(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...Attn. porn lovers: VMWare, Virtual PC are the programs for you!
Once a year, Dan Savage’s Seattle-based mega-popular and massively syndicated sex advice column Savage Love is run by a stranger who won the privilige in a charity auction.
This year, the winner was Eric Rescorla, a San Francisco computer security specialist, who used his IT skills to issue some advice to a poor soul suffering from an online-porn-lovin’ papa who had no idea how to keep his propensities…um, private.
He says to get some virtualization software so that the dad can “do his porn surfing on the virtual machine, and can even set it to reset itself whenever the virtual computer is restarted, so there’s no need to worry about leaving tracks. It takes a little technical sophistication to get this working, since you need to install Windows on the virtual machine, but once it’s running, any idiot can use it.”
He recommends VMware (”because you can download a free version of VMware Server for home use”), or “if you’re running the business versions of XP or Vista, you can download Microsoft’s Virtual PC for free.”
We somehow don’t see VMWare and Microsoft sending out this case study.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...We’re No. 4 — suck it, Finland!
Nokia is apparently under the impression that more people will buy cell phones if they are told to do so by a really boring British professor, so it commissioned a global ranking from Leonard Waverman of the London Business School.
Taking the top spot in the please-don’t-make-it-annual Connectivity Scorecard was (you guessed it) the United States, followed by Sweden, Japan and Canada.
“What this study demonstrates is that not even the world’s richest countries can afford to become complacent about their current telecom and computing profile,” Prof. Waverman was quoted as saying. (But can they afford Nokia’s E65?)
Ironically, Finland, where Nokia is headquarted, only came in at No. 5, after us. Apparently they can make good cell phones there. They just can’t make good enough use of them.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...To do: invest in a built-in back-up program and PsychoAlert®
Analysts are forever telling us that cyberthreats often come from within the enterprise, but one Jacksonville, Florida architecture firm learned this lesson the hard way last week, according to a FoxNews.com story.
Employee Marie Lupe Cooley found a newspaper ad for a job that looked suspiciously like hers and listed her boss’ phone number. She exacted her revenge by busting into the office and erasing the firm’s system contents, representing around $2.5-million in blueprints.
The irony? Her job wasn’t even at stake–the advertised position was at the owner’s wife’s firm. Cooley lost her job (duh), and was arrested and charged with the felony of causing greater than $1,000 damage to computer files.
The business was able to recover these files, although they had to cough up a lot of dough to do so. Bet they’re wishing they had invested up-front in a decent built-in back-up system, along with some PsychoAlert® software to keep out the tech-savvy loonies.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Web 2.0… hands off my TV watching!
MTV Flux, a U.K.-based television channel launched in September 2006, announced it’s shutting down. The idea behind MTV Flux is the audience decides which music videos get broadcast, and can even upload their own creations. Seems like the powerhouse behind this wise idea forgot one important thing. TV watching is a passive indulgence that necessitates just two things: television reception and a couch. Even the Web 2.0 craze can’t infiltrate the haven that is mind-numbing TV watching.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...We’re not pulling the wool over your eyes. Honest.
Out of the innovative braintrust in Waterloo, Ont., comes what will undoubtedly be a Canadian IT juggernaut bigger than Research In Motion: SmartPatterns.com!
That’s right: Using a drag-and-drop interface, users simply create their own designs and add the proper measurements. Then, presto-chango, a ready-to-knit pattern! Finally the on-demand model offers something your grandmother could use.
Like a lot of startups, SmartPatterns.com is looking for some investor funding. They will no doubt be able to knit an entire wardrobe before they’ll find it.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Richard Stallman is wookin’ pa nub
Craigslist posts that are especially funny, strange, or out-of-the-ordinary can be tagged by users, and, if enough people tag it, the posting can make it into the coveted “Best Of” listings that are collated once every month or so. One January winner was a M4W personal ad from a heavily bearded nerdy oldster…
And it turned out to be from Richard Stallman, the ornery, outspoken open source advocate and president of the Free Software Foundation!
He mentions his “unusual interests in politics, science, music and dance” and his search for a woman that can “[delight] in her ability to fascinate a man and…be loved tenderly”, and has a low opinion of success and spending time together every day.
He also identifies his “23-year-old child, the Free Software Movement” as a major part of his life (who precludes him from having any other children).
And the icing on the cake? The accompanying photo.
Now, the IT field isn’t renowned for its lookers, but you’d hope that someone smart enough to found the GNU Project and author the GNU General Public License would attach a less hobo-riffic photo to help potential mates get past his request for someone with whom to “share bouts of intense, passionately kind awareness of each other, alternating with tolerant warmth while we’re absorbed in other aspects of life.”
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Facebook user to Beacon: Bite me
I’m sure everybody remembers the Facebook Beacon controversy a couple months back. You know the one where bloggers around the world were concerned about the security and privacy concerns for the social networking site’s ad systems.
It was reported that the Beacon ad system would track Facebook users’ activities on third-party sites even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have opted out of broadcasting their online activities to their Facebook friends.
The fact that Facebook’s Beacon was automatically installing cookies in its users’ browsers to follow them around the Internet apparently irked one reader over at ValleyWag to launch some sort of protest.
But instead of taking it to the streets 70s style, the anonymous user decided to head over to the kitchen and bake an edible Facebook cookie. The biscuit pictures the profile page of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. We think Mr. Christie missed a golden opportunity with this one. Check out the picture.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Hasbro, Mattel scrabble to squash Scrabulous
Scrabble has recently emerged from the nerd ghetto, thanks to Scrabulous, the Facebook application that lets users play the crossword game. But Hasbro (the game’s North American distributor) and Mattel (who sells it everywhere else) are none too pleased about this rip-off (and the $25,000 per month its creators make off ads). The app might’ve gone under the radar of the corporations’ crack legal team for who-knows how long, but the game has reached critical mass, with over half-a-million players using it on a daily basis out of the two-million-person installed base.
According to a BBC News story, the companies have issued a cease-and-desist letter to Facebook (who have yet to comment), the news of which has triggered an outcry from all the Scrabulous addicts. A “Save Scrabulous” group has been started on Facebook with a whopping 20,000 members and thousands more signing up every few hours.
What will happen if Scrabulous gets shut down? Uh, work, I guess?
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...Web host vendor soothes with sassmouth
Valleywag reported on the recent gaffe by Web hosting company DreamHost, who, for starters, over-billed their customers by $7.5-million. Oops! Making things even worse, the firm, in an ostensible attempt to communicate with its target audience of “broke kids who have personal sites,” used some rather cavalier language when conveying the bad news.
The missive begins with “Ack.” and then uses lots of CAPITALIZATION to convey how “reaalllllly embarassed” they are about the “bum charges”, which will be removed “within a day or two max.” It’s signed “The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!”
Perhaps this is a smarter tactic than it seems. Wouldn’t the TJX victims have felt better if they got a notification saying, “srry for the mixup, y’alls! Identity theft is our bad LOLLLLLL >? That just puts you right at ease.
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(2 votes, average: 9.5 out of 10) Loading ...This never happens on 24
A U.S. government audit revealed last week that an FBI wiretap had been cut off by a telephone company because the Feebies hadn’t paid their bill. According to the Reuters story, this was due to a combination of outdated accounting systems and a predeliction for some agents to pinch some of the cash put aside for undercover telecommunications operations.
One would guess that since the civil-liberties-bereft Patriot Act was passed, the G-Men-and-Women have been going through “undercover telecommunications operations” funds like Stephen King goes through blank paper, slapping wiretaps on anyone who giggled when George Bush made his infamous remark about obstetriction-gynecologists being “unable to practice their love with women all across the country.” (For a complete time-waster, there’s a list of Bushisms here.)
This would never happen on the TV show 24. Can you picture Jack Bauer asking Chloe to download the schematics to the arming mechanism on a cannister of nerve gas to his PDA when, in mid-transmission, his wireless service is cut off because Bill Buchanan forgot to authorize the automated withdrawal payable to Verizon? (And can you picture anyone at Verizon — or any carrier, really — with the guts to cut off Jack’s service? I guess Bell might do it.)
In any event, asked to comment by phone, an FBI spokesperson said: “The FBI will not tolerate any financial misma –”
In unrelated news … sick of people who, with cell phone in hand, seem to lose any notion of etiquette, respect or common courtesy? Here’s a primer for them on cell phone karma, courtesy of Kyocera and YouTube.
