WTF? While iPhone users get their free upgrade to OS 3.0, iPod touch users have to pay US$9.95 for it?!
I’d be a tad annoyed about that.
Via Graham Cluley, who points out that it might have been nice if Apple had made the 46 fixed vulnerabilities available for free, even if you still had to pay for the other stuff.
While I was walking down the street running an errand, I tried scanning for Wifi networks on my N95 phone.
I must have found about 20 or 25 of them during just a few minutes’ walk. Probably every fourth or fifth house seemed to have one.
Many of them appeared to be named after the families living there. Some had obviously default names of common brands… Netgear and the like. A few had gobbledygook names which may or may not have been defaults.
And to my surprise, almost all of them were secured.
Almost.
Two weren’t — one an apparent Apple network, and one Netgear one, both close by to each other.
Hopefully not too many of their neighbours are sponging off them!
Apparently it’s e-Security week in Australia. Who knew?
This post from Graham Cluley of Sophos (who does a very entertaining and informative blog on computer security) includes this short video on how to choose a good password which is easy to remember, but hard for hackers to guess.
Simple tips for better web password security from Sophos Labs on Vimeo.
Not sure I agree with his conclusion, but it’s certainly worth some thought.
It looks like Kaspersky Anti-Virus is blocking at least some web adverts from prominent advertiser Doubleclick, on the basis that they’re phishing.
Here’s the warning from Kaspersky itself:
And here’s what appears on the web page:
This warning is appearing on sites using Doubleclick, including Yahoogroups and Facebook Scrabble (international).
Interesting.
So I was looking at the comments awaiting moderation. Two showed up on this post: Why Facebook sucks, a rollicking read about over-bearing security dialogues just to use Facebook’s video application.
Here’s the first comment — I’ve zapped the email address, but one was left:
Sam Hamilton 76.243.71.190
Submitted on 2009/05/29 at 9:37amIf you are tired of facebook but want a way to connect with artists and musicians
then you should check out http://www.putiton.com
If you are tired of facebook but still want to connect with your friends then pick up the phone…
Fair enough.
Here’s the second:
James Dee 75.85.9.225
Submitted on 2009/06/03 at 3:16pmI’m an artist and I haven’t been satisfied using facebook or myspace to promote myself… too slow and too much junk. I’ll give putiton a try… it looks clean
The problem here is that the first comment is still awaiting moderation. (Yes, it’s several days old. I don’t check as often as I should.)
So why would “James” decide to try putiton, a social networking site which basically nobody has heard of (well at least I haven’t) if nobody else has suggested it (eg the first comment isn’t visible to anyone)?
Curiously, “Sam” and even “James” have left similar messages on other, similar posts on other blogs.
I noticed a lot of my WordPress spam is coming from a handful of IP address ranges. I’ve checked, and in the five-ish years I’ve been using WordPress, no valid comments seem to be coming from there. (Just tap the relevant IP address into the WP comment admin search box.)
Time for a little .htaccess magic, I think.
order allow,deny
deny from 194.8.75.
deny from 194.8.74.
deny from 87.118.112.
deny from 194.8.75.
deny from 194.8.74.
deny from 87.118.112.
deny from 61.18.170.
deny from 196.12.36.
deny from 219.64.175.
deny from 69.59.137.
deny from 80.88.242.
allow from all
By the way, in cPanel File Manager, to see .htaccess you have to switch on the option to view hidden files on the options page when you go in.
Anyway, the result is less spam, though there appears to be a rash of new attacks from a wide variety of IP addresses, with a shirtload of embedded links to upcoming.yahoo.com
At some stage, some weird text seems to have inserted itself into a bunch of my links on my personal blog… a Get parameter referencing phpMyAdmin and a long hexadecimal string, which appears to be the same every time.
So for instance the link:
<a href=”/1995/12/22/the-bill/”>
became:
<a href=”/1995/12/22/the-bill/?phpMyAdmin=3bceb1b20913e8babce341325e13bf76″>
And this one:
<a href=”http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/energy.shtml”>
became:
<a href=”<a href=?phpMyAdmin=3bceb1b20913e8babce341325e13bf76″http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/energy.shtml”>
A Google search suggests that this specific parameter appears to be unique to my blog.
It mainly appears to have hit internal relative links, but has hit some external ones too. But it hasn’t affected all the links, by any means. Maybe a few dozen posts. And for the most part they are like the first example, above, and don’t actually break the links.
At first I thought it was a hack back at some time when I might have had a vulnerable version of WordPress on my blog. Though I’ve been unable to find any other examples of it (not that it’s the easiest thing to search for), and now I’m wondering if it was some mistake during a migration of the database.
Weirdness.
Oh lordy. I wonder if this is some kind of joke, or if it’s true?
The Telegraph reports that Google has blurred the image of Colonel Sanders on KFC signs in the UK, on the basis that he’s a real person.
The company says it took the decision because he is ‘a real person’ – despite him passing away in December 1980 aged 90.
If it’s true, then can I just say: IDIOTS!
1. It’s a cartoon image, not a photographic likeness.
2. He’s been dead for 29 years.
3. What, you think we won’t know who it is? “Hey, who’s that on the KFC sign?” “Dunno, could be any southern American military guy who knows about chicken.”
4. Are they doing the same for cartoons and photos of real people on billboards and the like?
5. How is the late Colonel’s privacy being spoilt if people could see the cartoon image of his face? Hasn’t the horse already bolted on that, given the image of him is up on thousands of KFC outlets all over the planet?
Of course, it could be that the whole story is a crock.
Or maybe they just haven’t implemented their policy (whatever it is) very well.
The reason I offer these two possibilities is that I found this unobscured KFC sign, and this one too, both in London.
Certainly it appears the Colonel in Australia is freely visible:
If they did institute such a policy in Australia, I wonder what they’d do about other cartoon face logos, especially of people who are still alive. Dick Smith is one who springs to mind, though now I think about it, I think they’re phasing out use of his face on their signs and literature.
The non-profit I volunteer for got an iMac in the office. So lovely. Such clean design, spoilt only by the Post-It note someone had to put on the front of it to tell people to reach around the back to find the power button.
There’s some interesting things coming out of the bushfires royal commission; the last couple of days has highlighted the limitations of the emergency Triple-0 system, when surges in the number of calls outstripped available capacity, and overflow calls were put on hold, got recorded messages or were diverted.
The first half-hour of Jon Faine’s show on 774 is worth a listen for those interested, particularly the section from about 10 minutes in, with Garth Head, a former adviser to Minister for Police and Emergency Services. For geeks, it’s a reminder that sometimes the systems we design, implemennt and manage are sometimes critically important to those who rely on them.
(Part of my project to re-install my main home PC.)
I’ve been re-installing my main home PC, and trying to avoid putting junk on it.
iTunes 8 has blown out to a 70Mb download, up from about 20Mb just a couple of years ago with version 4, 33Mb for version 5, 35Mb for version 6, and 49Mb for version 7.
Part of the reason is that they bundle in a bunch of stuff: Quicktime, Bonjour (for networking), Apple Mobile Device Support (for iPhone and iPod Touch), MobileMe (for syncing with the service previously known as .Mac) and Apple Software Update (automatic updates, but includes shovelling in more stuff you don’t want).
The very intelligent Ed Bott investigated and found the following solution to cutting out the crap.
Download the iTunes setup. Then open it with an archive program such as 7-Zip or WinZip or WinRAR.
For people like me who have only old iPods, Nanos and Minis in the house, all you need is iTunes itself, and Quicktime. So extract and run the following:
Quicktime.msi /passive
iTunes.msi /passive
(For 64-bit: iTunes64.msi /passive )
…and that’s it. Done.
More details from Ed Bott — including what to do if you have an iTunes Touch or iPhone.
As I’ve mentioned in passing before, I hate relative time on updates.
Twitter is the obvious one here. “About 8 hours ago”. “About 9 hours ago.” WTF use is that? Why not just tell me the time it happened, so I don’t have to mentally work it out?
It’s particularly useless if I want to compare the time of that Tweet to something outside Twitter.
Likewise the ABC Online News “4 hours 37 minutes ago” … jeez, just give me the publish time.
It’s doubly-annoying when presented on web pages, which may or may not get read immediately, and sometimes sit there for a while without being refreshed or updated. I come back half-an-hour later… “About 3 minutes ago”… oh really? When was that? 3 minutes before I last refreshed the page? Again, useless information.
The annoying thing is some programmer has actually jumped through hoops to display the time like this.
PLEASE, just give me the option of showing the ACTUAL time, not the relative time.
Now, does anybody know of a good Windows Twitter client that will show me actual times?
(OK, some people on Twitter reckoned Tweetdeck is one to try.)