good senator manages to put an unhealthy spin on technological subjects that are not properly understood nor appreciated it would seem. Indeed, Sen. Eastman has gone on record as describing keyword advertising as being a creative new kind of identity theft. Cool and trendy sound bytes no doubt, but of little real world value.

There are already plenty of rules put in place by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others to prevent the misuse of protected trademarks within keywords, and so long as competitive keyword advertising is truthful I fail to see the big deal. Certainly there is little evidence of the kind of rife hijacking of commercial identity, forceful misdirection of trade from one business to another, which this law is meant to prevent.

The fact that Sen. Eastman has stated that “Utah is a highly tech-savvy, super business-friendly state” would seem to point towards the real reason behind this law being passed. It is meant to give powerful business interests a warm fuzzy feeling, while at the …

Considering the kind of broadband networking infrastructure already in place in this region, I am thinking places like South Korea and Singapore which have been pioneers in super-fast broadband roll out, I am intrigued as to what Next Generation Networking will actually consist of.

To be honest I would be happy with the kind of thing that South Korea has got already, and has had for a good few years now...

And, of course, for Windows users there will soon be the Longhorn Server/Home Server which will provide similar functionality out of the box as it were.

I have been a supporter of RAID for the longest time; after all it would be crazy not to like something that brings efficiency and protection to the data storage process. RAID has certainly provided both, but that was then and this is now, and it is time for RAID to step down and let a new storage king be crowned. Without turning this into a huge anti-RAID rant, it is only fair that I highlight perhaps a handful of the reasons why the technology has had its day before turning my attention to that which could replace it.

Most importantly there is the small matter of large drives, in particular the fact that RAID is not flexible enough to allow the user to drop in additional drives of any capacity. By determining that all drives need to be the same size my choice to expand the storage on offer cheaply is reduced. I want to be able to just drop in a huge drive and use all the capacity it offers, without the RAID group saying I can only use a percentage of that capacity and no more. I don’t want to be forced into replacing all the drives with the new bigger capacity ones at a much greater overall cost to me. And talking of inflexibility, I would rather not have to make my mind up in advance as to what type of RAID solution is best for me and then have no choice but to stick …

Ever since I interviewed Bradley Horowitz, Head of Technology at Yahoo!, 18 months or so ago I have been keeping a keen eye on pretty much everything the company does in the search realm. Not least because Bradley is a man with a real vision for the future of social search, and with his enthusiasm and passion for the technology you just know that some good has to come out of it. So it was that I noticed the Australian arm of Yahoo! had launched a new search service into Beta testing which seems to have escaped the blogosphere radar pretty much.

The Alpha Beta, and yes I do appreciate how annoying and confusing at the same time that can be, is nothing new in many ways. At heart it is a federated search services offering aggregated search feeds within a single page interface. Many companies have offered similar approaches to search over the years with varying levels of success, the best known and most commercially viable being Copernic I would imagine. But Alpha does things differently to everything that has come before, to the best of my knowledge at least, and so deserves a little attention.

Differently because the Bradley Horowitz influence is there in the social search implications. The ability to customize the search view and the search functionality in a way that Google Custom Web Search simply does not do, although adding your favourite search service to Alpha does require support for OpenSearch …

Leading security vendor Kaspersky Lab has uncovered the first ever proof of concept virus designed with the sole intention of infecting the iPod media player. Like all proof of concept viruses though, Podloso poses no real world threat to users. For a start it requires a Linux installation, not on your PC but on the iPod itself which rather limits the number of devices likely to be capable of infection. Even if this requirement is fulfilled, the virus still requires user involvement to be launched from the program demo folder. Finally, if the user does execute the Podloso file it will then scan the iPod hard drive and infect all ELF (executable and linking) files which it finds.

And the payload? Well, an infected executable will fail to run and instead launch a message display box which says “You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus.”

So if it is relatively difficult to become infected in the first place, requires more than a little user interaction, and has a relatively harmless payload is Podloso a cause for concern? Now that is not such a straightforward question to answer. Although there is an argument to say that this is just the beginning of the iPod virus invasion, and the lack of a malicious payload this time does not mean the next one will be harmless, I am inclined to think otherwise. After all, there is no mechanism for the virus to spread because it has to …

Cruel, but with a hint of truth nonetheless. ;)

Lenovo bought the PC/Laptop business from IBM a couple of years back, inlcuding the rights to the ThinkPad name. They have been selling ThinkPads ever since, and are currently the third biggest manufacturer of computers globally.

They also sponsor the Williams F1 racing team as from this season. I know because I was invited along to the launch of the new car a couple of months back :cheesy:

The latest Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics has been published, and makes fascinating reading for anyone geek who really cares about the effect that technology has upon the environment.

Greenpeace ranks the leading mobile and PC manufacturers on their global policies and practice with regards to eliminating harmful chemicals as well as taking responsibility for their products once they are discarded by consumers. Until the use of toxic substances within technology is completely eliminated, it is completely impossible to have completely safe recycling. That is the harsh truth, and the reason that Greenpeace wants to see major electronics companies cleaning up their act.

It is also the reason why the points system used to calculate the league tables within the guide weight more heavily those awarded for corporate practice on chemicals than criteria for recycling. After all, by substituting harmful chemicals in the production process there are all sorts of knock on benefits from preventing worker exposure to the substances and the contamination of communities close to the production facilities, through to the prevention of leaching chemicals such as brominated flame retardants during use. As Greenpeace so properly point out, the presence of toxic substances in electronics perpetuates the toxic cycle “during reprocessing of electronic waste and by using contaminated secondary materials to make new products.”

So, where any two companies score the same overall total, it will be the one with the higher chemicals score that ends up ranked higher. Talking of which, let’s …

So the Sony PlayStation 3 has been available for a little over a week in Europe, and in that time it has officially become the second fastest selling games console ever in the UK. ChartTrack, an organisation that monitors such things, reports that the first two days of release saw some 165,000 PS3 consoles sold. Second place in the history stakes isn’t all bad news for Sony, it also has the number one spot which was with the PlayStation Portable. The PSP shifted some 185,000 units at launch. The PS3 did break one record though, as the most expensive games console ever sold in Great Britain at a recommend street price of £425, which is roughly $840!

Nintendo could only manage a relatively poor 105,000 launch sales for the Wii, although the official reasoning for this is that there were supply shortages and many more could have been sold if they were physically available in the shops. No such excuses for Microsoft, it has to be said, with the launch figures for the Xbox 360 of just 70,000 being less than half that of the PS3.

What it does mean for the consumer is that demand has not outstripped supply for the PS3 as there were apparently some 220,000 consoles brought into the country which means that there must be at least 50,000 left to sell. This is good news as it mans that in the UK there is unlikely to be the same kind of …

Proposals for a virtual red light Internet district have been overturned for the third time during a contentious meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Portugal. Concluding business at the meeting, a resolution rejecting a proposal from the ICM Registry to create an .xxx top level domain was passed by nine votes to five.

Despite the reported tens of thousands of pre-registration requests for .xxx domains received by ICM, almost ironically it would appear to be the lack of backing from the adult industry itself that was a key factor in voting it down for many of the board members. Indeed, one adult industry trade organization, the Free Speech Coalition has made it very clear it is strongly opposed and has lobbied ICANN to this effect. AN FSC board member, Reed Lee, has said that ICANN members who voted against the .xxx domain did so almost uniformly for one or both of two reasons: “They didn't want ICANN ensconced in content control and censorship controversies. And they recognized that sharp opposition from the community distinguished this application from all others in this sponsored round.” With members of the FSC covering adult industry webmasters from the largest organizations to the smallest, this undoubtedly has an impact upon ICANN which prides itself upon a bottom-up decision making process.

But reading between the lines of the official vote transcript, which is lengthy and features members on both sides of the …

Certainly the problem does seem to be getting more commonplace. Although that might just be down to better detection methodology, more security awareness (yeah right) or a maturing userbase when it comes to things IT.

IT security specialist Sophos is warning anyone with a website about recently uncovered evidence that spammers are hacking into legitimate sites in order to sell drugs.

Online pharmacy spam, be it under the Viagra or just general prescription drug banner, has become one of the most annoying and persistent forms of the junk mail genre. Rather than advertise the actual URL of the pharmacy site within the messages, however, the drug-peddling pharmacy spammers are instead directing users to the websites of innocent users unaware that they have been hacked. All the sites uncovered by Sophos are using PHP, most likely because there are so many operating in an unpatched form and so still open to any number of well publicized security vulnerabilities. Once a punter, victim or idiot as I prefer to call them, arrives at the innocent host site they are automatically redirected to the pharmacy itself.

Unfortunately, it is the innocent website owner that runs the risk of brand damage and reputation loss, because it is their address that appears in the spam. They also run the risk of larger hosting bills if a spam campaign dramatically increases the bandwidth consumed by increased traffic, all of it just hopping aboard for a quick ride with a drug scamming spammer.

Even more unfortunately, because of the way that many anti-spam and anti-phishing filters work it is quite possible that these messages would avoid filtration in the first place. The destination URL, after all, is …

> Ask any real security professional and they'll tell
> you that if someone gets physical access to your
> computer, there's jack you can do.

Ask any real security professional and they will tell you that if a six year old girl gets physical access to your computer they should not be able to install an application, they should not be able to use an unauthorised USB device. The computer should be locked down to prevent this, it is not rocket science, espeically whenj you consider the location of the computer concerned.

But perhaps that is just evidence of the weakness of the security protocol of Parliament. Perhaps it is assumed that becuase the physical perimeter security is so strong there is no need for such tight security at a network and local PC level. The BBC report proves how wrong that assumption is.

You can install a hardware keylogger device in seconds, no knowledge required other than how to remove keyboard cable and plug into device and device into computer - very small, unless you are looking for it you wouldn't spot it.

OK, hack is putting it strongly, but security was compromised and fairly easily considering the sensitivity of the location. But as I stated in the article, it was made easier by the cooperation of the MP concerned. But to think that this diminishes the importance of the original story or the weakness in the security processes of Parliament is naive. The fact that MP computers are security deificent in the first place is cause for concern enough.

Using a six year old girl to do this was just good TV from the BBC, and makes for a good blog headline of course, mea culpa. :cheesy:

Having a professional interest in security, and a personal distrust of politicians and their promises of providing the same, I was not at all surprised by the findings of a BBC TV investigation that has just been broadcast in the UK. Inside Out, a news reporting and investigative documentary series that most often homes in on fairly lightweight consumer stories, decided to send their reporter to the heart of the UK Parliament, the House of Commons, and test the security provided by one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the British Isles. I’ve attended working group committee meetings there and I know only too well of the advanced information that needs to be supplied, the passes issued, the body searches an x-ray machines at the entrances, the small army of fully armed police that patrol.

Now let’s get one thing straight right up front, the successful security compromise was made easier because a Member of Parliament, Anne Milton (MP for Guildford) agreed to take part in the investigation. She was apparently convinced that no harm could be done by accepting the challenge of leaving her computer unattended in here House of Commons office, with just the reporter to keep it company, for a total of 60 seconds and no more. She was, however, visibly shocked when that reporter managed to compromise the computer in less than 20 seconds using a readily available keylogger application. This would have enabled a hacker …

Wireless networking has, in my rather sadly predictable geeky opinion, made computing not only a whole lot more accessible but sexy as well. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that the social Internet service explosion would not have happened, or certainly not happened as quickly, were it not for the wireless phenomena. Nobody, apart from me and my ilk, want network cables on the carpet and few can afford the luxury of an Ethernet infrastructure built into the property itself.

Wireless is truly an enabling technology if ever there was. What’s more, it is still very much n emerging one as well. New standards, new functionality, new levels of wow factor are being unveiled every few months. And so it is with the arrival of Ultra Wide Band. Although UWB has been around in various forms for a while now, it has only just received the official sanctioning from the International Organization for Standardization and Ecma International to become a kosher wireless standard. If you want to be specific, go Google for ECMA-368, ECMA-369, and ISO/IEC 26907 which cover all the technical bases between sublayer and physical network layers.

If you just want to know what it does, then short-distance (think same room) wireless data transfer at 480Mbps maximum throughput pretty much sums it up. But the really interesting stuff is still come, and that is asking the question: so where next for WiMedia UWB?

The answer looks like being Wireless USB, …

Web security company ScanSafe has published its latest monthly Global Threat Report that looks at corporate usage of the web. The results should not be shocking as we all know that if you give someone free access to the Internet at work then they will abuse that access if at all possible, but shocking they are nonetheless. By analysing the data from its web traffic scanning and blocking security as a service offering, ScanSafe is able to tap into the web working habits of the world.

In fact, according to ScanSafe, some 49 percent of all web traffic scanned and blocked during the course of February was classified as non-productive. OK, so that could account for pretty much anything some workers do, but the reality is that it is not just the usual slacker suspects we are talking about here. The numbers are too high for that. Instead the report suggests that nearly half the time spent online at work is doing things not only with nothing at all to do with the job, but often things that could lead to employee dismissal. A relatively high, in the scheme of things, 4 percent of time was spent browsing pornographic sites, and another 4 percent each for gambling and music downloads. Moving up the activity blocking ladder you find webmail on 10 percent, IM on 12 percent and advertising top of the tree on 14 percent.

Of these, perhaps the most worrying is the gambling figure as …

Every now and then, as a journalist, a press release lands upon my virtual desk that stands out because it relates to ‘a good thing’ and one of them arrived today. In fact, it relates to a number of good things:

Good Thing Number One

It raises awareness of what it is like to live in a world when you are both deaf and blind, and by so doing encourage people to help those for whom deafblindness is more than a computer simulation. Deafblindness is a combination of both sight and hearing difficulties. Some of these people are completely deaf and blind, but others have some remaining use of one or both senses. It is estimated there are two million people over 60 who have a dual sensory impairment. Causes of deafblindness include premature birth and exposure to rubella during pregnancy, which can cause babies to be born deafblind. Sense therefore supports MMR which has proven to be the most effective vaccination program against rubella. Some genetic conditions, such as Usher syndrome, can also result in deafblindness. People can also become deafblind at any time through illness, accident or in older age. Further information can be found at Sense.

Good Thing Number Two

It offers to help them by helping you to get back some valuable storage space while doing your bit for the environment, by recycling your old mobile phones through the UK based National Deafblind and Rubella Association ‘Sense’ charity which will …

Cool in what way?

In something of an unusual twist of late, Google would appear to be playing catch up to Microsoft for once. The Redmond giants bought the market leader in the in-game advertising business, Massive Inc, last May for close on $200 million. Today Google has confirmed it has finalized the deal to buy an in-game advertising business itself, namely the relatively small San Francisco based Adscape. Relatively small describes the cost of the acquisition as well, although Google is keeping the actual figure close to its chest, the word on the vine is that $23 million is the order of the day. Whether that turns out to be a good value investment remains to be seen, especially as Microsoft/Massive already has hugely important deals with Ubisoft Entertainment, THQ and Take-Two Interactive wrapped up.

A Google spokesperson said that “as more and more people spend time playing video games, we think we can create opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences while maintaining a high quality, engaging user experience.”

The new Google ‘Dean of Games’ is Bernie Stolar, a former president of Sega Entertainment and Adscape executive. He claims that the cost of producing a single game has risen from an average $100K in the 1980’s to $25 million today, and that something is required to help fund these movie style productions. “The good news is there are some very passionate gamers out there that …

The world of mobile telephony is better regulated than that, in most places. Mind you, I wouldn't put it past Google to try something along those lines and find the loopholes to allow it.