Why you shouldn't ship computers via UPS
Some guy who moved from Winnipeg to Florida discovered why the risks of international shipping when the computer he shipped via UPS Ground (which doesn't allow international insurance) came pretty much completely destroyed. Naturally, he's posted pictures of the damage.
Via Slashdot.
When .Net requires Java
The Register reports that Corporate Software ran an online tutorial on Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net - that required Java-enabled browsers.
Says one registrant:
Advertisement: |
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Windows brand new operating system precludes me from learning about .NET.
11/15/01
High-tech grafitti artists
What is it with high-tech vendors that deface public property to promote their wares? First it was IBM with its Peace, Love and Linux sidewalk stencils. Now Microsoft is doing the same thing in Australia to promote its new Xbox game console. The Sydney Morning Herald reports a Microsoft ad agency has spray-painted hundreds of green X's at intersections throughout the area:
"It's a teaser campaign," said Xbox's general manager, Alan Bowman. The graffiti campaign was about getting its target audience talking, he said.
At least one town council is planning to fine the company $300 for each X.
Via Scripting News.
Spam from beyond the grave
For only $26 a year, you can make sure your loved ones get e-mail from you after you've died. Loving Pup says:
With the basic service you will have the ability to send a message to a maximum of 20 recipients. This service will allow you to send a total of 25 single messages to multiple users. You will also have a half megabyte of disk space to attach any type of file you would like.
For $42 a year, you can reach out to 60 people with a message of up to 2 megabytes in size. Surprisingly, the company FAQ doesn't answer the question of how it finds out you're dead so it can send out those messages.
Via Boing Boing.
11/14/01
New group tries to oversee the whole Internet
Some might think ICANN and the IETF already effectively run the Internet. But they're too ad hoc for the Union for Representative International Internet Cooperation and Analysis (URIICA), a group launched yesterday.The Internet has become too important for its development, management, security, and other critical aspects to continue largely on an ad hoc basis. Internet-related issues, which now impact our world and lives in a vast number of ways, are usually approached in isolation from one another by existing organizations, and often in parochial and non-representative ways.
We submit that a new organization is needed, created specifically to provide guidance relating to Internet functions and issues on an international and truly representative basis. Such an organization could also help establish confidence that the Internet exists to benefit people everywhere, not merely commercial and other special interests.
Founders include Lauren Weinstein of the Privacy Forum, Peter Neuman of Risks Digest fame and David Farber of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Paging Dick Tracy
The Wristcam Gallery is a collection of photos taken with Casio's Wrist Camera, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Via Boing Boing.
11/13/01
Students use PDAs to cheat
Kids today. Imagine, students at at least one school have discovered how to use them to cheat during class. The Baltimore Sun reports:
Freshman Rhea Udyavar, 13, said she doesn't cheat, but added, "It's really easy to do, actually. You can turn the sound off and everything. You turn it on, you press one of the buttons and you're on the Internet, and teachers wouldn't even notice. It's so easy."
Via Fark.
Windaz for Aussies, Newfies
Take a look at these "ads" for a certain Microsoft OS for Australians and Newfoundlanders
Via fozbaca.org.
11/12/01
Another alternative to Passport
Sure, life will be grand when everybody has a Microsoft Passport, once Microsoft works out those pesky bugs. But some people just don't like the idea of centralizing all their personal data in some Microsoft server. For them, there's always Sun and its partners, who have wrapped themselves in the flag with their Project Liberty alternative. Now there's a new proposal, by Andre Durand. His Project IAME (you're supposed to pronounce the last part "I AM ME") would rely on peer-to-peer networking and a variety of XML-based protocols and applications to let users and devices identify themselves to each other.
It's anticipated at this time that the underlying protocol for IAME should be based upon the principles of Peer-to-Peer networking. The reason for this is several fold, but rooted in an underlying desire to maximize the distributed nature of the overall system, ensuring that Identity can be managed and hosted by an individual or device at any location (peer) of the network. Done correctly, this architecture also maximizes the systems adoption capacity amongst wireless devices which utilize technologies such as Bluetooth, where the devices have a requirement for information exchange while independent of a larger IP network.
Via Doc Searls.
A virtual honeynet
If you want to snare the hackers, sometimes the easiest way is to set up a bogus system that appears to be open to their exploits but which really just sits there logging everything they do.
SecurityFocus shows you how to set up a virtual "honeynet" on a production machine by using VMware, which basically lets you run multiple OSes (Linux and NT, say) at the same time.
RELATED LINKS
Compendium archive: Week of 01/21/02 Week of 01/14/02 Week of 01/07/02 Week of 01/02/02 Week of 12/03/01 Week of 11/26/01 Week of 11/19/01 Week of 11/12/01 Week of 11/05/01 Week of 10/29/01 Week of 10/22/01 Week of 10/15/01 Week of 10/08/01 Week of 10/01/01 Week of 9/24/01 Weeks of 9/10/01 - 9/17/01 Week of 9/3/01 Week of 8/27/01 Week of 8/20/01 Week of 8/13/01 Week of 8/6/01 Note: Compendium's entire staff took the week of 7/30 off. Week of 7/23/01 Week of 7/16/01 Week of 7/9/01 Week of 7/2/01 Week of 6/25/01 Week of 6/18/01 Week of 6/11/01 Week of 6/4/01
Tracking down a stolen Mac; Dead C Scrolls; Googlewhacking; How bad is it in the Valley?; Storage lessons from the Wayback Machine; The pub-seeking handheld; Internet gang wars; Outlook XP breaks MIME.
Why should iMac owners have all the eye candy?; Luxo Redux; So you think your job is bad; Google as a DNS replacement? Not so fast; Nokia exec cites stock plunge in speeding-fine appeal; The tragedy of the .coms; The Google parlor game; Some people *like* Steve the Dell Guy; Ban all Microsoft attachments?
Dot-com to bare all; iMac Dance; Wendy's remembers Dave; Search engine bites the dust; Wendy's Web site ignores Dave's death; Geek comic strip; Youngest security expert ever; Spam poetry; Confessions of a hacker; Breathless Apple; Dave Barry does Windows XP.
Dropping everything to vote; The best Apple rumors, ever; Guess Steve Case isn't getting into Harvard; Make your own O'Reilly cover; Boosting your wireless juice; Telnet lives!
This space intentionally left blank (vacation).
The most useless software ever; Is Microsoft getting ready to squash PC vendors?; Excite@Home: The Watergate of the New Economy?; No more 3Com Park. Is CMGI Field next?; Are you an e-bore?; This site'll have you coming and going; Entertainment Weekly's loss of innocence; Ensign Crusher as Entertainer of the Year; Oh, for the old days.
The Museum of Broken Packets; Just in time for Thanksgiving; Tourist Guy found; Why virtual offices suck; A domain ruling that sucks; Hacking the iPod.
Why you shouldn't ship computers via UPS; When .Net requires Java; High-tech grafitti artists; Spam from beyond the grave; New group tries to oversee the whole Internet; Paging Dick Tracy; Students use PDAs to cheat; Windaz for Aussies, Newfies; Another alternative to Passport; A virtual honeynet
Bill Gates: Father of open source; Verizon exec: Monopoly is good; Weird molecule names; E-mail: too much of a good thing?; A cluster of one; More woes for dot-bombers; Spam as weapon in the war on crime; Just when you think the Web can't get any better; Just when you think the Web can't get any worse; More proof I shouldn't be a wiseass; Using your Web logs to ID hacker attacks; Help save the FAQs; Who do you trust, baby?; Powerpuff Girls powerless against virus; Big IP pipe between US, Europe.
The profit of turning thugs into programmers; Work Name Generator; A programmer's lament; The world's best ATM; Are anti-spammers killing people?; Web services and storage; Get your Aerons here; Perl for the XXI-imum century; Microsoft's blocking of non-IE browsers.
Government info taken off the Web since 9/11; Beware hackers who talk too much; A contest you can enter sitting down; Now don't try this in the office; Bob Patterson must die; Finally, a useful 404 page; Tech calls from hell; Teletubbies XP; More XP fun; Anthrax and e-mail; Larry's ID card; World's longest gum-wrapper chain.
Let's drop PDAs on Afghanistan; Voice control? Try grunt control; Spam gets back to business; A content-management portal; Share your system tray with the world; Would you let the recording industry onto your network?; Al Queda's low-tech high tech; 9/11 archive; Shoe company gets open source after all; Pod people, coming soon to a cube near you.
Larry and Scott's dueling ID cards; Cringely: Broadband is dead; The dangers of Photoshop; The dangers of copy protection; Microsoft mining whois for telephone solicitations?; How to REALLY throw a LAN party; Good fences don't make good 'Net neighbors; How Google adapted to 9/11 news; Web services as over-hyped hooey; Why shoe guys shouldn't do open source; Online air hockey.
AT&T waives 9/11 wireless charges for some; Shifting gears; Craig Burton on the Novell/Microsoft suit; In search of the post-PC interface; Vibrating PDAs and wearable phones; Gary Condit's Web site; No, that isn't a real photo of a WTC tourist; How to throw a LAN party; How sucky is your intranet?
For grizzled 'Net veterans; UK ISP forced to pull deceptive ads; Pretty Good encryption controversy; Are you as smart as Miss America?; Really securing your computer; Still lots of insecure IIS servers; Kids, don't try this at home; Anthrax Kills; Larry's national database; Nimda hysteria?
Attack and post-attack items.
999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall; Finally, a wind-up cell phone; Enough with the ringing!; The VoIP calculator; 802.11b insecurity; Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf explains IOS DHCP; Is ENUM the mark of the devil?; AOL gives user permanent demerit; The Ballmer music video; Cleveland news flash: Y2K was last year.
Re-routing around censorship; Us vs. them in scripting; The boss button; Fighting off the hackers for fun; Peer computing as a weapon of war; Unix poetry; The Windows Fatal Exception Decoder; New Fusion widget: Getting rid of spyware; The sound of 200 cell phones going off at once; Taleban Web site hacked; Hey, sysadmin, remember Sircam?
On the importance of flame wars; Bill Gates sees dead people?; A markup language for grunts and groans; Is Microsoft leaking those Ballmer dance videos?; Good Samaritan not so good?; Steve Ballmer works up a sweat; Open-source wireless cracking; When technology goes too far; Another dumb computer arrest?; Is Cisco Communist?
Moron marketers threaten 'Net users; Finding free wireless access; Complete wastes of time; OS holy war flares in North Carolina; Are programmers weird?; Somebody actually buys an X10 camera; We're number, uh, two!; Those after-hours computer discussions; An entire city running on Linux; Distributed spam fighter under development; Could a Warhol virus infect the entire 'Net in 15 minutes?; Tell AOL what to do with its CDs.
Fusion shatters a myth; Bridging .Net and Java?; AT&T Broadband cuts off non-IIS servers to fight Code Red; Bluetoothless; Tennessee town bites into Apple; And you thought TI-99/4A fans were over the edge; Biometrics coming to your local supermarket; Steve Ballmer a-hootin' and a-hollerin'; Speaking of Web images; Just how far PC prices have fallen; Does Starbucks' CEO get his own wireless strategy?
Crackers getting more sophisticated; Sex and Microsoft Office; The wonders of science, part MXXII; Finally, a useful virus; A shocking game controller; Big Ball of Mud school of programming; Two vitally important new resources; Adobe: Ooops; Eudora Welty, dead at 92; Centralizing Unix administration in Perl; Spellchecking the entire Web.
Worm turns on Microsoft Web servers; The day the ISP died; Cell-phone users have no shame; Even Internet consultants can screw up the 'Net; Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers; The ultimate cup of coffee; The solar-powered ISP; Everhost; Internet VCer: Oops; The Lego Palm and the pink fuzzy laptop; The Microsoft-English dictionary; Putting a loved one in the home.
Saving those all important VoIP calls; This site is a bright idea; Could wireless end messy divorces?; How much will that software really cost you?; Ghosts of failed dot-coms; The spy's guide to securing your Cisco routers; Oprah for Internet czarina?; What's Microsoft doing at an open-source conference?; Like a big pizza pi; Cyber-bullies; Better check your phone bill; Have some birthday pi.
How HP wastes energy to save energy; New toy for the bored and lonely; Weird programming languages; When sponsors are speakers; The case of the disturbing backwards monitor; Congress to ICANN: Drop dead; Yet another video game made into a movie; Smile, you're on Candid (Police) Camera; High-speed hotels; Network Solutions blocking name transfers?
One of the fathers of Usenet dead at 45; Are you ready for insta-spam?; Diary of a site collapse; Skirting the issue; Assimiliating the Web; Trolling for help; Software wars; Rating the rater; True tales from the help desk; How about spam embedded in your mail?
Unix diapers; A beautiful waste of time; A P2P taxonomy; This page is too stupid; Homeless dot-commer bogus?; Whee, Linux is fun!; Blue Screens everywhere; Forget viruses: This fungus eats CDs; Microsoft revises Smart Tags a bit; Homeless dot-commers.
Slashdot crashes the NSA; They may be Smart Tags, but they're not Original Tags; What open source and California wines have in common; Jakob Nielsen no tyro; How to make Windows 2000 really, really secure; Where the Internet begins; A useful computer bug; The clothes make the geek; The end of the Internet; Why PDF bites; Novel use of a wireless phone; Hidden info; When Web sites tell too much.
DSL modems are so '90s; Bye-bye Netscape; Get ready to upgrade those mail servers; The anti-.Net; The real reason to buy a Palm; Anatomy of a DDoS attack; Pain is good.
