tech
Rock and Swim
I started swimming at lunch again every day after deciding I just wasn’t getting what I need simply from riding my bike to work each day. To sweeten the deal, I picked up one of these lil’ jobbies, the Swimman, an internally-waterproofed iPod shuffle that is not bulky or temperamental and requires no case like the one I used to use [my 2nd-gen iPod recently shit the bed].
For any of you thinking about getting into the pool, nothing motivates me better lap after lap than the right soundtrack.
Highly recommended – thanks, Swimman : )
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Voice Rec is here [almost]
My tech-minded pals and I have used all the mediocre voice-recognition solutions out there for years and years, waiting patiently for some genuis to put it all together for the first time.
Welp, no one I know has actually used Dictate for the Mac, but demos like these are pretty compelling:
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iGame
This could spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E for the gaming industry and its plethora of hardware platforms – what if all you needed to play your favorite games was a cable and the device you carry with you all day anyways:
Read more here.
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waxieus : QR Code
My pal, Lars, turned me onto QR Code, the nifty little descendants of the common bar code.
We’ve been itching for a style upgrade on these for quite some time now. Their predescessors were cool in that creepy way but these are, uh..different to look at even if maybe only because they are new to people like me.
Make your own at the QR Code Generator : )
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At long last : Street Views
Maps now have Street views! Public transit and walking directions! Display address of dropped pins and share location via email [long sigh of contentment].
Go now and install v2.2 of the firmware and you, too, can be full of glee, thankful that technology not only enslaves us all but gives us a little reprieve now and then.
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In the Beginning was the Command Line
My pal Steve turned me on to this essay, written in 1999 by Neil Stephenson.
Highly recommended.
Here’s an excerpt :
If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.
If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.
In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.
Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.
But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.
Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
If you wish, you can download and read his essay in its entirety here.
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GoDaddy.com shills domain auctions?
Before you purchase hosting or domains, check out NoDaddy.com, which explains the way GoDaddy.com operates.
Via Slashdot :
When a GoDaddy customer forgets or otherwise fails to renew a domain, GoDaddy sells it off to the highest bidder through their TDNAM subsidiary. Some registrars–even Network Solutions–give the domain owner a percentage of the proceeds of such auctions. But GoDaddy keeps all the spoils to themselves. Anyway, it was recently discovered that the Vice President of TDNAM has been bidding on (and sometimes winning) TDNAM’s own auctions. This drives up the prices for normal customers and also leads to conflict of interest issues since normal bidders need to trust TDNAM to keep various information secret, such as their proxy bids, bidding history, the domains on their watch list. Also, GoDaddy doesn’t tell you when your bid price was inflated due to TDNAM executives bidding against you. They are one of the few auction services which don’t even give you the nicknames of competing bidders.
DomainNameWire contacted other domain auction services, and none allow unrestricted employee bidding on their own auctions like GoDaddy does. Enom (a patner in NameJet) notes that “We definitely do NOT let employees compete in auctions. Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it.” Yet GoDaddy seems to think it is fine for executives to inflate their auction prices by bidding against customers. They responded to DomainNameWire that they allow this. There is a big risk that these employees have access to private information of the normal bidders, that they get special discounts, or that they may sometimes shill bid to increase prices without trying to actually win.
Head on over to NoDaddy.com for more information.
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Why Neurosurgeons Use Bluetooth
What do brain surgeons know about cellphone safety that the rest of us don’t?
Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,†said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.â€Â
Dr. Vini Khurana, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Australian National University who is an outspoken critic of cellphones, said: “I use it on the speaker-phone mode. I do not hold it to my ear.†And CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, said that like Dr. Black he used an earpiece.
Along with Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s recent diagnosis of a glioma, a type of tumor that critics have long associated with cellphone use, the doctors’ remarks have helped reignite a long-simmering debate about cellphones and cancer.
That supposed link has been largely dismissed by many experts, including the American Cancer Society. The theory that cellphones cause brain tumors “defies credulity,†said Dr. Eugene Flamm, chairman of neurosurgery at Montefiore Medical Center.
According to the Food and Drug Administration, three large epidemiology studies since 2000 have shown no harmful effects. CTIA  the Wireless Association, the leading industry trade group, said in a statement, “The overwhelming majority of studies that have been published in scientific journals around the globe show that wireless phones do not pose a health risk.â€Â
The F.D.A. notes, however, that the average period of phone use in the studies it cites was about three years, so the research doesn’t answer questions about long-term exposures. Critics say many studies are flawed for that reason, and also because they do not distinguish between casual and heavy use.
Cellphones emit non-ionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancer. There is no known biological mechanism to explain how non-ionizing radiation might lead to cancer.
But researchers who have raised concerns say that just because science can’t explain the mechanism doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. Concerns have focused on the heat generated by cellphones and the fact that the radio frequencies are absorbed mostly by the head and neck. In recent studies that suggest a risk, the tumors tend to occur on the same side of the head where the patient typically holds the phone.
Like most research on the subject, the studies are observational, showing only an association between cellphone use and cancer, not a causal relationship. The most important of these studies is called Interphone, a vast research effort in 13 countries, including Canada, Israel and several in Europe.
[From the NYT]
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GOOSH
If your workspace revolves around the cli like mine does, you will prolly dig goosh as much.
Ahhhh, how we love to get more done with less effort.
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Charter should rename itself Cheater
Charter Communications is sending letters to its customers informing them of an “enhanced online experience” that involves Charter monitoring its users’ searches and the websites they visit, and inserting targeted third-party ads based on their web activity. Charter, which serves nearly six million customers, is requiring users who want to keep their activity private to submit their personal information to Charter via an unencrypted form and download a privacy cookie that must be downloaded again each time a user clears his web cache or uses a different browser.
Reader Matt copied The Consumerist on a letter he sent to Charter’s VP of Customer Operations and CEO:
Dear Mr. Stackhouse,
I am a high speed internet subscriber in the Fort Worth, TX area. For the last year or so I have had Charter’s 10 Megabit service and I am a satisfied customer. I am writing, however, because I am concerned by your recent letter discussing the “enhancement†that will be coming soon to my Charter web browsing experience (targeted, in-line advertisement manipulation). I appreciate Charter’s respect for my privacy, but the method that Charter has provided to opt-out of this tracking scheme is insecure and woefully inadequate.
The method that you provide to opt-out is as follows. First, a customer must visit www.charter.com/onlineprivacy. Once at the site, the customer must enter his or her complete name and address. Upon submission of this personal information, the customer must accept a cookie from Charter that indicates his or her opt-out status. While this process sounds simple on face, further consideration reveals that this opt-out method is fraught with privacy concerns and places the burden on your paying customer, rather than Charter.
The most pressing privacy issue with this opt-out method is that the opt-out form presented at the aforementioned URL is not encrypted. As I’m sure you realize, this means that a user submitting his or her address to Charter is doing so in the clear, leaving this personal information open to eavesdropping. It is not difficult to create an SSL-encrypted web form. It is troubling that Charter has not done so in this case.
The fact that this opt-out system relies on a cookie to keep users opted out is also a privacy issue. By telling customers who visit the opt-out page that, “if you delete your cookies or cache files… you will have to opt-out again,†you are encouraging users to keep those files that good privacy practices dictate should be frequently purged. Ironically, the best reason to purge one’s cookies often is to prevent internet marketers from tracking one’s behavior online.
In addition to the critical privacy concerns, the steps required to avoid being tracked by this new advertising system place the burden on your customers, rather than on Charter where it belongs. A customer should be able to opt-out of this advertising tracking system in a manner that will rarely, if ever, require the customer to opt-out again. Instead, because the system uses cookies, a customer must insecurely opt-out of being tracked on each PC in his or her home. Further compounding the work that the customer has to do, if he or she deletes cookies in accordance with safe browsing techniques, it will be necessary to insecurely opt-out on each and every PC again.
I suggest that rather than force your customers through unending iterations of opting out of this advertising system, you should allow customers like me to opt-out at the cable modem level via a secure, encrypted form on your website. I’m glad to hear that Charter has an appreciation for my privacy, but please change your opt-out process to demonstrate that you also have an appreciation for my time and security online.
Matt’s letter focuses on the flawed opt-out clause, but the program itself, an implementation of “deep packet inspection,” is more worrying. Deep packet inspection allows an ISP to monitor not only its users’ searches and visited websites, but also the type of activity (e.g., email or peer-to-peer), which could be used for traffic shaping and threatens net neutrality.
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Houston, We Have a Coredump
Naturally, the astronauts aboard the ISS kept logs of all their activities while up there.
We can read the logs thanks to The Laboratorium, brought to us since 2000 by James Grimmelmann. Thanks, Jim!
The kinds of computer problems they experienced in space are interesting to read about if only because they are no different than the ones we experience here on Earth.
Read some of their logs by clicking here – if you likey.
And – if you’re REALLY geeking out on this stuff like i did, you can download the complete logfiles via NASA’s site.
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robot rebellion is alive and well
Via Gizmodo :
“The army’s machine-gun wielding, insurgent-slaying robot SWORDS is no longer spraying foes with hot doom in Iraq. Actually, it never got the chance to notch a single frag, and never will. Apparently, there was an incident where “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move,” meaning it totally pointed somewhere it wasn’t supposed toâ€â€like at friendlies, which resulted in recall from the field and might’ve set the program back 10-20 years, according to the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey.
He confirmed that no inappropriate shots were fired, so no one was hurt. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any casualtiesâ€â€it might’ve basically killed the program says Fahey: “Once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.” On the upside, it means we have another 10 to 20 years before they rise and go to war with us.”
Well, that’s relief.
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Deep Packet Filtering
As if the infiltration of our privacy by advertisers hasn’t been bane enough, we no longer have to fear *the cookie* as the new evil is deep packet filtering being conducted by many ISPs into the activities of their customers, relaying this info to marketers’ and advertisers’ perusal.
I can’t even begin to express my distaste at such actions and wonder if it was exactly this kind of scenario the people who run this country had in mind when they decided to start treating all of us like energizer batteries for their marketing machine.
UGH :
The Washington Post is reporting that some Internet Service Providers (ISP) have been using deep-packet inspection to spy on the communications of US customers. Deep packet inspection allows the ISP to read the content of communications including every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered, in short every click and keystroke that comes down the line. The companies involved assert that customers’ privacy is protected because no personally identifying details are released, but they make money from selling the information to advertisers who use the information to target their online pitches. Deep packet inspection is a significant expansion over tools like cookies in the ability to track users.
You can liken it to a phone company listening in on your conversations.
Read the New York Times article on the same controversy here.
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EMR and You
Have you ever wondered what, if any, effects all our WiFi and Broadband and cellular energies flying around might have on our physical bodies?
Certainly, most of us heard the rumblings during the emergence of cellphones that they may cause problems in some people and other related stories that are always presented as nothing to worry about. Such notions would hurt the cash flow to companies who manufacture such devices as well as the carriers who provide subscription-based services to them. We can’t have that now, can we?
Like so many decisions people have made over the millennia, however, we usually make great decisions for the short-term and exceedingly poor ones for the long-term.
Thus, now with so many frequencies being pulsed through the air for this and that we seemingly don’t think or care much about the long-term implications these conveniences may have in store for us. We can speculate about it but the facts are that WE CAN’T BE SURE.
Enter the EMR Policy Institute, who’s goal is :
We believe that the unfettered use of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) – radiofrequency/microwave radiation (RF/MW) present in all wireless and communications technologies, as well as the extremely low frequencies (ELF) present in powerline supplies – is ill advised given research that has accumulated over the last two decades. The Mission of The EMR Policy Institute is to foster a better understanding of the environmental and human biological effects from such exposures. Our goal is to work at the federal, state and international levels to foster appropriate, unbiased research and to create better cooperation between federal regulatory agencies with a stake in public health in order to mitigate unnecessary exposures that may be deemed to be hazardous.
If you’d like to help ensure that these technologies are monitored for these effects with greater accuracy using unbiased research, click here to sign the online petition now being assembled.
Good decisions are based on good information that is not biased and not bent to the will of vested parties. The leaders of those companies should care, too, because what if all of these frequencies are affecting DNA structure in humans? Doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor – the same types of radiation waves are flowing through all of us. All day. All night.
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Wifi that Works?
By Peter Kaplan and Eric Auchard
WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc on Monday unveiled plans for a new generation of wireless devices to operate on soon-to-be-vacant television airwaves, and sought to alleviate fears that this might interfere with TV broadcasts or wireless microphones.
In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission, the Internet leader outlined plans for low-power devices that use local wireless airwaves to access the “white space” between television channels. A Google executive called the plan “Wi-Fi 2.0 or Wi-Fi on steroids.”
“The airwaves can provide huge economic and social gains if used more efficiently …,” Google said in the comments.
Rick Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel, said this class of Wi-Fi devices could eventually offer data transmission speeds of billions of bits per second — far faster than the millions of bits per second available on most current broadband networks. Consumers could watch movies on wireless devices and do other things that are currently difficult on slower networks.
[click here to read more of this article on Reuters]
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Now, That’s Cool!
Every now and then some hype comes around that is, well, worth it :
The applications for such stuff are mind-boggling!
Who can hardly wait to have wallpaper that is capable of projecting video feeds – raise your hand
[image of me raising my hand, hardly able to stay in my seat]
Minority Report, here we come – for better [more streamlined and efficient systems in our homes] or worse [the marketing and advertising buttwhacks will exploit this to the max - just as soon as they can figure out how].
You think advertisements are annoying NOW?
Just you WAIT.
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Another Eureka Moment!
If you had to wear a knee brace every day you’d definitely want to wear one of these.
Funny how these simply wonderful ideas elude us for so long :
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. Scientists in the United States and Canada said on Thursday they have developed a unique device that can be strapped on the knee that exploits the mechanics of human walking to generate a usable supply of electricity.
It generates enough power to charge up 10 cell phones at once, the researchers report in the journal Science.
you can [read more of the reuters article] too.
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another kind of tag
It would be an interesting first day on the job : sign the paperwork, W-2 and whatever else, and then roll up your sleeve for a microchip injection.
Sounds like sci-fi, but it’s happened, and now a handful of states are making sure their citizens will never be forced to have a microchip implanted under their skin.
No one’s quite sure how real a threat these forced implants might be or why states are feeling compelled to protect their residents from being physically tagged. Lawmakers are calling the legislation pre-emptive [isn't that a term used for bombing other countries?] while the industry that produces the technology sees the states’ action as fear mongering.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags – tiny, data-storing microchips about the size of a grain of rice – are in passports, in Wal-Mart factory shipments and in subway passes in cities from New York to Taiwan. They are also in humans. On one less-than-likely episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” a paranoid actor Bob Saget even uses one to monitor his adulterous wife.
Unlike Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which is used for constant, real-time tracking, RFID tags are scanned at close range [for now] – usually from a few feet to a few inches. The tags are tracked by scanners installed at checkpoints, such as office doors or warehouse loading docks. The systems are also commonly used in highway toll collection and as theft protection in car keys.
In humans they’ve been used to store medical information, to track movement and to gain access to locked rooms. To date, roughly 2,000 RFID chips have been sold for implantation in humans, says VeriChip Corp., the only manufacturer with a Food and Drug Administration-approved implantable chip.
The company is focusing its technology on medical patient identification, and about 400 patients, including those with Alzheimer’s disease, have RFIDs implanted. Other VeriChip human implants have been used by a Spanish nightclub to allow VIPs with implanted chips to bypass entrance lines and by the Mexico attorney general’s staff to safeguard identity information at a time when the kidnapping of government officials there is not uncommon.
Some customers are using them as high-tech keys. Ohio security firm CityWatcher.com raised eyebrows in 2006 when it requested that some of its employees be “chipped,†or implanted with tags for access to certain rooms. According to published reports, only two employees got the implants before the company dropped the program. CityWatcher.com has since shut down.
But forced chipping has been a rare practice, leading some industry spokespeople to decry regulation as “scare tactics.â€Â
Wisconsin enacted the first RFID ban in May 2006, and North Dakota in April. Colorado and Ohio have bills in committee, and Oklahoma and Florida saw theirs die. Except for one U.S. House proposal to use RFID tags to track prescription drugs, Congress has not widely addressed the technology.
Yet.
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bluehost is the most
i’ve been loyal to the same host for years. when i first got into external hosting it was way more expensive than it is now. since there are tons of affordable options out there now, i decided it was time to look for a new, more affordable host with the kind of digs i like, such as linux, shell access, multiple domains, mysql and all that good junk geeky types love.
fortunately for me, my pal and geek idol ryness had just switched all his external hosting to bluehost and raved about them to me. at first glance i was sold. ry’s got the eye for quality.
three days and some finagling later all my sites [including this one] are running off of it and i couldn’t be happier with not only the savings but also the features and ease of use for pennies a day.
thanks for the tip, ry.
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Better be good to Amazon or…
Just in time for holiday shopping, the USPTO has awarded Amazon a patent for Generating Current Order Fulfillment Plans Based on Expected Future Orders, which explains how to use modeled net present value to adjust an order’s delivery date favorably or unfavorably based upon expectations that the customer will have high-profit orders in the future. So don’t blame Santa if that special gift isn’t under the tree on Christmas morning, kids – it could just be dear-old-Dad’s low NPV score!
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Humans are not evolved for security!
Human beings aren’t evolved for security in the modern world, and particularly the IT security world, according to security guru Bruce Schneier.
He told delegates at the 2007 RSA Conference that there is a gap between the reality of security and the emotional feel of security due to the way our brains have evolved. This leads to people making bad choices.
“As a species we got really good at estimating risk in an East African village 100,000 years ago. But in 2007 London? Modern times are harder.”
Our brains evolved to deal with the reality of security, but emotional aspects also have a big role, he added. There are a number of such factors that prevent people from making the right security decisions. For instance:
* Exaggerate uncommon risks – for example, air travel is safer than cars but because car accidents are common they are seen as less risky
* Unknown risks – The unknown is always scary
* Personified risk – Osama Bin Laden is scarier than a faceless threat
* Involuntary risks – We overestimate the risks of situations where we have no control, like natural disasters
* Risks that could be controlled – The DC sniper caused a few deaths but the response was way out of proportion.
“In the technology industry we like to think we’re computers, but we’re not even close,” he said.
“The brain is still in beta mode, it’s got all sorts of patches and workarounds. It’s not perfectly created, it’s clearly evolved up.”
Too often in the industry products appealed to people’s emotions rather than addressing business facts and that was hurting the industry.
Fear is still the best motivation for consumers.
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