The article is full of "could"s and "possibly"s. It's sheer speculation.. and indeed, scaremongering.
I've seen this several times before, and the best article I've seen on it is here. That's a lot more level headed, and it refers to the "Free Public WiFi" SSID as a virally spreading phenomena, but most likely not a virus or honeypot.
The problem is that Windows handles Ad Hoc WLAN networks in a rather bizarre way.. once you've connected to the Ad Hoc network, your computer will likely become *part* of the Ad Hoc network and will consequently rebroadcast the SSID, advertising to others. This means that the SSID slowly spreads out just like a biological virus.
Yes - it *could* be used as a man-in-the-middle attack or some sort of botnet, so the advice to steer clear of Ad Hoc networks you don't know about it very sound indeed. My experience of seeing the "Free Public WiFi" SSID definitely fits in with that theory.
Eudora was always an odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio - their primary business is wireless technologies. Eudora didn't really fit in, but to Qualcomm's credit it has been under continual development and revision to this date.
There's a decent Wikipedia entry on it for anyone wanting to know the background, but basically it's been around for an astonishing 18 years. It's evolved gently as a mail client, so any Eudora user can use a new version quickly. Compare this with Outlook which radically redesigns the whole interface every release or so.
To be honest, Eudora probably isn't the simplest mail client in the world. But it's a very powerful, very secure client that's ideal for power users.
When I first heard about this move I went "uh-oh". But on reflection, this could be a good thing. Eudora has some really cool features that would work well in Thunderbird, and both products appeal to the same type of people. I only hope that they don't break Eudora in the process of changing it!
To paraphrase Chandler when Joey turns up in the Elf costume in Friends.. "Too many jokes.. must mock Microsoft".
Awww shucks. Let's start with having to press CTRL-ALT-DEL on the steering wheel at 200 MPH and take it from there..
A big question here is.. is the database compromised? From the poking around I've done, it does seem that the only people who have received this message are BlueFrog users.. those who don't use it, don't seem to have it. It could simply be that the spammers have used tracking information embedded in the spammy URLs to find out who is using BlueFrog.
BlueFrog has been criticised for it's so-called "vigilante" approach.. it's not alone in this approach, but perhaps this does go to show a potential downside: spammers are evil - pissed off spammers will simply direct the evil at the people who pissed them off.
Normandy isn't a town - it's a whole region. I suspect many Normans regard it as a country in it's own right (bloody Vikings). Specifically, the article mentions Caen (which is a city).
Now, Caen is an interesting place. It's hardly a sleepy backwater - it's the busiest urban centre in the area. (And the traffic is awful). It's actually a very modern, thriving city that was rebuilt after being almost completely destroyed in the aftermath of the D-Day invasion in 1944 (even most of the pretty bits are actually restoration of the original buldings). I'd suggest that of all the places I've been to in France, Caen is certainly one of the top runners when it comes to modernity.
Also, the French are pretty keen on their plastic and were early adopters of payment cards and related technologies. So.. it'll be interesting to see how this experiment pans out because it's being carried out in more-or-less ideal conditions.
My Nokia 770 is great - it does exactly what it's designed to do. It's a great, portable way to access the web via WiFi or Bluetooth, *much* more convenient to carry around than a laptop and the great thing is that it's really an accessory to your phone, so you don't have to have a cellphone as big as a housebrick.
What the Nokia 770 *is* - it's an internet tablet with an very high-resolution 800 pixel wide display, with a basic email client, RSS reader, multimedia support and some apps thrown in. It does come with expandable memory, and there are other apps you can load onto it for free.
It *isn't* a laptop replacement, nor a PDA, nor a phone, nor is it a games machine or a personal multimedia player although it can do all of these to an extent. Primarily, it's designed to give you a much better web experience than you would get from a cellphone while it fits in your pocket. If you choose to extend it with keyboards, new applications and even things like GPS then it's up to you.
Two words of warning - I bought mine directly from Nokia (I had one of the first) and the first unit was faulty, at which point I discovered that Nokia's customer service is not great. And to get the best out of the N770, some work is required in terms of patching and loading on apps.
One last thing - it's great value. In the UK it works out as £250 including tax and shipping which is cheaper than many mobile phones.
It is of course the Manchester Guardian traditionally, although it is published now in London. Although the name changed in the fifties, the popular Radio 4 presenter Brian Redhead stubbornly referred to it by it's original name until his death in 1994. Partly as a result of this, many people still refer to it as the Manchester Guardian. The London Guardian it is not, and never has been - I guess the British Guardian newspaper might annoy pedants like me less;)
Although I think most people still call it the Grauniad because of it's historical propensity for tpyogarphical errors.
Bundled in with this patch is a change to the behaviour of embedded controls in IE6 on Windows XP, due to the Eolas patent issue. This means that things like Flash navigation or Java widgets might not work without being clicked first to activate. TechWeb have a good article with a summary of the changes, along with some links elswhere.
This won't affect IE6 on Windows 2000, and it's worth noting that things like Flash will work just fine in Firefox, Mozilla or Opera on Windows too.
If you're an admin of machines running IE then it will be worth keeping an eye on this one. The best place is the Internet Storm Center which usually updates several times a day and links to other sites of interest. (Be sure to check the diary archive).
This is a little like the WMF flaw that became known just after Christmas. Eventually MS had to provide an out-of-cycle patch (even if it was just a few days early) because of the bad press they were getting. From the looks of things, the patch for this one will be ready soon too.. so any kind of noise you can make to get an early release would be a Good Thing.
Yeah yeah, MS will get a lot of flak from Slashdotters on this, but you should bear in mind that they also provide some decent patching tools like WSUS for administrators to roll these things out. Personally, I never use IE on my Windows box, but I'm afraid it's still a fact of life in most large businesses.
This is a Bad Thing, and it's quite possibly unlawful. In most countries, parody sites are protected under the "fair use" clause in copyright laws. If I wanted to create a humorous site parodying the UK government (where I live), I'd have certain protection by law to copy the "look and feel" of the other site. This is true of most other countries.
For example, some time ago there was a similar issue (reported here) about the UK Gov's "Preparing for Emergencies" site (the real one is here, the parody one here). There was some fuss about it at the time, but basically the UK Gov cocked up by not registering the.co.uk domain along with the.gov.uk, and there was no case to answer in law, because of the "fair use" clause.
Similarly, whitehouse.org and whitehouse.gov coexist. Indeed, there are probably hundreds of parody sites that work in a similar way.
Now, when I read the story, the quote from Bruce Tonkin at Melbourne IT set off my BS alarm. His claim that Melbourne IT reacts quickly to issues like this is simply not true. If you're involved in the anti-spam or anti-scam business, you'll know that Melbourne IT are one of the domain registrars of choice for phishers and spammers. In fact, Melbourne IT's procedures are so slack that they infamously transferred the panix.com domain to a third party without authorisation last year. The site was offline for several days because Melbourne IT don't work weekends. You'll see that Bruce Tonkin offered another bullshit excuse there too.
So, don't just blame the "Australian government" for this, as it's unclear who exactly intervened. A large part of the blame for this has to fall on Melbourne IT and their pisspoor procedures.. I bet they'd believe ANYBODY who rang up and claimed to be from the government. Shucks, perhaps I should give 'em a call and pretend to be John Howard.. although my English accent might give me away, though probably not.
You're not doomed.. for starters, you can always let off steam in private and off-the-record. Have a few drinks with your coworkers (and NOT the boss) once a week just to get it off your chest.
As a management style, there will be two likely outcomes. One, it will actually succeed and bring positive things to the business - this will be a Good Thing. Probably more likely, your department will make some enormous mistakes because of the supression of internal debate and be reorganised.. in which case you need to make sure that you're out of the frame, or else this will be a very Bad Thing.
Don't forget the ultimate sanction - if the place sucks, leave.
Cookies schmookies.. everything will be in the server logs anyway. And doesn't the DHS collate all ISP data in any case? The violations of privacy that people should be concerned about are not a few tracking cookies, but are in fact a widespread and ongoing monitoring and profiling of the activities of all internet users. And not just in the US either, this is common in Europe too. Really CNET and other media outlets are bleating about something that's irrelevant and are missing the real story.
Also, having a go at the White House for using WebTrends to collect and analyse visitor data is nuts. When you've got a busy and important site like that, good quality analytics are vital. If they didn't have them, you'd probably find the media criticising the White House for not knowing about their visitor demographics, popular pages etc etc.
That article really just smacks of lazy journalism. Whatever next.. discovering their PC has a "Temporary Internet Files" directory?
What patents does NTP actually have? None, it seems. The USPTO has so far indicated that NTP's patents appear to be invalid. So what are they licensing? Pixie dust? What do they actually make? Anything? Have you ever seen their web site?
So Visto have managed to licence what appears to be a non-existant set of patents from a company no-one has heard of. They must be betting the barn that the US legal system continues to come down hard on RIM and they have to shut up shop. Visto aren't new though, they've been around providing push email services for a while.. so perhaps they just bottled out when the NTP lawyers turned up.
One final point.. do you think that RIM would be having these problems if it was a US company rather than a Canadian one? Microsoft gets away with infringing patents all the time, but it's yet to be proved that RIM actually *has* and yet they are punished far more harshly than Microsoft ever was.
Now, Wikipedia has its faults.. but to be honest, I find it a hugely relevant, usually accurate and very enjoyable resource, sometimes marred by personal agendas and bias. On the other hand, The Register is a hugely relevant, usually accurate and very enjoyable resource, sometimes marred by personal agendas and bias.
I think this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Any intelligent netizen takes a variety of sources (e.g. Wikipedia, El Reg, Slashdot, Digg, the BBC etc) and forms their own opinions.
Yes, Wikipedia has grown up, and I think it needs to tighten up procedures. But The Register's bizarre vendetta against what the term "wiki fiddlers" is annoying. Perhaps The Register needs to grow up a little too?
Darl McBride says that "all your ideas are belong to us" and starts a mass lawsuit against every idea ever. McBride is quoted as saying "Benjamin Franklin is gonna have to cough up for all that IP he ripped from us, else he's gonna have to say a big HI to his new cellmant BUBBA."
They're not the first to do this.. there's a product called Petrel made from seabirds. The same firm also makes fuel from surplus wine and other renewal sources, in addition to a range of other interesting fuels.
Oh no.. here we go again. No, it's not that there's another flaw in IE that I say that because some things are inevitable.. death, taxes and IE flaws. But any self-respecting IT professional or geek won't be using IE anyway. Sure.. users do, but they're much further down the food chain.
No, the reason I'm saying it is that this being Slashdot we'll get the usual set of arguments about browser and OS supremacy. Again. It's like Groundhog Day!
Shucks, everything has security flaws. Yeah, some more than others. To be honest, I found it more of a shock that Lynx has a security flaw. If you can't trust Lynx to be secure, then really nothing is secure. Except unplugging your computer and putting it back in the box, perhaps.
CMP aquired BYTE some years ago. And promptly shut it down, leaving it to be a web-only publication. They have a history of acquiring other publications and killing them off. God only knows what their business model is.
The 800 pixel wide 770 screen is physically narrow than the 9500's 640 pixel wide screen. The 9500 has an excellent display, but the limited resolution is a problem, and 770's web browser is much better than the 9500's.
The 9500 isn't a 3G device, but the 770 is.. sort of! It works best on the move when used with a Bluetooth 3G phone. You know *one* advantage of this is that you can put the phone somewhere where is gets a good signal and use Bluetooth to talk to it. That's certainly a feature the 9500 and other "all in one" smartphones can't do.
As for the question about timed events.. err, well I have an alarm clock for things like that, but one thing the 770 could do with is a proper docking station so that it can be left on charge all the time and just pulled out, rather than the slightly fiddly arrangement of a seperate stand, hard case and power supply.
VOIP comes next year in the 2006 version of the software. Nokia have always said that they'd add more features to it in 2006 that users can download and install themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen this several times before, and the best article I've seen on it is here. That's a lot more level headed, and it refers to the "Free Public WiFi" SSID as a virally spreading phenomena, but most likely not a virus or honeypot.
The problem is that Windows handles Ad Hoc WLAN networks in a rather bizarre way.. once you've connected to the Ad Hoc network, your computer will likely become *part* of the Ad Hoc network and will consequently rebroadcast the SSID, advertising to others. This means that the SSID slowly spreads out just like a biological virus.
Yes - it *could* be used as a man-in-the-middle attack or some sort of botnet, so the advice to steer clear of Ad Hoc networks you don't know about it very sound indeed. My experience of seeing the "Free Public WiFi" SSID definitely fits in with that theory.
They missed the European Union's EUROPHON-1 Standard (pronounced "euro phoney") out. This is clearly a case of the European Union gone mad. ;)
There's a decent Wikipedia entry on it for anyone wanting to know the background, but basically it's been around for an astonishing 18 years. It's evolved gently as a mail client, so any Eudora user can use a new version quickly. Compare this with Outlook which radically redesigns the whole interface every release or so.
To be honest, Eudora probably isn't the simplest mail client in the world. But it's a very powerful, very secure client that's ideal for power users.
When I first heard about this move I went "uh-oh". But on reflection, this could be a good thing. Eudora has some really cool features that would work well in Thunderbird, and both products appeal to the same type of people. I only hope that they don't break Eudora in the process of changing it!
(If you haven't been following the 360 Insight vs Spamhaus thing then you'll have no idea what's going on here!)
To paraphrase Chandler when Joey turns up in the Elf costume in Friends.. "Too many jokes.. must mock Microsoft". Awww shucks. Let's start with having to press CTRL-ALT-DEL on the steering wheel at 200 MPH and take it from there..
BlueFrog has been criticised for it's so-called "vigilante" approach.. it's not alone in this approach, but perhaps this does go to show a potential downside: spammers are evil - pissed off spammers will simply direct the evil at the people who pissed them off.
Now, Caen is an interesting place. It's hardly a sleepy backwater - it's the busiest urban centre in the area. (And the traffic is awful). It's actually a very modern, thriving city that was rebuilt after being almost completely destroyed in the aftermath of the D-Day invasion in 1944 (even most of the pretty bits are actually restoration of the original buldings). I'd suggest that of all the places I've been to in France, Caen is certainly one of the top runners when it comes to modernity.
Also, the French are pretty keen on their plastic and were early adopters of payment cards and related technologies. So.. it'll be interesting to see how this experiment pans out because it's being carried out in more-or-less ideal conditions.
Kinda reminds me of this old one. ;)
What the Nokia 770 *is* - it's an internet tablet with an very high-resolution 800 pixel wide display, with a basic email client, RSS reader, multimedia support and some apps thrown in. It does come with expandable memory, and there are other apps you can load onto it for free.
It *isn't* a laptop replacement, nor a PDA, nor a phone, nor is it a games machine or a personal multimedia player although it can do all of these to an extent. Primarily, it's designed to give you a much better web experience than you would get from a cellphone while it fits in your pocket. If you choose to extend it with keyboards, new applications and even things like GPS then it's up to you.
Two words of warning - I bought mine directly from Nokia (I had one of the first) and the first unit was faulty, at which point I discovered that Nokia's customer service is not great. And to get the best out of the N770, some work is required in terms of patching and loading on apps.
One last thing - it's great value. In the UK it works out as £250 including tax and shipping which is cheaper than many mobile phones.
Although I think most people still call it the Grauniad because of it's historical propensity for tpyogarphical errors.
This won't affect IE6 on Windows 2000, and it's worth noting that things like Flash will work just fine in Firefox, Mozilla or Opera on Windows too.
This is a little like the WMF flaw that became known just after Christmas. Eventually MS had to provide an out-of-cycle patch (even if it was just a few days early) because of the bad press they were getting. From the looks of things, the patch for this one will be ready soon too.. so any kind of noise you can make to get an early release would be a Good Thing.
Yeah yeah, MS will get a lot of flak from Slashdotters on this, but you should bear in mind that they also provide some decent patching tools like WSUS for administrators to roll these things out. Personally, I never use IE on my Windows box, but I'm afraid it's still a fact of life in most large businesses.
For example, some time ago there was a similar issue (reported here) about the UK Gov's "Preparing for Emergencies" site (the real one is here, the parody one here). There was some fuss about it at the time, but basically the UK Gov cocked up by not registering the .co.uk domain along with the .gov.uk, and there was no case to answer in law, because of the "fair use" clause.
Similarly, whitehouse.org and whitehouse.gov coexist. Indeed, there are probably hundreds of parody sites that work in a similar way.
Now, when I read the story, the quote from Bruce Tonkin at Melbourne IT set off my BS alarm. His claim that Melbourne IT reacts quickly to issues like this is simply not true. If you're involved in the anti-spam or anti-scam business, you'll know that Melbourne IT are one of the domain registrars of choice for phishers and spammers. In fact, Melbourne IT's procedures are so slack that they infamously transferred the panix.com domain to a third party without authorisation last year. The site was offline for several days because Melbourne IT don't work weekends. You'll see that Bruce Tonkin offered another bullshit excuse there too.
So, don't just blame the "Australian government" for this, as it's unclear who exactly intervened. A large part of the blame for this has to fall on Melbourne IT and their pisspoor procedures.. I bet they'd believe ANYBODY who rang up and claimed to be from the government. Shucks, perhaps I should give 'em a call and pretend to be John Howard.. although my English accent might give me away, though probably not.
As a management style, there will be two likely outcomes. One, it will actually succeed and bring positive things to the business - this will be a Good Thing. Probably more likely, your department will make some enormous mistakes because of the supression of internal debate and be reorganised.. in which case you need to make sure that you're out of the frame, or else this will be a very Bad Thing.
Don't forget the ultimate sanction - if the place sucks, leave.
Also, having a go at the White House for using WebTrends to collect and analyse visitor data is nuts. When you've got a busy and important site like that, good quality analytics are vital. If they didn't have them, you'd probably find the media criticising the White House for not knowing about their visitor demographics, popular pages etc etc.
That article really just smacks of lazy journalism. Whatever next.. discovering their PC has a "Temporary Internet Files" directory?
So Visto have managed to licence what appears to be a non-existant set of patents from a company no-one has heard of. They must be betting the barn that the US legal system continues to come down hard on RIM and they have to shut up shop. Visto aren't new though, they've been around providing push email services for a while.. so perhaps they just bottled out when the NTP lawyers turned up.
One final point.. do you think that RIM would be having these problems if it was a US company rather than a Canadian one? Microsoft gets away with infringing patents all the time, but it's yet to be proved that RIM actually *has* and yet they are punished far more harshly than Microsoft ever was.
I think this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Any intelligent netizen takes a variety of sources (e.g. Wikipedia, El Reg, Slashdot, Digg, the BBC etc) and forms their own opinions.
Yes, Wikipedia has grown up, and I think it needs to tighten up procedures. But The Register's bizarre vendetta against what the term "wiki fiddlers" is annoying. Perhaps The Register needs to grow up a little too?
Also reviewed here but the review unit didn't want to talk WiFi. Looks like Nokia's customer service is dreadful and probably best avoided.
cellmant = cellmate. All your speling are belong to us.
Darl McBride says that "all your ideas are belong to us" and starts a mass lawsuit against every idea ever. McBride is quoted as saying "Benjamin Franklin is gonna have to cough up for all that IP he ripped from us, else he's gonna have to say a big HI to his new cellmant BUBBA."
They're not the first to do this.. there's a product called Petrel made from seabirds. The same firm also makes fuel from surplus wine and other renewal sources, in addition to a range of other interesting fuels.
No, the reason I'm saying it is that this being Slashdot we'll get the usual set of arguments about browser and OS supremacy. Again. It's like Groundhog Day!
Shucks, everything has security flaws. Yeah, some more than others. To be honest, I found it more of a shock that Lynx has a security flaw. If you can't trust Lynx to be secure, then really nothing is secure. Except unplugging your computer and putting it back in the box, perhaps.
CMP aquired BYTE some years ago. And promptly shut it down, leaving it to be a web-only publication. They have a history of acquiring other publications and killing them off. God only knows what their business model is.
The 9500 isn't a 3G device, but the 770 is.. sort of! It works best on the move when used with a Bluetooth 3G phone. You know *one* advantage of this is that you can put the phone somewhere where is gets a good signal and use Bluetooth to talk to it. That's certainly a feature the 9500 and other "all in one" smartphones can't do.
As for the question about timed events.. err, well I have an alarm clock for things like that, but one thing the 770 could do with is a proper docking station so that it can be left on charge all the time and just pulled out, rather than the slightly fiddly arrangement of a seperate stand, hard case and power supply.
VOIP comes next year in the 2006 version of the software. Nokia have always said that they'd add more features to it in 2006 that users can download and install themselves.