Posts by happygeek

Warnings have been issued today not to complete a customer satisfaction survey that appears to come from McDonald's and promises cash for your answers. A bit like fast food itself, something that looks appetising and promises a quick fix is often not actually that good for you.

IT security and data protection company Sophos has today warned members of the public not to complete a customer satisfaction survey that promises cash in return for completing what claims to be a questionnaire about fast food originating from the McDonald's chain.

The survey is being spread by an email spam campaign of some considerable size, and purporting to come from the 'McDonald's Survey Department' using a subject line of 'McDonald's Customer Survey'. The full text of the email reads : "Dear customer, Please give us only 5 minutes of your valuable time to ask you some questions about our products. Please be aware that we will not ask you about any personal information. In return, we will credit $90.00 to your account - just for your time. If you want to answer our simply 8 questions, please click the link below. Thank you for helping us to become better. Sincerely, McDonald's Survey Department. Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response."

If someone opts to take the survey, they are then asked to provide a bunch of personal information as well as their credit card …

When it comes to data storage and retrieval the current buzz is undoubtedly cloud-shaped, so why would anyone want to invest in Network Attached Storage? Two words: cost and capacity. Cloud services are great, but as far as storing and accessing large amounts of data is concerned things can get very expensive not to mention a little on the slow and clumsy side. Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices solve both the cost per Mb issue and that of access speeds. Unfortunately, setting up a NAS server to work how you want it has traditionally been a fairly complex business and one that has prevented all but the most determined home user (or those with a very geeky friend) from investing in the technology. Until now, that is.

What Dane-Elec has managed to achieve with the newly launched myDitto Server is quite remarkable: this is a truly beginner level, three-step, plug and play NAS device. Seriously folks, not only do you not need to be a network engineer to set it up but you don't need to have one as a close friend you can call for when things go pear shaped either. The amount of technical know-how required to set up the myDitto is approaching a big fat zero, and just requires three basic steps as follows:Plug the myDitto Server into your router and power it up. Now plug one of the supplied myDitto USB keys into your PC (or Mac for that matter) and run …

With the Android developer community buzzing about how easy it is to pirate apps, one outfit took it upon itself to try and track down the pirates. The results are truly shocking.

The provocatively named Android Police site last week claimed that most Android apps can be simply patched and stripped of their licensing protection . Indeed, Android Police even went as far as to produce a video demonstration entitled 'Breaking Google's Android Licensing Verification Library (LVL)' which proved just how easy it actually is. And with 49 percent of publishers making less than they had hoped for from Android development according to one new report, any hint of piracy is going to need to be stepped upon as quickly as possible.

[youtube]eMZ4qYbpN_s[/youtube]

Android app developer Keyeslabs would seem in a good position to help out, what with having introduced an automatic licensing validation tool earlier this year. In response to the Android Police report, Keyeslabs has now turned detective itself and set about tracking down the Android pirates.

In a blog posting entitled ' A Global Piracy Heat Map ' Keyeslabs explains how it did this. Noting that he had experienced very high piracy rates for his own apps, the Keyeslabs developer behind the research decided to try and find out where the piracy activity was coming from on a global scale. And so the concept of a piracy heat map was born, created to show …

For the record, news story sources are varied and plentiful. I write stories based on press releases that are sent to me, information that gets slipped out on Twitter, information that is provided by individual sources via email/phone and even through my own journalistic investigations.

Sure, the same stories get covered on multiple sites but that is the nature of news: only one person/site/publication gets to break a story. DaniWeb has broken stories in the past, stories that have even gone on to become headline pieces for major TV news channels and picked up by the likes of Mashable and Tech Crunch (see what I mean about recycling) but a story can only be broken the once - does that mean it should not be covered by anyone else? Of course not, as long as there is something new to add by way of how the story is written up, analysis of the facts, opinion of the writer and so on.

Speaking with 20 years of experience as a professional, full-time journalist, card-carrying member of the National Union of Journalists and winner of awards including 'Technology Journalist of the Year' and 'IT Security Journalist of the Year' in the UK where I am based, I can categorically state that the first to publish is not only not always the best version of a story but that later 'rewrites' as you would call them often provide a better depth and insight into the same story as the reporter has …

Just as your average Joe starts to 'get' the importance of online security, and that means using anti-virus software, so the bad guys start exploiting this new found understanding by flooding the Internet with fake AV products.

Security researchers at SophosLabs have today identified a major new fake anti-virus software campaign which is threatening to flood the Internet with malicious security products.

The widespread spam campaign is designed purely with one goal: to get the unwary recipient to open HTML files attached to the messages which then redirect web browsers to hacked sites that come complete with a malicious iFrame to launch the fake anti-virus attack. Of course, fake anti-virus is nothing new but the scale of this latest attack is causing concern.

These attacks take the usual form of pop-ups warning that your computer is infected and offering to remove the threats for a software registration fee. "A scam like this can be extremely successful at passing revenue directly and quickly into the hands of hackers - so we all have to be on our guard," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "The attacks are designed to trick people into paying to remove threats from their computer that never really existed in the first place. Once a user's computer is infected with fake anti-virus, the software will continue to bombard the user with bogus warning messages to encourage them to pay for threats to be removed or install …

The founder of Facebook might be facing the death penalty in Pakistan but social media growth is showing no sign of slowing down in India. In fact, it is displaying some of the fastest social networking growth on the planet.

According to a comScore report on Social Networking Sites in India , published today, the Indian social networking audience has risen by an astonishing 43 percent in the last year.

In the month of July alone, some 33 million Internet users over the age of 15 visited social networking sites in India according to comScore measurements, and that represents some 84 percent of the total Internet audience. This places India as the seventh largest social networking market worldwide. The really interesting number to pull out of the comScore figures is not that 43 percenter, but rather that it equates to more than triple the rate of growth of the total Internet audience in India.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook would appear to be the main beneficiary of this India social media growth, seeing a rise of 12 percent from June to July to capture the most visited of social networking spots for the first time with some 20.9 million visitors. To put that growth into some perspective, it represents an increase of 179 percent versus a year ago. But that's where the similarity to other global markets stops though, with 19.9 million Indians visiting Orkut to put it in second place followed by BharatStudent …

Zurich Insurance in the UK has just discovered the true cost of failing to secure confidential customer data properly, as the Financial Services Authority (FSA) fines the company a record £2.275m ($3.5m) for the data loss incident in 2008 which potentially put some 46,000 customers at risk.

The incident occurred when an unencrypted back-up tape containing those 46,000 customer records disappeared in transit between two sites in South Africa in 2008, although apparently it took the best part of a year before Zurich UK heard about the data loss.

According to the FSA the resulting £2.275m fine is the highest levied to date on a single firm for data security failings . But it could have been much worse, Zurich were granted a 30 percent discount for settling at an early stage during the investigation which dropped the fine from an original amount of £3.25m ($5m).

The misplaced data included customers' personal details such as bank account and credit card information as well as information about insured assets and security arrangements. Although Zurich UK states it has seen "no evidence" to support suggestions that the data has been misused or compromised in any way, the fact remains that it certainly had the potential to cause serious problems for the 46,000 customers concerned.

FSA Director of Enforcement and Financial Crime, Margaret Cole, said "Zurich UK let its customers down badly. It failed to oversee the outsourcing arrangement effectively and did not have full …

Send me a PM with your choices, more than one in case the first one or two are already taken, and I will change it for you.

And now closed...

Michael Reagan, the eldest son of former US President Ronald Reagan, has accused people who use email services from Apple, AOL, Google, Hotmail and Yahoo! of "supporting the Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda" and ultimately "hurting our country". His answer, for those supporters of what he calls true "Reagan Conservative Values" is the first conservative email service provider .

In a truly bizarre attack on some of the most successful and popular providers of email across the planet, Michael Reagan insists that every time someone with conservative political views uses their email from these companies they are "helping the liberals".

Apple, AOL, Google, Microsoft (through Hotmail) and Yahoo! are, Reagan says "huge supporters financially and with technology of those that are hurting our country". By establishing an alternative email provider at Reagan.com, the politician reckons that supporters of the "Greatest Conservative of all, my father Ronald Reagan" can support true conservative values.

"When you purchase your email address @Reagan.com you are supporting truly conservative causes and the proceeds from this conservative initiative will help me promote true Reagan values to win back our country in November and in 2012" Michael Reagan promises.

A Reagan.com email account will set you back $39.95 per year from today. For that, you might expect to get a heck of a lot better support than the free mail service providers. But if you read the terms of service agreement it clearly states: "we are under no obligation …

I'm with Dani in that it sounds good as an exercise in blue sky thinking, but bringing it down to Earth would most likely see it break.

That said, there's something intriguing about the notion of Open Source web development for want of a better term.

Many of the biggest forum-based online communities, including DaniWeb, are powered by vBulletin software. So it came as something of a shock when the BBC reported that a vBulletin security flaw means that any hacker could "easily access the main administrator username and password for a site" . But is the security flaw really both that simple and that serious, and are DaniWeb users at risk?

Let's answer the most important question first: No, DaniWeb users are not and have never been at risk from this security flaw as it only impacted upon a specific new version of vBulletin that was released on the 13th July and which DaniWeb has not upgraded to.

Which brings us to the simple and serious part. While the flaw, which exploits sites using version 3.8.6 of the vBulletin software only, is very simple indeed the seriousness of the problem has, in my opinion, been somewhat exaggerated. The flaw is specific to the FAQ section of that vBulletin version, and could be exploited simply by typing a keyword into the FAQ search box which then exposed MySQL database credential data. I will not be revealing any more than that as there are still plenty of forums out there which have not updated to the fully patched and secured version of vBulletin as I write this.

How do I know that? Because another really simple Google search for the vBulletin copyright message reveals them in a matter of seconds. …

Geeks and fast cars have gone together ever since the first young coder made a million developing computer games. However, it takes a true nerd to build a car capable of breaking the land speed record and hitting 1050 miles per hour. A team of true nerds, and a whole lot of technology, in fact.

The launch of the Bloodhound Education Programme this week sees 1.5 million students join that team, with access to the world class research and development behind the car including real world case studies and curriculum materials based on the jet and rocket powered beast. One recent study by the National Foundation for Educational Research concluded that Bloodhound provided a real 'hook' to get kids interested in science and engineering technology, which has to be a good thing.

The full size show car was unveiled for the first time at the Farnborough Air Show on Monday, and represented a 1:1 scale replica of the car that will make the record breaking attempt. The result of three years of aerodynamic study, the car is longer than four Minis parked end-to-end at 12.8 metres.

Intel were involved in this research through the provision of super-computing power to aid the Computational Fluid Dynamics involved. The Bloodhound aerodynamic team ended up generating generated millions of mathematical equations in order to determine how air around the car would react as accelerated to the maximum design speed of 1,050 mph. This data allowed them to …

None of the 'heavy hand of Microsoft' theories explain why the US Dell site is so supportive of Ubuntu while the Europe Dell site apparently so dismissive though.

Want to buy a Dell machine loaded with Linux? Shame, as it appears that Dell Europe would really rather you bought a Windows-powered one, despite having a website devoted entirely to selling Dell Ubuntu laptops. And, oh boy, does it use some strange arguments to dissuade you from becoming a Linux convert.

Three years ago Dell went Ubuntu bashing, making it really pretty hard to buy a Linux-loaded machine from the vendor. The Linux machines back then cost more than the Windows ones, there were warnings about it not being compatible with lots of software and to top it all the Dell sales staff didn't even seem to know that Dell offered a Linux option .

Fast forward to the present and it seems that things have not got a great deal better. Visiting the Dell Ubuntu UK website , the first thing you see is a huge banner telling you that Ubuntu 'keeps getting better' which is a great start. However, it immediately falls into some weird Linux is bad, m'kay affair with the very next thing you see being a bloody big warning stating that Ubuntu is "not compatible with Microsoft WINDOWS or any WINDOWS based programs (Microsoft Office, iTunes etc)" although you can, of course, using WINE.

Dell does, for the record, say a few nice things about Ubuntu such as it coming with built-in office software, being one of the world's most popular open source operating systems …

Teen pop sensation Justin Bieber has already conquered Twitter, and now it would appear he has become the undisputed King of YouTube after knocking Lady Gaga off of the 'most viewed video ever' spot. According to a posting on Twitter by YouTube, Bieber first overtook Lady Gaga on Thursday night but was soon beaten down again as Gaga fans viewed the Bad Romance video by the thousand.

However, within 48 hours the inevitable weight of Bieber fans has taken its toll and the Baby video has now pulled well clear with 247,991,181 views compared to 'just' 246,609,606 views for Lady Gaga. To put this in to some kind of perspective, the third most viewed YouTube video of all time is 'Charlie bit my finger - again' featuring a cute kid and his baby brother with 210,601,397 views.

Lady Gaga has, so far, remained quiet about the YouTube battle. Not so Bieber who commented via Twitter http://twitter.com/justinbieber that "what is goin on with the BABY video on youtube is crazy...i started on youtube so the support...well i just need to say thank u" and later added "someone just showed me and i just need to say that @ladygaga is an incredible artist who have great respect 4. and her vid is incredible".

Of course, not everyone will be pleased to see Bieber grab the record for having the most viewed YouTube video of all time. We have already seen the development of the

His English teacher at school must be so proud...

Viral videos are usually a great laugh, which is why they spread so quickly and the reason they get called viral in the first place. But the laughter soon stops when the bad guys use the lure of a viral video to launch a clickjacking attack.

Security researchers at Sophos are warning that scammers have struck on Facebook with a message that is spreading fast by proclaiming "I am part of the 98.0% of people that are NEVER gonna drink Coca Cola again after this HORRIFIC video" and which includes a link.

What makes this particular attack stand out from recent clickjacking exploits, is the fact that the bad guys ensure that people will pass the message to their Facebook friends by telling them that in order to actually view the video they have to share it with at least seven members.

Of course, it doesn't actually matter how many times that link is shared because there is no video to play. It looks like there is, with a thumbnail of a video showing a Cola bottle and the words 'Coke can't hide its CRIMES' but it's just a thumbnail and nothing more. The social engineering psychology comes into play by including a link which says "Click here To Skip Posting and Reveal The Content" instead of continually checking to see if you've passed the link to enough people. If you hit this link, you get taken to a survey section which …

1. Keep it pleasant. Resorting to immature name calling is no way to make a point, well not if you expect anyone to take you seriously dude.

2. DaniWeb does not delete accounts, nor does it delete posts unless they break the rules. If you no longer wish to be a member, simply stop posting and don't login again.

OK folks, time to calm down before the ugly tattooed admin with the big stick (erm, that would be me) comes along and bashes this thread into submission by closing it.

The Founder: you broke the rules, you were warned for breaking the rules by our Super Moderator Sanjay, the clever money would be on someone learning from their mistakes and moving on from this rather than acting like a troll with all the 'I've got more money than you' nonsense.

Everyone else: stop feeding the fire and fanning the flames.

Despite the ongoing signal strength problems displayed by the new iPhone 4 , there can be no denying that the latest Apple gadget has been a runaway success. With Apple claiming 1.7 million units sold in just the first three days it would be hard to argue. One of the not often discussed implications of that kind of sales surge is what happens to the previous model? It can now be revealed that Apple users are environmentally friendly types, you could call them green Apple users I guess. The iPhone 3G is now officially the most recycled mobile phone in the UK.

I was recently checking out what kind of recycling value my iOS 4 upgraded iPhone 3GS had, just in case I felt the urge to get an iPhone 4 when that signal problem gets sorted, and couldn't help but notice that the iPhone is far and away the most often recycled handset at most of the online sites that deal in such things. At the mobile recycling comparison site Compare and Recycle iPhones occupy the first, second and fourth most recycled positions as I write. The iPhone 3G 8GB is first, followed by the iPhone 3G 16GB and the iPhone 3GS 16GB. Only the Nokia 5800 prevents an Apple one-two-three.

I'm not actually sure that Apple users are being green out of any desire to be environmentally friendly to be honest. In fact I'm pretty sure that the …

A new poll into Operating System popularity by a British computer magazine has revealed that an incredible 37 percent of respondents are still using Windows XP. That's more than Windows 7 which managed to woo 30 percent of the folk taking part, and Vista could only garner a pretty poor 16 percent of support. This being a PC magazine it should come as no great surprise to see Linux being used by 8 percent of respondents and Mac OS by 7 percent. However, what was surprising was the sheer number of people who refuse to let Windows XP die.

Was it really over three years ago now that I penned a story here on DaniWeb entitled Windows XP 2001-2008 R.I.P in which I suggested a suitable epitaph might be good riddance to insecure rubbish? mind you, some 18 months later the doubts were starting to stir and I even went as far as calling Windows XP the invincible OS and suggested that perhaps Microsoft just didn't have the stomach to kill off this dinosaur of the Windows world.

Microsoft could best be described as killing XP gently, I guess, and the first real twist of the knife happens on July 13th when Windows XP SP2 reaches the end of its life . What that means is Microsoft will stop releasing security updates, hotfixes and other updates from that date. Which could be problematical when you consider that …

Hackers have targeted Justin Bieber videos on YouTube, exploiting a cross-site scripting vulnerability which enabled them to bombard viewers with pop-up messages and redirect them to porn sites. The hack attack lasted for the best part of two hours before Google was able to isolate the problem and apply a fix.

As well as using Justin Bieber video clips as the bait for the attack, the hackers also took the opportunity to leave abusive and obscene comments about the popular teen idol singer. A number of banner messages even appeared beneath the most popular Bieber videos proclaiming that he was dead. A Google spokesman told The Telegraph that the YouTube hack had been dealt with swiftly , claiming "Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour, and we released a complete fix for the issue in about two hours. We’re continuing to study the vulnerability to help prevent similar issues in the future."

Meanwhile, security expert Graham Cluley points out that this is a big target with millions of visitors a day and hopes that YouTube will be investigating what went wrong with their processes , as well as "explore if they are reviewing code properly before it is made live to ensure that loopholes aren't left in their code in future."

This isn't the first time that Justin Bieber has found himself at the centre of an online controversy. DaniWeb has previously reported how Twitter tweaked its trending …

I forgot to mention the fact that I have boxes full of ZX80s, ZX81s, Spectrums, Dragon 32/34s etc (working and non-working for spares)...

We are beyond help, methinks.

Any other collectors of vintage video game consoles on DaniWeb? Or am I really the only person sad enough to have more than 1000 of the things in my house? My collection has even been loaned to a museum for a special history of video gaming exhibition before now.

To give you an idea of just how dedicated/fantastic/obsessed/sad (delete as appropriate) I am about my collection, I have no less than three examples of the very first home video games console: the Magnavox Odyssey from 1972. All of them are boxed, complete, original and in full working order. I ended up with three as I was offered a second complete and original example for a good price and simply couldn't resist it, and the third is a rare example of a unit sold in the UK (complete with the UK distributor documents, original bill of sale etc) which again the nerd in me could not resist.

Other stuff here ranges from a wheelbarrow-full of Nintendo Game and Watch devices, loads of truly amazing yet bizarre things such as the Vectrex with its vector graphics for example.

Hey, everyone needs a hobby, right?

It's an interesting question, and one that's being raised by Gartner which is predicting that the number of wireless e-mail users will reach an incredible one billion , worldwide, by the end of 2014. A number that's not too hard to accept, given that earlier this year global business wireless e-mail accounts were being estimated in the region of 80 million, and that's equivalent to around 60 million individual users.

Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, points to how the productivity gains achieved with using wireless e-mail are driving adoption beyond the purely executive reach and reveals that "in 2010, enterprise wireless e-mail is still a priority for organizations, whose mobile workforces are up to 40 per cent of the total employee base. Most midsize and large organizations in North America and Europe have deployed enterprise wireless e-mail already, but on average, for less than five percent of the workforce."

The really interesting stuff starts as wireless e-mail begins to integrate more completely with social networking. There is no doubt that social networking is starting to complement e-mail already as far as interpersonal business communications are concerned. But Gartner is going further, and predicting that courtesy of standardisation, interoperability and the increasing commoditization of mobile email services, vendors are looking to pursue a differentiation into the cloud and into collaborative services. As a result, Gartner says, that social networking services "will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications" at least for …

For the longest time there has been an implied, some might even say explicit, connection between computer infection and online pornography. According to one developer of AntiVirus software that connection has now been well and truly broken.

Ondrej Vlcek, the CTO at AVAST Software, has announced the results of research which suggests that for every 'adult' site that is infected in some way there are 99 sites with non-sexual content that are also infected. That's worth running by you again, websites with non-adult content outscore porn sites when it comes to being infected by a ratio of 99:1

"We are not recommending people to start searching for erotic content" Vlcek insists "but the statistics are clear, for every infected adult domain we identify there are 99 others with perfectly legitimate content that are also infected". The AVAST research discovered that, in the UK alone, there were more infected domains being uncovered on a daily basis containing 'London' as a keyword than those containing 'sex'.

Earlier this year I was reporting how in Britain we appear to prefer most everything online, from Twitter to news, over porn anyway. So it would appear that the myth has been busted that visiting porn sites is the most dangerous of online activities.

However, none of this means that porn sites are somehow the safest place online either. Truth be told the same 'safe surfing' advice applies no matter where on the web you are travelling: have …

Someone posing as Apple head honcho Steve Jobs on Twitter has managed to fool a major UK newspaper into reporting that the iPhone 4 would be recalled after posting a Tweet which said "We may have to recall the new iPhone. This, I did not expect". The Daily Mail website ran a story with a headline which proclaimed "Apple iPhone 4 may be recalled, says Steve Jobs" which was pulled soon after. Of course, this being the Internet there can be no hiding from such mistakes, especially when Daily Mail content is syndicated far and wide.

I was able to locate plenty of copies of the article by Richard Ashmore which that is was "a hugely embarrassing move for Apple" although truth be told it was actually much more embarrassing for the Daily Mail I would imagine. What a shame that a "spokesperson for Apple was not immediately available to comment" to the story, or Mr Ashmore would have probably have been pointed in the direction of the bio for that ' ceoSteveJobs ' account on Twitter which clearly states: "Of course this is a parody account".

Or maybe the journalist should have looked at some of the other ceoSteveJobs Tweets before coming to the conclusion that it must the real deal. Would the CEO of one of the biggest companies on the planet actually post such things as "FaceTime video calls are the future of AppleCare support" …

If you cannot wait to get hold of the new iPhone 4, should you have been lucky enough to have successfully pre-ordered, then you could always upgrade your existing iPhone 3G/3GS to iOS 4 and get many of the same features.

Be warned, though, the update itself is not without some problems. Things got off to a bad start when the iPhone 3GS decided to take rather longer than usual to back up before starting the upgrade procedure. A deep breath, a reboot and I started again, but the upgrade froze during the backup portion completely. Third time was the charm, although it was still a painfully slow process which took over an hour from start to shiny new iOS 4 finish. I've read reports across the Internet of users experiencing very similar backup freezing and slowness. But once installed, what does iOS 4 bring to the iPhone party which is worth waiting for?

Well the multi-tasking support is great fun. Or at least it would be if more third party apps actually supported it. So far I've been able to enjoy using a Twitter client (Twittelator Pro) and Safari, cutting and pasting between the two and accessing them with the 'double home click' trick to pop up icons for running apps. I can listen to streaming radio courtesy of the TuneIn Radio app which has been updated for iOS 4 while doing something else with the iPhone now, which is nice. But that's pretty …

According to the BBC, although you'll need to understand Urdu to read it (here is a rough translation using Google for your convenience if you don't), Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stands accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a Pakistani court filing under something known as 'Messenger Law' for which the punishment can be death.

The case stems from a competition that a Facebook user started which invited users to 'Draw Muhammad' and led to Facebook access being blocked in Pakistan back in May. A competition which proved quite popular with the Facebook 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day' group attracting over 40,000 members before it was pulled. That said, the 'Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day' group which was not pulled managed to attract more than 60,000 members, so make of that what you will.

Boxcrack informs us that on May 31st "a High Court judge, Justice Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry, ordered the government to take action in respect to alleged blasphemy on Facebook. On June 11th in consequence of this order, the Deputy Attorney General authorised and initiated the first stage of investigation and prosecution of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook". Now reports are emerging that a Pakistani lawyer, Muhammad Azhar Siddique, has filed a "First Information Report" (FIR) alleging that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is responsible for the distribution of blasphemous Islamic content.

Zuckerberg is not the only person facing this police investigation as the FIR …

>
and be a professional and do the research yourself as we have already done it for you once!

C'mon, that's more than a little harsh. Dani is professional through and through, and just trying to reach out and get ideas, new as well as old, about things that she could do to improve the place. She does read the threads here, and has taken on board what has been said previously, that doesn't mean she should not ask for further ideas.

And talking of keeping it professional, isn't this all getting just a little bit too personal? My mum always told me to count to ten before responding to anything I was angry about, advice that I have often ignored to my cost but good advice nonetheless. Let's not be too harsh on Dani, without her DaniWeb would not exist in the first place (and that is not meant to devalue the community, just a statement of fact) and without her continuing dedication and hard work (I know the hours she puts in on keeping DaniWeb going and growing) it would not be the place it is now.

Just saying...

The Twitter account of the Conservative MP for Suffolk Coastal, Therese Coffey, has been well and truly hacked it would appear. According to London Spin "The attackers bombarded social media users with sexually explicit messages and comments after gaining access to her Blog, Facebook and Twitter account details".

Although the Facebook account would seem to be back under Tory control, with a message apologising that her account had been hacked and stating that she has the email address "of the person who has hacked in" which will enable her to "do something about it" the Twitter account would appear to still be awaiting a clean up after the hacker, calling himself thegh0st, posted a handful of offensive anti-Tory tweets.

The last warned another Twitter user, Tim Montgomerie who is editor of ConservativeHome blog, that "youre next on the chopping list...freak" and other postings included one which stated "David Camerons wifes a slut...she dresses like a whore!!!"

I recently argued 'Why Goatse was right to disclose iPad data leak' after it came to light that the FBI had started an investigation into the hacker group following the responsible disclosure of an iPad data leak caused by poor AT&T security measures. I said "The security researchers which discovered the vulnerability ensured that AT&T were not only informed, but that it had also closed the hole down, before going public with the news. So why are they, and not the dumbass security folk at AT&T responsible for not securing that data in the first place, the ones under investigation by the FBI?" at the time, and now it seems an arrest has been made.

However, it looks like I might have been right about Goatse doing nothing wrong legally, despite what others argue, as that arrest had absolutely nothing to do with the iPad data leak at all. In fact it appears to have been on drugs charges. According to reports Andrew Auernheimer, aka 'Weev' and 'Escher' from the Goatse group, was arrested on four felony and one misdemeanor charges "involving possession of a controlled substance" on Tuesday. The Register claims that police "allegedly discovered cocaine, ecstasy and LSD during a search of his home".

There's no denying that, if the charges stick, Mr Auernheimer has broken the law by possessing these controlled substances. However, it does seem a little arse about face that the drugs discovery was only made after …

More often than not I'll be writing about the security problems facing Windows XP users, such as when I recently reported how a large number of enterprises are still running XP SP2 machines which will shortly stop being supported by Microsoft in terms of security updates, hotfixes and the like. So imagine my surprise, at the same time that Microsoft reminds us that it's the end of the line for Windows XP netbooks, to finally get hold of a story about Windows XP being good for security.

OK, so the report from the Webroot Threat Blog is a pretty damn specific one, relating just to a single Trojan downloader executable, but it's a Windows XP good security news story nonetheless.

It would seem that researchers at the security labs have caught the first Trojan, a variant of the Tacticlol downloader, which simply refuses to execute under Windows XP. A new spam campaign was distributing the Trojan and it executed as expected under both Windows Vista and Windows 7, but repeated tests on both virtual and real machines, with various levels of patching, have determined that the thing just will not run in an XP environment.

So there you have it, Windows XP users are safe from a Trojan downloader which kick-starts what Webroot describes as a "devastating malware infection" while users of the more secure Windows versions are vulnerable.

The really interesting thing for me is the notion that this …

I am new here so I was not aware of the dates these threads are posted. If you check my profile it is definitely new and i am not spamming or something.

And stellarios is new here as well, but posts from exactly the same IP as you, and has the exact same signature links as you, and oddly enough voted down the same posting as you after you stated you would "deal with" the posters reputation. Odd that...

Almost as odd as user snipzers who has a different IP to post from, but the exact same signature links as you, and also downvoted that post.

Or how about the other handful of brand new accounts all started on the same day, all with no posts but all of whom happened to downvote that same members post that you threatened to 'deal with' on the reputation front?

You can see why someone might think that these were all the same person, and that person was involved in some kind of spamming activity can't you?

iPad users in the USA have found themselves caught up in a security gaff which saw subscriber data of some 114,000 of them exposed for anyone to see. Subscriber data such as email addresses the Integrated Circuit Card ID that authenticates them on the AT&T network. The security researchers which discovered the vulnerability ensured that AT&T were not only informed, but that it had also closed the hole down, before going public with the news. So why are they, and not the dumbass security folk at AT&T responsible for not securing that data in the first place, the ones under investigation by the FBI?

According to a Goatse spokesperson "All data was gathered from a public webserver with no password, accessible by anyone on the Internet. There was no breach, intrusion, or penetration, by any means of the word. The dataset was not disclosed until we verified the problem was fixed by the vendor". Indeed, the timeline of events could not be much clearer as far as the matter of acting responsibly goes.

The vulnerability was discovered and verified, with user data extracted as proof, and AT&T were informed via a third party. AT&T then acted to fix the vulnerability, and Goatse ensured that this fix was in place and working (meaning there was no further threat to use data) before contacting a journalist at Gawker with the story and the proof in the form of the acquired dataset. The journalist concerned, Ryan Tate, then acted …

The bug, I suspect, was someone failing to paste the link in...

The failure, I'm certain, was in Google thinking that people actually want a confusing full screen image that you cannot remove (only replace with another confusing image) instead of the clean and crisp screen that helped make Google what it is today.

All in all, a massive FAIL

What do you, dear reader, call a posting on Twitter? I'm guessing the chances are high that you call it a tweet, like pretty much everyone else I know. Apart from the editorial elite at the New York Times that is, which has just banned the word 'tweet' from being used in conjunction with anything other than birds making chirpy noises, on the grounds that it is a silly word amongst other things.

According to reports the New York Times has sent a memo out to contributors asking them not to use the word tweet, in which a man with the title of 'standards editor' says: "outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English" and insists that "standard English is what we should use in news articles".

Phil Corbett, the standards editor in question, then goes on to justify his assertion with some nonsense about favouring established usage over jargon, and how regular people using Twitter would not use the word. Really? I think Mr Corbett might be surprised, if he actually bothered to ask a bunch of Twitter users about this, as to just how many of them do. However, the really telling bit, I feel, comes towards the end of the memo when Corbett admits that "Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly".

The official advice from the New York Times appears to be to use the words 'say' or 'write' …

So who's going to be there then?

I'm looking forward to meeting you all F2F, just be gentle with me and promise not to mention signature spam or the new site design :)

Microsoft will stop releasing security updates, hotfixes and other updates for Windows XP SP2 on July 13th 2010. No biggie, you might think, after all Windows XP SP3 was released way back in April 2008 and since then we've had both Vista (perhaps best forgotten) and the much more palatable Windows 7. Yet despite the death of XP SP2 being absolutely no surprise to IT admins the world over, it would seem that a large number of machines within enterprise networks are still running that very version of the Windows OS.

Qualsys reckons we are still more than a year away from all machines migrating away from XP SP2 and this threatens to leave many of them exposed to exploits for the vulnerabilities that you can bank upon being unleashed in the second half of 2010. It's not really such a big concern for home users, of course, as XP SP3 is already being pushed automatically through Windows Update, but in the enterprise such automatic updating just isn't feasible.

DaniWeb asked Qualys CTO, Wolfgang Kandek, what global security risks the Windows XP SP2 end-of-life creates?

"Starting in August, the risk of using SP2 will grow as more vulnerabilities for Windows XP are uncovered over time. While we do not know the exact dates and the severity of these vulnerabilities, we are certain that after 90 days automated attacks (exploits) will be available. These exploits will give the attacker full control over the infected machine, including access to …

The box that the HandShoeMouse arrived in proudly claims that this is "the only mouse that fits like a glove" although I'd take issue with that. You don't wear it like a glove, but rather it wears you. The glove analogy does hold up when it comes to the pre-purchase ritual, however, as this is the first time I have ever needed my hand to be measured before I could purchase a mouse! The vendor website guides you through the process, with a separate order route for right and left handed users. It's not overly complicated, which is handy if you'll excuse the pun, and simply involves a ruler and some accurate measuring of the length of your hand.No ordinary rodent

So why all the palaver? Simple: this is no ordinary mouse. Not that you need me to tell you that, look at the pictures for goodness sake. Have you ever seen anything like it? The thing has the appearance of a stingray, with smooth flowing lines that defy conventional mouse design rules. That's because this mouse design has evolved with the help of a group of mechanical engineers working in cooperation with Dutch Erasmus MC (Erasmus University Hospital Rotterdam) department of Biomedical Physics and Technology plus the Neurosciences and Anatomy department in order to link anatomy and technology with a goal of eradicating the type of strains normally associated with mouse usage.

This is the mouse re-invented...

Writer's block

I'm a writer by profession, …

Wow! Who would have thought that teenage girls could be so vicious? C'mon ladies, I know you all love Justin Bieber sooooooooooooo much but PLEASE try reading what is being said before typing your hate emails and hitting the send key. Yes, that's right, I've had some pretty weird email heading my way since posting this piece. How about these snippets (my replies in brackets)

"You ******* retard Justin is not dead!!!!!!" (I never said he was, but thanks for not reading anyway)

"If you had half the talent of Justin Bieber you would be a much better writer" (At least I know what Germany is)

"Why don't you just die of cancer" (Isn't it way past your bedtime?)

"**** you and *** you again you ******* **** LEAVE JUSTIN ALONE, OK!" (I feel a mind reading session coming on: you are 13 and a Biber fan. Am I right?)

"I wish I could censor you and your bullshit from the internet" (you can, just don't read my stuff - simple)

I have written about many contentious issues before now, courting controversy and expecting a heated response, but never have I experienced the kind of pure hatred and nastiness that my email inbox has seen as a result of this. What surprises me most is that these rather emotional young girls have gone to the trouble of looking up my email address in order to be able to vent their collective spleens. Seriously girls, …

Bad news for anyone with an iPhone 3GS: even if you have the latest OS, even if you have a PIN number, even if it isn't jailbroken - it can be hacked by anyone using a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.

I wouldn't ordinarily reveal exactly how to hack an iPhone within a news story such as this, but what the heck, here's all the gory detail revealed, step by step.

• Step 1 - Take a powered down iPhone 3GS and connect it to your computer running a fully up to date version of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.
  
• Step 2 - See Step 1.

Seriously, that really is all it takes according to security blogger Bernd Marienfeldt who reckons that the way Ubuntu Lucid Lynx handles the iPhone means that a ton of data is accessible, even if that iPhone is PIN protected and running the very latest version of the OS. How much data exactly? Well how about all your Google safe browsing databases, game content, music, photos and videos, voice recordings and so on for starters? The person gaining access in this way will leave no visible footprints to show the iPhone has been compromised, and will enjoy full read and write access during the hack.

About the only thing someone could not do is make phone calls without having your PIN number, but that's precious little comfort should your lost or stolen iPhone end up in the hands of someone …

I don't hate Bieber, in fact I wish him all the best of luck (especially if he ever tours Germany) - but it is interesting how the very name 'Justin Bieber' does seem to polarise opinion. I'm more interested in how far people will go to prevent that name appearing during an online session. Seems a mighty overreaction to me, hence the Chinese state censorship comparison. There's plenty I don't like online, but I don't go to the extremes of using software to remove all traces of it from my view - instead I don't knowingly go looking for it.

As my late father used to say "I hate sex on the TV, I keep falling off" but he also used to say "If you don't like sex on the TV, don't keep watching it" and I think he had a point.

Justin Bieber is, so my 10 year old daughter informs me, a pop sensation. Actually, her exact words when I asked just who the heck this Bieber bloke who keeps topping the Twitter trending chart is were: Oh My God, Justin Bieber, he's gorgeous. A little more journalistic investigation turned up the fact that in reality he's a 16 year old Canadian who doesn't know what the word German means.

Having listened to a couple of his songs, and I must confess that I'm more a Slipknot man myself so my opinion of Bieber is unlikely to be too high, I fail to see what all the fuss is about - however I would not wish him dead, even if only virtually. It appears not everyone is so generous.

Bieber has been flying high on Twitter, pretty much dominating the trending charts for months on end. Until now, following an apparent tweak to the Twitter trending algorithm Bieber has vanished from view from the social networking trending topics list. Twitter now looks for those things that are 'immediately popular' and representing the moment in time rather than taking a historically popular over a period of time viewpoint. Twitter is, of course, at pains to point out that Bieber has not been banned despite the facts appearing to suggest that he most certainly has been as far as the trending topics list is concerned.

But that is not enough for some people, who simply …

That's the surprising consensus reached at a meeting of 30 CSOs representing some of the UK's leading enterprises held in London during the past week. This despite a poll at the bi-annual CSO Interchange event revealing that those same CSOs view social networking as the most over-hyped threat.

When it came to the round table discussions on the subject of social networking, however, the gathered CSOs expressed what has been called a "strong preference" for companies to consider banning them all. Well, almost all, as LinkedIn gets an exception as most of the CSOs considered that acceptable. Could that possibly have something to do with the CSOs being more likely to be active members of LinkedIn, a business-to-business oriented social network, than Facebook or Twitter I wonder? Perhaps they missed the news about LinkedIn and Twitter integration last year.

Indeed, polling showed that some 75 percent of companies represented had already chosen to go down the social networking ban route, pretty much the same number as the same poll last year indicated. Interestingly, considering that this was a meeting of security executives, the ban reasoning was as much to do with an impact on productivity as it was matters security related.

Even more interestingly. the gathered CSOs admitted that they recognised any company which did ban social networking tools risked alienating the younger members of the workforce and they would be likely to resort to their own mobile devices - and potentially open …

At first glance the news story headline from The Telegraph was rather comforting: Britons spend more web time reading news than looking at pornography. That's one big finger flipped up in the face of all those who decry the Internet as being a cesspool of depravity and the people who use it as bereft of a moral compass. However, when you read behind the headline things do not look quite so clear cut.

The story came about as a result of research published by the United Kingdom Online Measurement Company (UKOM) which suggested that the proportion of time that the British spend looking at online porn had dropped over the last three years while online news consumption has all but doubled during that same period.

Thing is, the actual percentages are so close you might as well run a headline that says 'Brits like online news and porn' and it would have been just as accurate. Apparently we spend an average of 2.8 percent of our time consuming news while adult website browsing accounts for an average 2.7 percent of that time.

So when the newspaper followed this 'revelation' with a quote from a UKOM spokesperson that "the prevalence of web adult usage has always been greatly overestimated" which is true enough, but to suggest that these figures somehow punctured the myth that porn was behind Internet popularity is bizarre if you ask me.

For a start, choosing the news and porn …

Dani most certainly is listening, and acting upon many of the points raised in this forum. However, there is a difference between listening and accepting every argument made. If you want real chaos then that would come if Dani just caved every time someone disagreed with some element of site design or rule implementation.

For what it's worth, Dani has listened and fixed the following so far:

• Reputation and solved threads in member's posts - DONE
• Polish the MFF design - DONE
• Fix up the white papers section - DONE
• Fix icon in thead listing pages that says whether you have posted in the thread - DONE
• Make threads with zero replies differentiated - Fixed bug in Unanswered tab
• Fix problem where navigation menu hides behind tabbed navigation and member profile chart in IE - DONE

Other stuff is still being worked on, and worked on for far more hours in the day than most of us are happy to put in.

A little less Dani bashing would probably go a long way. Refusing to help anyone in the forums is, to be honest, not going to sway anyone to your point of view. If something is going to be changed it will be changed depending upon the merit of that change as determined by Dani after considering the arguments made by folk here. It will not get changed as a result of holding any forum to ransom.

I think you can tick this one as things that Dani has fixed already :)

Well the site is done, but the sorting out any bugs and tweaking stuff will be ongoing for a week or two, so a little patience will go a long way I suspect.