Posts by happygeek

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

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

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

I fought the law - The Clash

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

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

The Unforgettable Fire by U2

@cwarn23 All of your tutorials should now be flagged as such, yell at me if they are not :)

Three and a half years ago, DaniWeb was reporting how stolen credit cards could be purchased online for as little as $10 per card, complete with a guarantee that the accounts behind the cards were active, when purchased in larger volumes. So how has the market changed since the start of 2008?

It should come as no real surprise, given the number of high profile data breaches which have resulted in the loss of credit card information from online databases, that the underground cybercrime marketplace has become pretty saturated with credit cards for sale. And whenever a market gets saturated with goods, the cost of those goods comes tumbling down. Stolen credit cards do not escape from the bondage of the basic economic rule of supply and demand. This is proven, in part, by another previously reported story here at DaniWeb from four years ago. Back in September 2007 I was writing about how an online identity auction site was selling stolen credit card data for as little as $0.50 per card. Yet current values are nowhere near as low as that, so what is actually happening? Simple, in 2007 there had been another flood of card information onto the black market but the demand to buy wasn't as great as it is now. So although there was perhaps a little less data floating around, there were fewer buyers to sell to. That has certainly changed within a relatively short …

Hint: Go to the forum in which you want to start a new thread, then click on the bit (right towards the top of the page) that says "Click Here to Start a New Thread" and that's it.

CodeToGo is, essentially, an API wrapper around the Ideone.com online compiler and debugger that enables you to use it to compile and run code in around 50 different programming languages on your iPhone or iPad. It has been around for a while but has always been somewhat tarnished with the 'toy' label courtesy of a total inability to load or save code snippets, requiring you to type them in manually. Actually that wasn't quite the case either, although many thought it to be, as you could always use the ideone.com site to email the code snippets. However, this latest app update pretty much resolves the load/save issue by adding the ability to import and export files using Dropbox to the existing functionality which automatically saves the current code you are working on for any given language. You can now also save and load different files for each language. The Dropbox solution works well in practise, simply touch "Save" whilst editing and then go for the pretty obvious "Save to Dropbox" option. To load then, as I'm sure you have worked out by now, you do the same thing but use the "Load from Dropbox" option instead. It's a much neater solution than importing and exporting files by syncing to iTunes from your computer using the file sharing option. Just as ideone.com describes itself as 'more than a pastebin' so the same is true of CodeToGo. You can write your code and …

Currently, Susie and I have two dogs (a South African Ridgeback cross, and a Heinz 57 cross) and three cats. Khush, Teak, Pitch (a black cat), Mix and Lotty.

I cannot remember a time in my life when there were no animals in it.

Mobile phone security threats used to be mocked by everyone outside of vendors with mobile antivirus software to sell. That has changed, and how. The online media headlines have been full to bursting with reports that 'mobile malware' had grown by a staggering 273 percent in the first half of 2011 when compared to the same period for the year before. But can that be true? The answer, it would seem, is no. It's actually much, much worse. Maybe.

The news broke on the back of a report from German-based security software specialists G Data which issued a press release detailing that 273 percent figure. But according to a sharp-eyed reporter for Mobile Europe all is not quite as it seems. While the press release highlighted précis of the report, which is what most news outlets appear to have looked at and used to produce not only their headlines but also the meat of the story, states that mobile malware overall had risen by 273 percent the actual report shows that this figure relates to the share of the overall malware market represented by mobile platforms.

As the Mobile Europe reporter states, taking the sequential half year numbers quoted in the G Data report: "mobile malware has increased around 1,400 percent from 55 to 803 detected threats". So why the 'maybe' in my opening paragraph? Well, simply put, although the 1,400 percent rise figure looks really very scary indeed on …

It's official: Android now has a greater market share than iPhone across the EU5 countries of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. According to newly published data from the comScore MobiLens service , nearly one in four smartphone users in the EU5 region were using smartphones running on a Google Android platform.

In the three months covered by the research, ending in July 2011, there were a total of 88.4 million smartphone users amongst mobile subscribers in the EU5 which represents a 44 percent increase from the year before. Of these, the undoubted winner was Android with an increase in market share from 16.2 percentage points to 22.3 percent. Indeed, Google's Android platform showed the fastest growth in market share of any of the smartphone platforms.

When it comes to the devices themselves, the clear winner was HTC which accounted for a staggering 34.6 percent of all Android smartphones across the EU5 region during this period. Samsung wasn't too far behind though, with an impressive 31.7 percent share. Talking in numbers of devices owned, the report reveals that there were some 19.7 million EU5 smartphone users adopting the Android platform, most of them in the UK where some 6.3 million were to be found.

Both Apple with it iOS and RIM with the BlackBerry platform could barely muster a single percentage point in terms of market share gains, which kind of puts the spectacular rise of the Android-powered smartphone …

Good luck then :)

Ever wondered just how many domain names there are on the Internet? DaniWeb has, and can reveal the answer as being an almost astonishing 215 million worldwide.

According to global Internet infrastructure provider and domain registrar Verisign, more than five million domain names were added to the total during the second quarter of this year alone, which represents a growth rate of 2.5 percent above the previous three months. To put that into some perspective, that's a year on year growth in the number of Internet domains of 8.6 percent or some 16.9 million domains.

If you were to look at just the number of .com and .net domains registered, then you are talking about a running total of more than 110 million by the end of that second quarter 2011 cut off point. New registrations within the two domain high flyers accounted for 8.1 million in the quarter. However, according to the DomainTools statistics site the Internet could have been be so much bigger if domains had not expired and been deleted over the years - or could it? The current numbers suggest that a staggering 328,456,608 .com domains have been deleted since the Top Level Domain was first created, and 36,196,098 .net domains for good measure. Actually, domains which expire are added to the deleted column and remove3d from the active, but are available for re-registration immediately. So the deleted column is a cumulative total over the decades.

Interestingly, China …

It would appear that a Florida bank has been the victim of a $13 million ATM heist, but just how did the cyber-robbers pull it off?

Although the security breach which led to the ATM fraud itself seems to have taken place in March, and was disclosed in the first quarter earnings statement for Fidelity National Information Services Inc (FIS) back in May, details of exactly what happened are only just starting to leak from the FBI probe that followed.

FIS, based in Jacksonville, is one of the world's biggest processors of prepaid debit cards with more than 775 million transactions every year. These cards, preloaded with a cash value, can be used at ATMs to withdraw that cash until the preloaded balance is exhausted. You might have thought that a company at the very top of the prepaid debit card business would also be at the very top of the security business as it applies to those cards, but as information leaks from the investigation it would appear that wasn't necessarily the case.

If it was, then how could a total of just 22 of these prepaid debit cards, issued by Efunds Sunrise in Florida, be used to perpetrate a staggeringly simple yet ingenious $13 million robbery? FIS, as is common practise in the financial sector, has issued a statement assuring customers that it has "taken steps to further enhance security and continues to work with Federal law enforcement officials on this matter" …

In an unusual take on the usual 'my smartphone is better than your smartphone' debate, a new survey has revealed that when it comes to the amount of time we spend using our handset of choice, iPhone users are the biggest addicts. So addicted, in fact, that many iPhone users cannot bear to be parted from their smartphone no matter where they are: and that includes the loo.

According to digital banking provider Intelligent Environments which commissioned YouGov to undertake the research of British smartphone users last month, some 43 percent of iPhone users spend more than two hours a day using their handsets compared to 33 percent of Android smartphone users and 31 percent of BlackBerry users.

iPhone users are, so the research tells us, also most likely to pick up their handset as soon as they wake up in the morning and last thing at night. Slightly more worrying was the discovery that 35 percent of iPhone users regularly take their smartphones into the toilet with them and continue to use the things while going about their, erm, business.

Of course, the Intelligent Environments research was geared towards financial usage of smartphones so here are the boring banking statistics:

Sixty nine percent of iPhone users are happy to check their balances, 62 percent will transfer funds and 46 percent pay their bills from their handsets. Seventeen percent admitted their main bank account is always overdrawn, which is higher than the average of …

Perhaps it was because you spammed them like you are spamming DaniWeb, and they wanted revenge? Why ask for help from a site where you are flagrantly breaking the rules?

OK, so Apple has successfully persuaded a German court to ban the sale of the Galaxy Tab Android tablet on the grounds that Samsung has copied the design of the iPad. The legalities of which revolve around certificate of registration number 000181607 in the Community Designs Register that protects the ownership of design within the boundaries of the European Union.

DaniWeb can reveal exactly what it is that Apple thinks Samsung has copied, and we hope you are sitting down because the actual community design images contained within that certification are basic to say the least. In fact, we would go so far as to say that it looks remarkably like every tablet every to hit the streets and we are, frankly, amazed that the certificate was ever granted in the first place. What it doesn't look like, in any really meaningful way, is an Apple iPad. It looks like something my son would do with an Etch-a-Sketch, which ironically also looks like this interpretation of an iPad!

This has to be one of the most bizarre court cases we've seen in the tech sector in recent years. And that's saying a lot considering how daft most software patent cases are. DaniWeb would love to know what you think. Why not tell us using the comment box below?

Users of the iPhone have stood accused of many things, from being more interested in form than function through to having more money than sense. However, the iPhone bashing has taken an unexpected turn as new research suggests that smartphone users are becoming increasingly rude both at home and in the workplace.

The study of more than one thousand workers in the UK, conducted by social email provider harmon.ie, suggests that the abundance of iPhones and other "electronic devices for collaboration" is directly leading to poor office etiquette and often downright rudeness.

The research revealed that 41 percent of workers continue to use their smartphones during face-to-face meetings in order to send instant messages, reply to text messages, check email or listen to voice-mail.Seventy percent do the same if those meetings are virtual rather than face-to-face. Thirty one percent will disrupt those face-to-face meetings to answer an incoming call, although 40 percent readily admitted it was considered rude to do so. Nineteen percent will ignore direct instructions from senior colleagues at work to disconnect calls.

Eighty five percent will stay connected to work stuff during the weekend, 79 percent during the evening, and 74 percent while on holiday. If you thought that was intrusive, 48 percent said they stay online in bed. Apparently, 35 percent of those asked claim to be permanently connected to the office and never disconnect their devices no matter what. A third of those asked thought that they might lose their …

Quite...

And to get that rep may require more than the current scattergun posting approach methinks...

I got mine at age 17, earliest possible in UK, having passed my text first time.

You clean out your loft becuase you are moving house and find that 90% of the stuff up there comes under the category of 'old computer stuff'.

Apple hacking PWN2OWN supremo and security researcher Charlie Miller is preparing to reveal just how to hack an Apple MacBook battery. Yep, you read that right: Apple battery hacking could be coming to a MacBook near you soon. Well, near you if you happen to be in Las Vegas for the annual Black Hat conference in August that is. Otherwise, DaniWeb suspects you probably won't see any such thing.

Miller, the principal research consultant with Accuvant Labs, says he will demonstrate how to reverse engineer both the MacBook embedded controller (that controls battery charging) firmware and the firmware flashing process in order to completely reprogram the smart battery itself in effect. Something that Miller reckons could enable hackers to overcharge the battery to the point of potentially causing a fire.

The word to focus on here is 'potentially' though as, to the best of our knowledge, Miller has not been able to set fire to a battery or explode a MacBook as of yet using this particular hacking technique.

That said, the concept of being able to factory reset the battery controller to any defaults you like is an interesting one, especially as the changes made will be persistent and able to survive an OS reinstall. Malware authors will, no doubt, be listening carefully at Black Hat in August.

Tal Be'ery, Web security research team leader at Imperva, has been taking notice already and told DaniWeb that while the vulnerability is certainly an original one that …

The world would be better without sanctimonious a-holes as well, but that's unlikely to happen either...

She should have said yes, yes, yes...

:(

“Your PC may be infected” says Google, which has taken the unusual step of warning users that a couple of million or so of them have most likely been taken in by a fake AV scam. According to a post on the official Google blog by security engineer Damian Menscher, Google has noticed an unusual pattern of user activity. “We found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers” Menscher explains, adding that they then collaborated with other security engineers at various companies which were sending the modified traffic in question to determine that the machines responsible were infected with a particular strain of malware.

Google decided to warn anyone matching the traffic pattern it has identified (involving the sending of traffic through particular proxies) when making a search by displaying a notification atop of their search results that says “Your computer appears to be infected” and offers advice on how to fix the problem.

The malware in question would appear to be installed when users are taken in by one of up to a hundred different fake antivirus warning scams that have been circulating for the longest time, although Google has so far been unable to actually name the miscreant malware.

Just to clarify, Walt, let me restate the rule so there is no confusion on your part:

Do ensure that all posts contain relevant content and substance and are not simply vehicles for external links, including signature links

Posts that are not relevant and/or have no substance and act as vehicles for external links break the rule.

Posts that are not relevant and/or have no substance but do not have external links do not break the rule.

As Nick says, being stupid isn't currently a crime. Those posters who do not break this, or any other rule, but otherwise fall into the annoying dumbass category should be dealt with by way of a guiding hand PM from the mods which serves to gently prod them in the right direction towards becoming a valuable member of the community.

Probably a lot more interesting than that pointless reply, to be fair...You wouldn't just be here to spam your signature links would you now?

You're not getting arrested either, on the upside :)

The British website for pop sensation Lady Gaga has been hacked, it's official. The website was targeted by the US SwagSec hacking group it would appear, a group which has a track record (if you'll excuse the pun) of hacking the official websites of pop stars having already hit Justin Bieber and Amy Winehouse to name but two. Universal Music has now confirmed that part of a database was copied and the names and email address records of Lady Gaga fans accessed. The record label was at pains to point out that no passwords or credit card data was stolen. Although precise numbers are not known, it is thought that thousands of fans have had their personal information accessed by the hackers. SwagSec hackers also, according to a number of reports, issued a death threat against Lady Gaga.

Universal Music has now notified all the fans who might have been affected by the security breach, and have issued assurances that security will be beefed up to prevent any repeat of the incident. John Stock, a senior security consultant at vulnerability management specialist Outpost24, however, insists that there must be "some red faces in the Haus of Gaga" and warns that while no financial data may have been taken on this occasion "the potential consequences are still extensive". Not least, as Rob Rachwald, Director of Security Strategy at Imperva notes "it's a safe bet that Lady Gaga fans are getting fraudulent email messages offering exclusive Lady …

If he hadn't fixed it by now, some SEVEN YEARS after the last post in that thread, I doubt it's really proving problematical any more...

It is real, just very small :)

Earlier this week a hacker group called Dev-Team launched a revamped website service that enables owners of the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 (amongst a myriad other iOS-powered devices) to jailbreak them in next to no time, for free, online. The JailBreakMe site exploits a vulnerability with the way that the Safari browser client handles PDF files to enable the jailbreaking to be performed in such a painless way.

However, as security researchers have been warning , the same vulnerability could be exploited by others for nefarious purposes rather than simply the ability to get apps which have not been approved by Apple onto their devices.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security vendor Sophos, worries that "cybercriminals would be able to create booby-trapped webpages that could run code on visiting devices without the user's permission" and predicted that Apple would be spitting feathers "that this vulnerability has been made public in this way" before it had a chance to get a patch out. Indeed, Cluley went on to wonder "how quickly they can issue a patch for iOS to close this vulnerability".

Well now we have the answer, sort of. Apple has confirmed it is working hard on a fix for the JailBreakMe vulnerability and although no release date has been announced, an Apple spokesperson says it will be "available to customers in an upcoming software update".

Given the coverage that the JailBreakMe site is getting online, I suspect that …

I always liked that bloke from the Monty Python sketch:

Tarquin Fintimlinbinwhinbimlim Bus Stop F'tang F'tang Ole Biscuit-Barrel

:?:
What are the discuss on area51 category in DANIWEB.:icon_question:

Currently we are talking about you... muhahaha >;)

Peter Mile.

1. I drink an average of four or five pints of beer (real ale such as spitfire or batemans) per week

2. Stupid question, only applies to those who depend upon booze surely?

3. I use Cialis, lasts longer than Viagra

4. Never water down your beer

Imagine lining up 57.5 billion Apple iPads to build a wall measuring about 4000 miles long and 60 feet high. To put that into perspective, think of the Great Wall of China cloned and stacked on one top of the other, that's how big we are talking here folks. Now imagine all of those iPads stuffed choc-a-bloc with data. 1.8 zettabytes (or 1 billion terabytes if you prefer) of it to be precise.

That, somewhat incredulously, is the amount of data that will be created globally just this year according to the new IDC Digital Universe study ' Extracting Value from Chaos '.

The study suggests that the quantity of data being produced is now actually growing faster than Moore's Law, and yes I know Moore's Law does not apply to data but it's an interesting analogy nonetheless. The amount of data being produced around the world is now more than doubling every two years, which is really quite a frightening statistic.

Need more help visualising just how much data 1.8 zettabytes actually is? OK, how about if everyone, including you dear reader, were to Tweet consistently at a rate of 3 Tweets-per-minute for 26,976 years without stopping at all.

Other interesting things to note from the report include:
Data growth is outpacing the growth of data storage capacity (as a single gigabyte of data can generate a further petabyte of data that is transient in nature such as streaming …

Penetration testing by the US Department of Homeland Security which involved dropping USB thumb drives and various data discs around the car parks of government agency buildings has revealed a not-so-shocking truth: just like most folk, government workers allow curiosity to trump security when faced with the opportunity to have a nosey at something they think they shouldn't be looking at.

Some 60 percent of those who picked up the thumb drives and discs went on to stick them straight into their company computers in order to see what they contained. The more that the drive or disc looked like it really might contain something 'official' and secret, those with an official looking logo stamped on them for example, the more likely people were to plug them in. In fact an amazing 90 percent of the drives with official logos that were picked up were installed.

Of course, this will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows anything about both human nature and IT security. Stick baiting, as the process is known amongst the bad guys, is a remarkably simple and effective method of installing malware onto the networks of target businesses. This particular pen test proves that government departments are not immune to the curiosity factor when it comes to targeted attacks. The DOHS testers got their percentage numbers for this test because the drives were 'infected' with a basic call home routine, but this could just as easily have been …

I swear I thought the thread title was 'Two nuns spotted in China defy explanation' but then I've never been able to explain nuns...

With the release of iOS 5 to developers, Apple has signalled the arrival of the much awaited iPhone 5. But when can we expect to see it, and how will it be different to the iPhone? As usual, the Apple rumor mill has been churning out specs for many months now but some seem much more likely than others so DaniWeb has attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff to bring you what we think is the most probable list of iPhone 5 specs.

Apple has already informed the world, well the world of app developers to whom the release of iOS 5 has been targeted in order for them to get working on creating and updating apps to work with the new iPhone 5 when it launches, that iOS 5 will come complete with no less than 200 new user features. Oh, and let's not forget the updated SDK which accompanies it and features a rather impressive 1500 new APIs.

So what are some of the most interesting of those 200 new user features we can expect to see implemented when iOS 5 hits the streets with the launch of the iPhone 5, which is now expected on September 7th according to most sources we have contacted? Well how about a BlackBerry matching messaging function called, naturally, iMessage? You want delivery and read receipts like the BlackBerry? You got it. You want secure end-to-end encryption like the …

That's Los Angeles in Pakistan is it? Your IP address doesn't lie, unlike you of course who have been spamming your signatures using different accounts here for a couple of years now.

I've deleted them, by the way...

According to reports, the LulzSec hacking group has claimed responsibility for a denial of service hack attack on the cia.gov website resulting in it being inaccessible for a while late yesterday.

LulzSec appears to have taken up the baton of high profile hacking from the Anonymous group in recent weeks, with attacks being reported to have hit the Senate, News Corp, Sony and even the UK National Health Service. Yet all these hacks have one thing in common: they all seem to be aimed at getting media exposure as much as anything else.

It could also be argued that they are exposing serious security shortcomings in web-based operations that really should know better, and certainly the likes of the Senate and CIA sites fall into that category. However, the light-hearted approach to the serious matter of hacking, with 'humorous' Tweets announcing them and claiming responsibility, have led to some security analysts to ask if LulzSec are just in it for laughs?

Not that the FBI is laughing, LulzSec members are currently wanted by the Feds for their activities which, at the end of the day, are in breach of the law no matter how much the group may want to paint themseleves as hacktivist pranksters.

The general public, however, would appear to get the funny side of the hacking according to a new survey from security outfit Sophos. When asked if they found "LulzSec’s activities amusing" an astonishing 56.85 percent …

Erm, THIS is the final word. Discussion now complete, and before this just turns into a trolling session, thread closed.

Ask a group of 100 people how they search for images online and the chances are that the vast majority will give the standard 'Google' response. Indeed, Google Images is a useful search engine if you are satisfied with a scattergun approach to finding all images that match a specific search term. But what if you wanted something a little more focussed, if you'll excuse the photographic play on words? What of you wanted to find all the images taken by your camera and that now appear online?

Impossible, you might imagine, but actually it's not only possible but actually incredibly easy using a free new resource that has entered a public Beta. Called, with a sad lack of creativity, the GadgetTrak Camera Serial Search it does pretty much what it says on the box. Enter the serial number of their camera and search for images online that were taken by that particular camera. As I write this, there are some 2,923,272 camera serial numbers indexed. When you connect to the site you can watch the serial numbers, along with the make and model of camera they belong to, whizz past on a scrolling display under the search box. Hover your mouse pointer over that scrolling display and it stops dead, allowing you to click through and return a search for all the images taken by that particular camera that are now online. Great fun for the voyeur in us, but …

It may seem like email has been around forever, but actually it is exactly 40 years since the first email was sent by the man credited with inventing it, engineer Ray Tomlinson, on Wednesday 8th June 1971.

Tomlinson was a computer engineer who was working for a company that had been hired to help build the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet, at the time. And in case you were wondering, that very first email message simply said: 'QWERTYUIOP' which as any self-respecting geek will know is the top line of letters on a standard QWERTY keyboard. QWERTYUIOP is actually quite apt if you ask me, as it makes as much sense as most of the email sent today considering more than 90% of it by volume is spam.

But don't let the abuse of email taint the fact that without it our lives just wouldn't be the same, and in a very positive way. Email is, in many ways, a return to an age of letter writing and as a writer myself I cannot see that as anything but a huge positive.

Research by Sky Broadband has uncovered some interesting email related facts:42% of Brits have not sent a snail mail letter in the last six month
51% of British workers would rather send an email than pick up the phone to a colleague, whereas only 24% would do the rather do the reverse
25% of Brits don't want their …

@happygeek
I have a question, if I copy paste something from another website, but I tell others that it is not mine and is from the other website(by giving the link), then will I be banned?

You are only banned if you accrue 10 infraction points. A Keep It Legal infraction is worth 5 points.

The Keep It Legal rule clearly states:

"Do ensure you own the intellectual property rights to everything that you post. Do not post copyright-infringing material"

And that still applies even if you then add a link saying "this is where I copied that from" unless you can prove that the IP owner has given you explicit, written, permission for you to use it and for us to publish it.

<cough> You know you are old if you remember the games console Magnavox Odyssey! I have three fully working, complete and boxed, original Odyssey consoles from 1972 in my loft...

I access DaniWeb from my iPhone when away from the office, just to keep an eye on things. Most of the time I use my lappy.

AD: what is this 'PC' thing you speak of? You are taking the 'ancient' thing too far my friend :)

The Kogan Agora 7 inch Android tablet has been kicking up something of a storm even before it has actually shipped. Not least because of the pricing. The Australian company is attempting to break into the UK market and is marketing the device as the best value Android tablet in the world to tempt buyers. It can do this, so the company tells us, as it is the manufacturer of the tablet and only sells directly to the customer via an online shop, cutting out additional middleman costs completely.

Thing is, it may just have a point with a selling price currently sitting at £106 ($175 US) which places it at around a third the cost of a Samsung Galaxy Tab. I say ‘currently’ as the price is a bit of a moving target depending upon when you commit to purchase. The Agora 7” is only available online, and Kogan uses something called LivePrice to determine how much you pay. According to Ruslan Kogan, the 27 year-old founder and CEO of Kogan, that price gradually increases “at a rate that depends on a number of key factors until we sell out, reach our expected dispatch date, or reach our everyday best value price”. Commit early and you get a better deal, and one assumes Kogan gets a better idea of how many units to produce. Full refunds are available at any time while a LivePrice is still being offered, apparently.

If that …