Category: Computer

Why You Should All Read The Register

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Most computer publications won’t use terms like “Crapware”, but the Register does, and in so doing eliminates 3 boring paragraphs of explanation.

Dell cleans up crapware
By Austin Modine in Mountain View
Published Monday 25th June 2007 21:11 GMT

Dell’s tradition of shoveling bloatware into newborn PCs may be coming to a close. All it took was a few years of outrage.

Previously, only Dell XPS systems had the privilege of shipping with a “no software preinstalled” option. But vigilant e-coniptions on Dell’s IdeaStorm (http://www.ideastorm.com/) feedback site has prompted Dimension desktops and Inspiron notebooks to join the party.

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There’s also the fact that Dell has been hemorrhaging, because it decided to save a few bucks by hiring incompetent Indian tech support, and users, particularly business users, have been fleeing to HP.

Their tech support could be either incompetent or Indian, and they would probably have been OK, but together, not so good.

Customers who configure either system on Dell.com can now choose to forgo unhappy hours of removing unwanted “productivity,” ISP, media software such as QuickBooks Trial, NetZero Installers, Earthlink Setup, Wanadoo Europe Installer, Norton Ghost 10.0, MS Plus Photo Story 2LE, MS Plus Digital Media Installer, AOL US, AOL UK, MusicMatch Music Services, Corel Snapfire Plus SE, Yahoo! Music Jukebox, Roxio RecordNow, Sonic RecordNow Audio, Dell Search Assistant — and the rest of the gang.

But not all software gets cut by Occam’s pre-configuration razor. Dimension and Inspiron systems will still ship with trial version of anti-virus software, Acrobat Reader and Google tools.

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Can the Paperless Office Be Far Behind?

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In the early 1990s, the concept of the “Paperless Office” was all the rage.

In fact, the opposite happened. Paper use soared with the introduction of computers, prompting many wags to say. “We’ll have a paperless toilet before we have a paperless office.“

We now have a paperless toilet.

Paperless toilets rolled out in Britain

By HELEN PIDD

This was the best toilet experience of my life. I went for an innocent loo break between sushi courses and ended up road-testing the lavatorial equivalent of Nasa’s Space Shuttle. In place of the toilet roll, there was a control panel.

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And These Guys are Protecting US???

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Would that Karl Rove’s evil minions were so incompetent.

Hacker breaks into Pentagon email system

By Austin Modine in Mountain View
Published Friday 22nd June 2007 00:20 GMT

The Pentagon took as many as 1,500 computers offline yesterday to stamp out a security breach in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters in a news briefing today that a hacker had penetrated an unclassified OSD email system, prompting the shutdown. The system reportedly does not contain information related to military operations.

“A variety of precautionary measures are being taken. We expect the systems to be online again very soon.”

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Lawsuit shows how to sue spammers | CNET News.com

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Short version, he filed in Washington State, won a 31K judgement, and followed up with a suit in Florida to collect, and won there.

Lawsuit shows how to sue spammers

By Declan McCullagh

A recent decision in a lawsuit filed against a Florida credit counseling company offers a promising road map to follow for suing spammers.

After receiving at least nine unsolicited e-mail messages offering credit counseling services, Washington state resident Joseph Hylkema did more than just consign the spam to his junk mail folder: he decided to get even.

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MyNuMO Scores with Celeb Video Game

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I know the guy who runs MyNuMo, he’s one of those classic, “Friends that I’ve never met except through the net.” and some of the content there is in-dirtyword-credibly good.

The Jewish Mother ringtones are prize.

How they describe themselves:

MyNuMo is an online community that lets its members create, share, and sell mobile content. We make it possible for anyone to publish and sell content into the $9B Mobile Market. The MyNuMo portal delivers independently created content that’s rated and promoted by real people and delivered to any mobile phone. MyNuMo is selling user-generated content to mobile users with direct billing and delivery agreements on ALL major US Carriers.

In any case, they put a flash game up on the web. It’s amusing, and it doubled their traffic.

Applause: MyNuMO

Every once in awhile we find a reason to stand up and applaud a marketing/advertising campaign. For all of you Trads out there, this case study falls into the emerging markets category, so hold on to your PCs real tight while we head into the digital divide.

MyNuMo is a service that allows users to generate and post content, from short videos to ringtones for mobile phones. Unlike the soon to be released service from Nokia called Mosh (it’s in beta) when users download content from MyNuMo, the poster of that equity is paid a small sum. In order to promote and differentiate MyNuMo’s fledgling services, the creators of the site created a quick and entertaining flash game in which players try to….

I can’t go any further, because it would involve mentioning she who must not be named.

Defense Boondoggle, June 24 Edition

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I see an IP lawsuit. They are using my likeness (sort of) without my permission.

A more pressing question is how is Lockheed getting its cut of this?

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

By Mark Baard
Published Saturday 23rd June 2007 09:02 GMT

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don’t have time for another.

Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.

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AMD To Challenge Intel on Ultra Mobile PC Chips

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I’m rooting for AMD on pretty every thing that they challenge Intel on.

AMD ‘Bobcat’ to challenge Intel next-gen UMPC platform

By Tony Smith
11 Jun 2007 09:43
Rival for ‘Silverthorne’

AMD will next year launch a processor specifically designed for ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs), the chip maker revealed last week at the Computex show in Taipei.

Details remain scarce, but the chip is currently codenamed ‘Bobcat’, a feline moniker that perhaps aligns it with ‘Puma’, AMD’s upcoming notebook platform. Puma comprises new mobile chipsets and AMD’s ‘Griffin’ processor, the first CPU it has designed specifically for mobile applications rather than a tweaked version of its desktop processors.

It’s not hard to envisage Bobcat as a combination of processor and GPU with both of these components bonded together in a single package. But that’s just conjecture at this point.

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The YouTube – uTube Lawsuit

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The suit is just plain silly. It’s clear that Utube had real damage as a result of Youtube, intentional or not, and Google could have made this all go away for a few bucks.

See the website screen capture below. All they have done is to put up a banner to cover the costs of clueless people who can’t type in a web site correctly.

A screen shot of Utube: Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

YouTube – uTube showdown stays alive in federal court

A website by any other name
By Kevin Fayle in San Francisco
Published Tuesday 12th June 2007 22:14 GMT

Silicon Justice What’s in a name, right?

For the Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation, operator of uTube.com, its domain name means cash – and with a federal court’s recent refusal to dismiss the company’s suit against YouTube, the possibility of even more cash in the future.

The company has operated uTube.com as a means to sell used pipe and tube mills and rollform machinery since 1996. After YouTube’s launch in 2005, the sleepy little Ohio website went from around 1,500 visitors a month to roughly 70,000 per day. The company alleges that this caused its web host’s servers to crash, which disrupted its business and sullied its reputation. It also claims that bandwidth overages bumped its hosting fees from $100 a month to $2,500.

In true Midwestern fashion, the company made the best of a bad situation by adding a ringtone search engine to the site, as well as links to dating, insurance and gambling sites. These new features now pull in $1,000 a day or more, according to one report.

In addition to capitalizing on the name confusion by hawking Internet crap, uTube has also sued YouTube in federal court. The company has asked for monetary damages, as well as injunctions to stop YouTube’s operation and for the court to transfer the YouTube.com domain to uTube.

The judge hearing the case just dismissed a number of uTube’s complaints, but also refused to grant YouTube’s motion to dismiss the entire suit. The judge also gave uTube permission to amend its complaint to see if it can revive any of the dismissed causes of action.

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This guy is Too Stupid to Cut His Own Meat

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In fact, I’d be worried if he knows how to consume oatmeal.

Never heard of Rand McNally, huh. Or the fact that this imagery is available through third parties for less than the cost of a air of expensive chows.

Why the hell is he a Democrat? It’s too f&^%ing stupid to be a Democrat.

There are real issues of privace with some of the stuff that Google is doing, like it’s new “Street” program, and they seem have lost the word “Don’t” from their motto*, but this objection is just asinine.

Google Maps aids terrorists, NY lawmaker warns

‘It’s only a matter of time’
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Monday 11th June 2007 20:24 GMT

Adding to the chorus of critics who say detailed images on Google Earth can aid and abet terrorists and snoops, a New York state lawmaker is calling on the company to blur potential terrorist targets.

The plea from Assemblyman Mike Gianaris follows the alleged discovery earlier this month of a plot by a Muslim terrorist cell to blow up fuel tanks and a jet fuel pipeline at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Some of the suspects planning the attack had used Google-produced images clearly depicting airport infrastructure after surveillance video they secured proved inadequate, according to an indictment in the case.

“It’s only a matter of time before someone uses the information Google Earth provides to do this country harm,” Gianaris was quoted as saying in an article in the New York Post. He objects to the satellite images carried on Google Earth and Google Maps that gives detailed views of skyscrapers, airports and other potential terror targets.

Gianaris is only the latest individual to criticize Google for making available images that have the potential to violate national security, privacy or other vital interests. In addition to officials in the US, Australia, India and South Korea complaining about sensitive facilities being clearly visible in online mapping services, other critics warn the rich detail could trample civil liberties.

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*“Don’t be evil.” Is the Google motto.

Anti-Hacking Laws Put Security at Risk

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This does not protect companies. Openness is the route to computer security. Security through obscurity is a sham.

Anti-hacking laws ‘can hobble net security’

Good Samaritans discouraged by threat of prosecution
By Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus
Published Monday 18th June 2007 09:52 GMT
Mobile computing: Opportunities and risk – Free whitepaper

Jeremiah Grossman has long stopped looking for vulnerabilities in specific websites, and even if he suspects a site to have a critical flaw that could be compromised by an attacker, he’s decided to keep quiet.

The silence weighs heavily on the web security researcher. While ideally he would like to find flaws, and help companies eliminate them, the act of discovering a vulnerability in any site on the internet almost always entails gaining unauthorised access to someone else’s server – a crime that prosecutors have been all too willing to pursue.

“I have long since curtailed my research,” said Grossman, who serves as the chief technology officer for website security firm WhiteHat Security. “Any web security researcher that has been around long enough will notice vulnerabilities without doing anything. When that happens, I don’t tell anyone, rather than risk reputational damage to myself and my company.”

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And in the Stupidity Olympics, We Have a Medal Winner

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Installing P2P software on one’s work machine? Really, Really stupid.

Also, the folks at the Register are a bit too cute…Privacy cock-up….

Pfizer worker data leaked via P2P

Privacy cock-up for Viagra makers
By John Leyden → More by this author
Published Thursday 14th June 2007 13:48 GMT
Why Businesses need Business Continuity – Free whitepaperMobile computing: Opportunities and risk – Free whitepaper

Casual use of file sharing by the spouse of an unnamed Pfizer worker has been blamed for leaking personal information on more than 17,000 current and former employees at the pharmaceutical giant.

Unauthorised installation of a P2P package on a company laptop led to the exposure of worker data, presumably after a directory holding the information was inadvertently offered up for sharing to world+dog.

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And in the War over Spam Bots, There is Escalation

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A Dog or a Cat? New Tests to Fool Automated Spammers
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a human — until you fill out a captcha.

Captchas are the puzzles on many Web sites that present a string of distorted letters and numbers. These are supposed to be easy for people to read and retype, but hard for computer software to figure out.

Most major Internet companies use captchas to keep the automated programs of spammers from infiltrating their sites.

There is only one problem. As online mischief makers design better ways to circumvent or defeat captchas, Web companies are responding by making the puzzles more challenging to solve — even for people.

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“You can make a captcha absolutely undefeatable by computers, but at some point, you are turning this from a human reading test into an intelligence test and an acuity test,” said Michael Barrett, the chief information security officer at PayPal, a division of eBay. “We are clearly at the point where captchas have hit diminishing returns.”

If that is true, at least captchas had a good run. Though several researchers devised similar tests early in the decade, credit for inventing the technology usually goes to Carnegie Mellon University, which was asked by Yahoo in 2000 to create a method to prevent rogue programs from invading its chat rooms and e-mail service.


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Yet some of that activity can be ethically murky. Aleksey Kolupaev, 25, works for an Internet company in Kiev, Ukraine, and in his spare time, with his friend Juriy Ogijenko, he develops and sells software that can thwart captchas by analyzing the images and separating the letters and numbers from the background noise. They charge $100 to $5,000 a project, depending on the complexity of the puzzle.

He lives in the former Soviet Union there’s a surprise.

On the bright side, with the mob penetration of those countries, hitmen are cheap and plentiful.

Microsoft researchers have developed an alternative captcha that asks Internet users to view nine images of household pets and then select just the cats or the dogs.

“For software, this is wildly hard,” said John Douceur, a Microsoft researcher. “Computers are tripped up by all the photos at different angles, with variable lighting conditions and backgrounds and the animals in different positions.”

The project, called Asirra (for Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), uses photographs of animals from Petfinder.com, a site that finds homes for homeless pets and has more than two million images in its database.

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It would be nice if this were to get some of those animals adopted.

Adopt a stray. Mutts and alley cats are just as good pets, and they don’t have the flaws from inbreeding.

He added: “No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

Not everyone feels that the traditional captcha is finished. Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a member of the team that invented captchas, recently unveiled an effort to give them new usefulness.

His reCaptcha project (recaptcha.net) seeks to block spam while handling the challenge of digitally scanning old books and making them available in Web search engines.

When character recognition software fails to decipher a word scanned in a book — when the page is yellowed or the letters are smudged, for example — Mr. von Ahn’s project makes it part of a captcha. After the mystery word has been verified by several people, it is fed back into the digital copy of the book.

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That is an insanely good “out of the box” application for this technology.

I’m not a Woman, but I find this a bit condescending.

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If this was being marketed to my 9 year old daughter, I’d be amused, but they are marketing it to adult professional women. WTF?

SiliconValley.com – Hello Kitty dons new pink laptop to woo working women

TOKYO (AP) – Japan’s cutest cat in glittering crystal decorates NEC Corp.’s new pink laptop in the Japanese electronics maker’s latest effort to woo working women.

The La Vie G Hello Kitty model, available for $1,650 by Internet order only in Japan, went on sale Wednesday, and has gotten off to a good start, company spokesman Shinya Hashizume said Thursday, while declining to give numbers.

‘PC users now tend to be men, but we’re hoping to attract women with this product,’ he said.

The laptop, developed in collaboration with Sanrio Co., the Tokyo-based company behind Hello Kitty, uses 299 Swarovski crystals to depict four hearts and the bubbly feline head wearing a pink bow and crown.

NEC is hoping to sell several hundred of the Hello Kitty laptops in the next few months, targeting the summertime when Japanese workers receive their twice-a-year bonuses, Hashizume said.”

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It’s really pretty hideous.

Julie Amero Gets New Trial!!!

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This was bullsh%$ from the beginning. The school did not update its filters, and she was told not to turn off her computer under any circumstances.

There appears to be prosecutorial misconduct too.

Hat tip to Lindsay Beyerstein. She really was the person who got coverage of this.

Of course, the poor woman is still out legal fees, and a child. The stress of the trial led to a miscarriage.

TheDay.com – Substitute Teacher Gets New Trial on Porn Charges
By Karen Florin Published on 6/6/2007

A New London Superior court judge this morning overturned the conviction of Julie Amero, who was found guilty of exposing Norwich schoolchildren to pornography on a computer, and has granted Amero a new trial.

Judge Hillary Strackbein said the state had conducted further forensic information that the jury had not heard at the trial. The information, according to defense experts, was that the computer had generated pornographic popups and that Amero, a substitute teacher, was not at fault. Amero had been convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor and faced up to 40 years in prison.

She has has been the subject of national attention as of result of the conviction, and seemed relieved after Attorney William Dow explained the judge’s ruling.

“I have a great team behind me and I feel very comfortable with the rulings,” she said before getting into a car with her husband and leaving.

“It was a porn trap,” said Chip Neville, a retired computer sciences professor who had petitioned the office of the Chief State’s Attorney to review the verdict.

“We’re all exposed to this. We wander into the wrong site innocently.”