The robots?
They'll be escorting the intruders out of the building, of course. Although it might be useful to re-equip one to clear up the resulting mess of blood and gore...
Posts by mittfh
416 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2008
BOFH: Lock shock
BOFH: Robot wars
Monday 4th October 2010 17:02 GMT 
Other ideas...
Definitely include a step-up transformer connected to the casing. Just in case the techs aren't wearing very thick rubber-soled shoes. Heck, turn the upper half into a tesla coil dome. Or buy a job lot of "next-gen" tasers and incorporate them into the design. With a suitably amplified potential difference.
EM pulse generator - fry all electrical equipment within a certain radius of the robot.
Fuel cell power plant - just make sure the H2 bottle is well protected.
GPS + flamethrower - as soon as it arrives it goes on the rampage, before the techs have a chance to get anywhere near it. Which also explains the icon I've chosen.
Google menaces penguins with Street View Antarctica
Thursday 30th September 2010 22:09 GMT
Streets?
Yeah, I was thinking that... I didn't think there were many streets down in Antarctica, especially as the few human buildings down there gradually get covered by the white stuff.
Unless they have certain routes they use between scientific bases and the penguin colonies.
Then again, since a certain TV programme once drove to the North Pole, it wouldn't surprise me if the Chocolate Factory doesn't ask them to do it again... but this time with a few hundred kg of computer equipment in the back and an all seeing eye mounted on a pole above the truck.
Just thought... thinking of penguins, have they done Linus' street yet? :)
Verizon courts Star Wars set with Droid R2-D2
Thursday 30th September 2010 21:16 GMT 
Design
I must say, in terms of looking authentic, it's only just behind the Halloween costume. That is described as having a "detailed realistic design on the front".
(Excuse me a minute while I ROFL at that statement)
Then again, Lucasfilm appear to take any excuse to further market the Star Wars brand - case in point: 3D-ifying all six films (err...why would anyone *volunteer* to watch Jar-Jar Binks in 3D?)
But still, dedicated fanbois might like it...
Skype and Facebook sitting in a tree?
Thursday 30th September 2010 15:16 GMT
Seperate contact groups?
Err... you can!
Familiarise yourself with the concept of "Friend Lists" and Custom privacy settings. Once you've got friend lists set up, it isn't too complicated to determine who sees what in your profile (so, for example, personal friends would see more than colleagues, since they're more likely to know your education history etc. anyway).
Unfortunately, the problems occur when when sending messages: the only way you can restrict messages to specific friend lists is to click on the padlock icon, choose Custom, and type the name(s) of the friend list(s) into the box.
It would be so much nicer if Facebook realised that people have different social circles (not just one big grab-bag one), and the custom privacy options could be integrated into the main box (Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends, Only Me), and it would be nice if a default privacy level could be set for each type of post (e.g. posts from FarmVille only go to people in my "Farmers" friend list, so the rest don't get spammed with application messages).
But they'd probably think doing this would make it too complicated for newbies... :(
Apple in 873-page legal claim to word 'Pod'
BOFH: Die, Robot
Project Canvas becomes YouView
Thursday 16th September 2010 21:59 GMT
DRM and standards etc.
Unfortunately, a fair amount of broadcast content is made by companies other than the BBC, ITV, Ch4 and Ch5. Some of these don't like the idea of people recording content. Add on the self-interested views of the PRS, who'd probably object to people recording anything containing commercial music, as the artists wouldn't be getting their royalties. DRM keeps the novice consumer happy as they can still record the content, but it also keeps the content providers happy as it makes it very difficult for users to copy the recordings to other platforms (oh, and allows them to delete the content after an arbitrary period of time).
As for mandating a single DRM standard, I would have thought the reasoning to be obvious - it's far easier to just bundle one form of DRM into the boxes than a different one for each channel / content provider.
Virgin is apparently unhappy because it's going to be an immutable standard - i.e. they can't add their own stuff to it unless it's provided through the Canvas interface.
Sky are apparently unhappy as they'd prefer to let each individual hardware manufacturer devise their own spec and let the market decide, rather than a bunch of content providers. Oh, and they're not happy about Canvas forcing a UI on the user.
Personally, most consumers would be happy if there was a single UI (perhaps with minor colour scheme / logo tweaks for individual manufacturers), as there doesn't seem to be a consistent UI with FreeView, and many UIs are cr*p (remember Teletext Extra?)
But one feature that would be welcomed by almost everyone: a channel list that auto updates itself. It's hardly an incentive to test out DTV before switchover if you have to spend 5 minutes doing the retune dance every time there's a channel change.
Google Instant – more searches, less thought
Tuesday 14th September 2010 14:26 GMT
Firefox Start
Just append /firefox to your favourite Google domain (e.g. google.com/firefox, google.co.uk/firefox, google.ie/firefox etc.) They haven't got around to implementing Instant Search on the Firefox Start Pages yet (and they work in any browser - including Internet Exploder!)
Of course, if you try searching from the results page, you'll get Instant Search back on.
Alternatively, find another search provider...
Google pulls trigger on 'Instant' search engine
Wednesday 8th September 2010 23:14 GMT
Firefox Start
It's invaded google.com and google.co.uk, but so far doesn't appear to have invaded the Firefox Start page (which loads fine in Chrome):
http://www.google.co.uk/firefox
PS. As for the sextant, the top results for the first three letters relate to a certain TV programme featuring Sarah Jessica Parker.
As for single letters, here's the alphabet according to Google:
A is for Argos
B is for BBC
C is for Currys
D is for Debenhams
E is for Ebay
F is for Facebook
G is for Google Maps
H is for Hotmail
I is for ITV
J is for John Lewis
K is for KLM
L is for Lotto (UK National Lottery)
M is for MSN
N is for Next
O is for O2 (the company, not the molecule)
P is for PayPal
Q is for QVC
R is for RightMove
S is for Sky (Rupert Murdoch's baby)
T is for Tesco (you have to type tw for you-know-what)
U is for YouTube (I kid you not!)
V is for Virgin (Virgin Atlantic being the top result)
W is for Weather
X is for XBox
Y is for YouTube (again!)
Z is for Zara
What about Google by Numbers?
0 is for O2 (oh two)
1 is for 192 (dot com)
2 is for 24 (TV Series) on Wikipedia
3 is for 3 (the mobile phone network)
4 is for 4OD (Channel 4's video on demand service)
5 is for 5 day weather (BBC then Met Office)
6 is for 6 music (the radio station saved from the axeman)
7 is for 7zip (the open source compression software)
8 is for 8 Ball
9 is for 90210 (TV series) on Wikipedia
UK.gov fishes for ID ideas
Thursday 2nd September 2010 15:18 GMT
ID Database
I never quite saw the need for creating another identity database. Surely HMRC already have a database of (almost) every adult in the UK, and ONS almost certainly maintain an electronic record of census information. Other agencies hold vast amounts of information on large chunks of the UK population, e.g. electoral register, local authorities (council tax), DVLA (drivers), NHS (depending on where you live, either your GP practice or the newfangled summary care record thingy)...
Now the national DNA database has been severely scaled back, but you could certainly imagine that if a rapid DNA testing kit was invented (that could produce results in a few minutes), a database containing some form of hashcode representation of people's DNA could be set up as an identity register. For cross-checking purposes it would probably need name / address / DOB - but that could easily be achieved with just a single field - a foreign key to one of the other databases.
And for fairly obvious reasons, tweak the DB code to make it impossible for anyone other than the DB administrator to to bulk export records, log every access request, and automatically run a report every week / month listing those who've made anomalous requests to the DB.
Undead Commodore 64 comes back for Christmas
Wednesday 25th August 2010 21:47 GMT 
BBC Micro next?
Believe it or not, even the good old BBC Micro is not dead yet! There's a suite of them at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley, where A level students are learning how to do *real* programming, without all the hand holding modern IDEs offer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10951040
Mozilla man: Firefox 4 will leapfrog JavaScript rivals
Short passwords 'hopelessly inadequate', say boffins
Monday 16th August 2010 22:00 GMT
LastPass?
OK, so it stores your passwords on a remote site, which does make a SPOF, but they are stored with 256-bit encryption, which makes it less likely a brute force attack will find them.
It's fairly painless to set up and use on FireFox - it's also available for Chrome but the UI isn't as good, and it successfully detects the majority of username / password fields (although it struggles with Wikia - it detects but won't autofill the login popup). Although you access your passwords with a single password, it you're smart enough to be using the program you'll probably choose a fairly long master password anyway.
The program also has the ability to generate secure passwords - tell it how long you'd like the password and what characters the site allows (many still don't allow non-alphanumerics, and several impose a limit of <12 characters, with some only accepting 8 letter passwords!), and it'll generate a completely random password, which you don't need to remember because it remembers them for you.
Oh, and you can download the (encrypted!) file of passwords, so even if something untoward happens to lastpass.com, as long as you've got the extension you can still access your passwords.
BOFH: Lies and the lying liars who lie about them
Friday 13th August 2010 11:24 GMT
When will they ever learn....
Then again, if any lusers at the company were clued up on the BOFH and PFY, they would have arranged a transfer ASAP. Except of course that would only work if they kept all their documents on a USB Flash Drive, and never (under any circumstances) contacted IT. Not that such activities would prevent the BOFH / PFY "discovering" incriminating emails or a whole host of other means of "persuading" them not to run to the competition...
Defra gifts £22m to payments quango
Google spins out happy-clappy autofill Chrome 6 beta
Firefox 4 hits third beta stage, gets touchy-feely with Windows 7
Thursday 12th August 2010 13:55 GMT
"Built in" vs "Add On"
Sure you can build a lean, mean browser, with virtually everything other than basic browsing handled through add-ons. The trouble is, hardly anyone would use it as functionality that may seem like frivolous add-ons to an experienced web user may be viewed as core functionality to someone less experienced, who'd prefer a browser that could do everything all the other browsers can do "out of the box".
Besides, I seem to recall reading somewhere that part of the reason for FF's lethargy is because it uses SQLite databases rather than flat files to handle bookmarks, history, potentially malicious sites etc., and it presumably takes a while to load them.
Independent bigs up the 'Wanky Balls festival'
Wednesday 11th August 2010 15:44 GMT
Daily Wail
Nah, the Daily Wail would just run a front page headline screaming that Wanky Balls cause cancer...
...as does reading rival newspapers, using Facebook, using electric nights when you take a leak at night, eating any form of meat, using any household chemical, touching plastic bottles, going on HRT, or any other activity which humanity didn't do 10,000 years ago.
Beeb deploys ISS as unit of measurement
Tuesday 10th August 2010 11:27 GMT
The maths...
So, if the ISS orbits at 350km, that's 350,000m or 350,000,000mm
Each dollar coin is 2mm thick, so divide that figure by two.
$175,000,000
Multiple that by seven.
$1,225,000,000
So they're only $125,000,000 out...
Perhaps "Just over 6 International Space Stations" would have been more accurate:
$1,050,000,000
Or $50,000,000 out.
UK ICT classes killing kids' interest in tech
Thursday 5th August 2010 11:47 GMT
Curriculum
Having attempted secondary school ICT teaching before choosing a more rewarding career, here are a few reasons:
* A large emphasis in many curricula on spreadsheets and databases, which many (correction: almost all) pupils instinctively regard as complicated / too hard / boring by the time they reach Year 9.
* A lack of relevance to the wider world. The vast majority of them won't be creating databases from scratch or using nested equations (e.g. IF(AND(B1<23,B1>5),"Yes","No") in spreadsheets. And the contexts are so corny - mobile phone tariff comparison, five a day, membership of an after-school club.
* AiDA / CiDA / DiDA in particular expect 14 year olds to engage in self-guided project work - something they're unlikely to have done beforehand. The qualification series looks as though it was designed for the post 16 market, but is aimed at the 14-16 range. There's also huge potential for dishonest marking - the teacher is supposed to mark them down if they need any assistance / guidance during the project (theoretically, pupils should spent 2/3 of the course learning skills, 1/3 doing the project. In reality, some schools kick start the project after only 1/2 term preparation. Introducing the skills in another context doesn't work as they can't 'map' them across contexts.)
It'll be interesting to see what the experience of schools is with the newfangled Applied ICT diploma, since the diplomas were allegedly designed by industry sector skills councils...
Next Gnome delayed until 2011
Thursday 5th August 2010 00:01 GMT
Yes...
...if you take a deltree /y c:, a format c: /u or fdisk your hard drive and install a proper OS on it first :)
Then take the "Recovery" CD, nuke it in the microwave for a couple of seconds and watch the fireworks, then hang the CD outside as a bird scarer. Do the same with any Windoze driver CDs then put the reams of multi-lingual manuals (300 pages, of which 2 are English) in your recycling box.
Liberal Google, Yahoo!, Apple hurting America claims Reagan
Wednesday 4th August 2010 22:44 GMT
In a few years' time...
...there's a small possibility the Democrats could get their own back with a husband/wife combo...
Erm, the bundled freebie? How about Bill having a Beer in Brum? :) Well, it's bound to be better than the infamous "I did not have sexual relations with that woman!"
Oh, and talking of Monica, apparently she's now living in London, where she's completed a MSc in Social Psychology.
Dixons aims high, medium and low with own-brand blizzard
Wednesday 4th August 2010 08:09 GMT 
Sandstrom Design
That link points to a Portland, Oregon design company. And judging by their website, if I lived in the area I'd avoid them with a barge pole.
"Look ma, I can do Javascript background colour cycling!"
The source also reveals two other bits of JavaScript: a tracking cookie and a "data collection script". Even more reason to avoid them!
Then again, I wouldn't touch Dixons PLC with a barge pole either. A friend of mine once visited PC World and asked where the laser printers were. After being taken to the scanners, the sales droid asked "Are they the ones that don't use any ink?" Needless to say, said friend exited the store, went around the corner to Staples, and found intelligent life (plus a laser printer).
Tombstone for the linkage mistake. Naughty, naughty!
Firefox market share drops as IE makes slender gain
Monday 2nd August 2010 23:11 GMT
3.5.11?
Cripes, the Fedora team are a little slow. Mandriva 2010.1 comes with 3.6.6. With eight (mainly text-based) tabs open, it's consuming 118 MiB - 107 for the main binary and 11 for the plugin container. I have 28 add-ons enabled and 2 disabled.
The only problems I've really noticed are the perennial memory leaks - after running it for a few days (putting the computer in standby between sessions) and opening several YouTube tabs, the memory usage can spiral (I once had it consuming over 800MB - I was starting to wonder why it was starting to be lethargic!) - but then that's probably my fault for running it into the ground. Startup takes about 12 seconds (about the same time as LiVES) but then again, there are 28 add-ons to load!), but Chrome takes ~6 seconds (including loading the Google homepage) on the first try and ~3 on subsequent occasions (as do the other Kebkit browsers - so it probably keeps a Webkit service running for a while after closure) and Thunderbird ~9 seconds (excluding checking my two accounts). GIMP and OpenOffice.org take ~8 seconds, and RPMDrake ~18 seconds. Which is my biggest bugbear about the OS. If you include the time it takes to log into Mandriva Control Centre ("Configure Your Computer") in the first place, you're looking at nearly 30s before you can search for and install software. And unless you know roughly what the package is called, you can't cheat by using a terminal and urpmi - besides which, the CLI doesn't allow you to browse the repositories.
Win 7 up, Mac OS X down in market share wars
Monday 2nd August 2010 21:05 GMT
Linux?
So if they're counting iOS, will Android be counted separately or lumped together with Linux? I imagine if Google get Andoid or Chrome OS running on iPad clones, Linux will start advancing towards 2%.
Meanwhile, on the Windoze scene, what percentage are using Win 2k or (heaven forbid) NT 4 / Win 9x?
Emmerdale shoves jam rags in innocent kiddies' faces
Tuesday 27th July 2010 16:55 GMT
Off to Urban Dictionary...
Not being acquainted with the colloquialism myself, I did what any sane individual with access to the net would do - look it up on Urban Dictionary.
Right, so it's a box of tampons. Excuse me, Daily Wail, but I would think that's a perfectly reasonable item for a female to put on their shopping list - and pretty much every post-pubescent female would know what they are (if listed under their proper name), and probably have used such devices themselves, regardless of their attitudes to sexual relationships.
I assume "tampons" would have generated similar outrage, as would the related product "Sanitary Towels" (unless they wrote a term also used for a certain electronic device...)
Image recognition – defense against a Lampard replay?
Saturday 10th July 2010 16:20 GMT
One potential Hawk-Eye flaw...
It runs on Windoze servers. So most of the time it will work flawlessly, then just as there's a crucial ambiguity over a cup final goal, it will throw a hissy fit because it couldn't find a net connection to download the latest Windoze updates, and the combination of that and the Hawk-Eye software causes a fatal exception (otherwise known as a BSOD)...
Or am I being too cynical? Tux for obvious reasons...
Feed curry to sheep, boffins suggest
Wednesday 7th July 2010 10:47 GMT
Radioactive cheese?
"Quality Evaluation of Sliced and Pizza Cheeses Treated by Gamma and Electron Beam Irradiation".
No doubt the irradiated cheeses give you a (not so) healthy glow... why use carrots to help you see in the dark, when eating irradiated cheese results in you lighting up the room without needing to worry about torches?
All gov jobs to go online
Wednesday 7th July 2010 10:39 GMT
Job Descriptions
Perhaps in the light of this, it would be useful for departments / councils to include wording in the job description in the ad to enlighten people as to what the job entails. Take the "Cheerleading Development Officer" for example - what exactly do they do? If they're involved with promoting cheerleading in schools, how many cheerleading teams are there in their patch? What are the benefits to society (other than encouraging teenage girls to take up a form of exercise which apparently is a combination of dance and gymnastics)? Perhaps they really do motivate sporty males to do their best, and ensure both get strenuous workouts that reduce their risk of middle age obesity. With council budgets likely to rapidly decline over the next few years (a combination of reduced funding from government and strong encouragement not to raise council tax) they'll need to vigorously examine and justify every new post they create.
Two infosec blunders that betrayed the Russian spy ring
Thursday 1st July 2010 15:18 GMT 
Xanatos Gambit?
Well done FBI, you've found the "Agents" you were meant to find. Unfortunately, while you've been spending precious time and resources investigating these, the real agents have been having a merry old time, safe in the knowledge you were looking in the wrong direction.
Of course, the Russians could have just employed the easily-detectable, but it would be a masterful if they have been playing a Xanatos Gambit.
Russian spy ring bust uncovers tech toolkit
Thursday 1st July 2010 11:31 GMT
Xanatos Gambit?
Perhaps this 'gang' were all decoys. It's a simple enough process - get the FBI to waste all its time and resources on a bunch of apparently hopeless spies, in the hope that they don't notice the real spies operating under their noses...
It's a similar method to that used by Nicholas Owen, the priest hold builder back in the days when English Catholics were persecuted. First, you build a 'fake' priest hole, which is cleverly concealed but also 'safe' to discover. The searchers would find it, open it up, find no-one there, and continue on their way. But unbeknown to them, this priest hole concealed the entrance to another... For example: a fake fireplace in a room. Investigators would notice the fireplace without a fire or chimney, so climb up it into the attic, where they would (hopefully) fail to notice the attic had a fake end wall...
Europe approves US mass data grab
Tuesday 29th June 2010 09:34 GMT 
Sledgehammer, meet nut...
I wonder how long it will be before they decide that not all wannabe terrorists make monthly donations to Hamas are are involved with suspiciously large transactions to remote areas of Afghanistan or Pakistan, and therefore need to snoop on, say, our library transactions as well.
No doubt if the hawks get their way, eventually the majority of the world will be subjected to the whims of the USA PATRIOT Act...
<-- Well, surely that's got to be the most appropriate icon?!
WTF is... Project Canvas?
Monday 28th June 2010 12:38 GMT
Consistent UI
Make sure the UI is agreed by all the partners, but whatever happens, DO NOT ALLOW ADS!
I repeat: DO NOT ALLOW ADS!
The last thing we need is another Teletext Extra EPG invasion...
As for Virgin and Sky, IIRC they were invited to join the Canvas working group, but declined.
If manufacturers want customisation, how about allowing certain parts of the GUI to be skinnable? That way, the interface would be identical across different hardware models, but in one of the corners the logo of the relevant hardware company could appear.
Dixons renames itself Dixons
Thursday 24th June 2010 10:33 GMT
Employee knowledge
It's well known that knowledge of IT products isn't a requirement for working at PC World. Someone I knew once entered a store, looking for a laser printer.
He was initially taken to the scanners, then when he asked Mr. Clueless again, he received the reply: "Are they the ones that don't use any ink?"
Needless to say, he walked out, went around the corner to Staples, was immediately taken to the laser printers, and walked out again a few minutes later a happy customer of the office supplies store.
Google gives its Voice to all Americans
Google's Wi-Fi snoop nabbed passwords and emails
Saturday 19th June 2010 05:46 GMT
Unencrypted Wi-Fi dangers
This quite clearly shows why users still using unprotected Wi-Fi need to have the message about the dangers hammered home. Bear in mind the Google cars probably only spend a few seconds at most slurping Wi-Fi connections and managed to capture unencrypted passwords and email.
Now imagine what could happen if Mr. Identity Thief parked up outside your house one evening and slurped on your unencrypted connection for an hour or so?
Users need to be reminded that an unencrypted connection is just as insecure as putting your bank, credit card, and utility bill statements out for recycling the night before collection without shredding them first. It's practically an open invite to someone to come along and steal the information - and by the time you wake up, you'll probably be unaware anything untoward has happened.
WEP is better than nothing, but WPA2/PSK with the largest key size your computer and router can handle is your best bet. Plus hiding your SSID (although Windoze sometimes throws a hissy fit if it can't see the SSID being broadcast) and turning on MAC address filtering, so the only computers the router will allow to connect to it are yours.
And of course, if the Wi-Fi is unencrypted, chances are the user has a weak password on their router, so a criminal could reconfigure it to suit their own devious ends; and a weak password on their computer, so the criminal could poke around to their heart's content...
-oOo-
Sure, what Google did was unethical at the very least, and seemingly without purpose. And since they've (reluctantly) admitted what their cars were up to, they'll probably 'fess up and pay the fines levied when the court cases start - or even attempt to settle out of court. But if ISPs in particular were more clued up about security (most nowadays provide some form of encryption enabled by default on their routers) there wouldn't have been much available unencrypted data to slurp in the first place...
BOFH: Risky business
Friday 18th June 2010 15:11 GMT
Contingency plan?
Well, she's locked in a plant room. There's plenty of kit there that could "accidentally" go wrong. It's underground, so there's presumably some form of ventilation system, which could "accidentally" break down. In either case, asphyxiation would soon reduce / eliminate the door banging...
Ubuntu 'more secure' than Windows, says Dell
Monday 14th June 2010 15:38 GMT
Of course...
the fact that almost any operation that involves adding / modifying / deleting files anywhere other than /home/user requires the root password immediately makes Linux more secure.
And it's had this functionality designed in from the start, unlike a certain other operating system which decided to try bolting on this functionality a couple of years ago - and have had to water it down in the latest release because it was never designed from the ground up to store all configuration information in /users/user.
Yes, iot's still possible to install some rogue software and completely bork Linux, but unless you're foolish enough to give an app the root password, if all else fails you can log in as root and recreate a user account. Of course, you'd need to provide users with a sheet or two of A4 walking them through the process of switching to a CLI console, logging in as root and creating a new user account. Of course, you could kill X then run startx from root and add your new user using the graphical tools, but running your GUI in root isn't a very good idea :)
Mozilla man blasts Apple and Google for HTML5 abuse
Aussie police probe Google
Monday 7th June 2010 21:04 GMT
Open networks
OK, I wonder what proportion of people with Wi-Fi have routers shipped with no encryption whatsoever? I'm sure most ISPs within the past 3-5 years have shipped routers with some form of encryption enabled by default. OK, WEP is easy to crack, but at least it is a form of encryption (and presumably requires a few minutes of effort to crack).
To take the house analogy: you probably wouldn't get any insurance whatsoever if you had no locks on your door. If you had a lock that was very easy to pick, you'd probably get some form of insurance, as that alone would deter casual thieves.
As for the legality, what information exactly is Google obtaining? If it's just SSIDs and MAC addresses, which are freely broadcast, the courts would probably struggle to find a relevant law. After all, web sites can grab your IP address and referring page through standard HTTP headers, and possibly a lot more via various scripts. If they grabbed data packets being sent across the network, they'd be in significantly murkier waters.
Monday 7th June 2010 10:44 GMT
Public domain
Given that practically all Wi-Fi routers issued in the past few years have some form of encryption set as default (and a suitably generic SSID that usually just identifies the brand of router), then those with no encryption either (a) have a router so ancient it doesn't have any form of encryption enabled by default (and their ISP hasn't got around to issuing an update yet), or (b) the users have deliberately disabled it, possibly unaware that by doing so they're sharing their net connection with half the neighbourhood.
So you could argue that by having no encryption whatsoever, they're placing their network info in the public domain. After all, anyone with a laptop and a logging wireless network sniffer could obtain the same information through driving around their neighbourhood...
Cyncial epileptic tree: use the information harvested to "improve" their ad-serving technology, so more ads get shown to these (presumably) gullible fools. Who will spend more money with the advertisers, so the advertisers will spend more money with Google...
After all, the people who have unencrypted Wi-Fi connections are unlikely to be using a decent browser, let alone AdBlockPlus or NoScript... :)
Dodgy Doctor Who games may be malwarey
Monday 7th June 2010 16:50 GMT 
Cybermen on the loose!
Spotted earlier in the thread: "This post has been deleted by its author"
Or has it? Was it deleted by a Cyberman?
Presumably if there are rogue trojan copies of the game, they must be Cybermen creations, since whereas the Daleks exterminate, the Cybermen delete...
AC@15:52 - if it's an exe, chances are Wine might be able to handle it. Which Jad, also @ 15:52 seems to confirm.
The world's ugliest dog is dead
$11m jackpot just a 'reset' message, says casino
Monday 7th June 2010 10:44 GMT
Mystery of the Missing $44
The machine showed an initial value of $1,672, but they were only allowed to claim $1,627.82. So did the initial displayed jackpot shrink by $44.18?
And the quote that the $11m would be the machine's next jackpot after the McMahons claimed theirs doesn't make sense - surely machines have a fixed jackpot, which remains the same regardless of how many times its claimed?
Yahoo! hooks up to Facebook blabberstream
Monday 7th June 2010 10:32 GMT
"Friends Only"
Presumably if everything in your FB privacy settings is set to "Friends Only" (or head into the scary Customize territory and select individual friends / friend lists), and untick the option to create a public search profile, then Yahoo will find it difficult to grab and share your stuff.
Assuming you have a Yahoo account in the first place...
Google blames Wi-Fi snooping on rogue engineer
Friday 4th June 2010 10:55 GMT
Patented technology?
Err...what's so novel about Wi-Fi data harvesting? All you need to collect SSIDs, MAC Addresses, NAT IPs and what (if any) encyption is being used is a Wi-Fi enabled laptop with a Wi-Fi sniffer program that logs its activities. Add a GPS... and all of that information is effectively in the public domain if you broadcast your SSID, as any Tom, Dick or Harry could pick it up.
The more interesting questions are why did they do it, and what did they plan to do with the data? After all, if you're sensible and use WPA2+PSK with 256-bit encryption or above, they'd find it very difficult to extract anything meaningful from the packets flying across your network.
I suppose it could be used for market research purposes - what proportion of the population use what brand of Wi-Fi router, how many use WEP vs WPA2 vs nothing...
Watchdog backs Google antitrust complaint with (more) data
Thursday 3rd June 2010 17:08 GMT
Searching...
OK, let's try two searches in three different engines, and see what's returned...
"browser"
Google: Firefox / Opera / Wikipedia / Wikipedia / Chrome / Safari / Safari / Flock
Bing: Wikipedia / Chrome / Firefox / Wikipedia / Firefox / Stats / Lynx (!) / Opera
AltaVista: Wikipedia / Wikipedia / Chrome / Firefox / Netscape (!) / Compatability Test / Safari
"video"
Google: Google Video / Metacafe / CNN / YouTube / YouTube / Yahoo / Wikipedia
Bing: Google Video / Google Video / Wikipedia / Wikipedia / Video game trailers / AOL Video
AltaVista: Google Video / Google Video / YouTube / MSN Video / MySpace Videos / Yahoo Video Search
Needless to say, "chrome" returns a certain browser as the top few results in all engines.
Of course, since YouTube is the most popular video sharing site, YT videos will appear fairly prominently in search results regardless of search engine used. It's a wonderful example of positive feedback. The more a site grows in popularity, the more it will feature in search engine results. The more a site features in search engine results, the more it will grow in popularity.
The converse is also true - the less a site features in search engine results, the more it's popularity will decline. The less popular a site, the less it will feature in search engine results.
-oOo-
When in 2007 did "Universal Search" first appear? It would be interesting to see that video sharing site popularity graph backdated to 2006, because the growth of YT / decline of other sites in that graph seems fairly linear, which suggests to me that there may not have been a sudden hike after "Universal Search" was introduced.
Thursday 3rd June 2010 17:07 GMT
Searching (continued)
Guess what the top result in Bing is for "maps"...
Clue: Multimap is #2 and #4 on the list...
I do love the irony that even in Microsoft's own search engine, Google scores higher than the company's own products :)
And even extending the "browser" search to "web browser", I can't find any mention of Internet Exploder on the first page of Bing results...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
