Sex sells - gadgets!

I just recevied a invitation to subscribe to Sync Magazine but I did a double take on the email because it included a quite suggestive front cover photo that looked like it would be more suitable for top-shelf treatment. Indeed while at my local bookstore I had just noticed a motorcycle magazine in a plastic sheath which given the cover photo was clearly not to prevent against damage.

When I trolled over to Sync Magazine's web site it became even more clear that this is someone's effort to turn the gadget reviews of magazines like Penthouse and others into an entire publication by itself. Almost every page of the website includes some geeky male with gadget and nubile geekophillic female. Clearly someone took the message "Sex sells" to heart.

Apart from the article on devices to sneak alcohol into football games and onto the beach I did spot an interesting article on wearable airbags from Halo Labs. Its intended for motorcycle riders, but as a paraglider pilot where people suffer serious impact injuries I think that one will go far in other activities.

Good maps at last

Halleluyah! Finally someone has come out with a good map service on the web and its from those goofy Google guys. Having just done an address lookup on Google I noticed they were now offering Google Maps as well as Yahoo and MapQuest. And when I clicked on Google Maps it took me to a very nicely presented map with a 3D label over the map indicating my search address. Then I found I could smoothly pan around the map in pretty much realtime. Even better I could drag the map around with the mouse and quickly zoom in and out (a bit slower). This isn't close to the amazing Keyhole aerial photo based service (also recently acquired by Google) but its pretty darned good and definitely wins my vote for best online maps. Combined with Google's local search capabilities it looks like it'll be a winner.

Spam humour

During a discussion on spam and spyware tactics on ISP's newsgroup the follow post was made:

WARNING
        This new scam is being pulled mainly on older men.

        What happens is that when you stop for a red light, a young
        nude woman comes up and pretends to be washing your
        windshield.

        While she is doing this, another person opens your back
        door and steals anything in the car.

        They are very good at this.

        They got me 7 times Friday and 5 times Saturday. I wasn't
        able to find them on Sunday...

I wouldn't have bothered posting this myself, except I'd just finished yet another job of cleaning spyware and viruses from a hopelessly chocked Windows PC. People just don't understand how it gets on their machines, and yet the PC was loaded with at least a half dozen free "utilities" that were clearly sent to distract them while the spyware was busy being installed and stealing all their private information. Sure Internet Explorer bugs can partly be to blame, in addition to a lack of user education too, but really, when it comes down to it, falling for the "FREE STUFF" trick and being entertained by the show is the biggest culprit and it works, time after time after time.

What is more I have yet another spyware and virus laden PC already lined up for fixing. I'm seriously thinking about refusing to fix computers, but instead to sell training time while I sit with the user and teach them how to fix the computer. Then a) they will appreaciate how much time this all takes, b) how complicated and difficult it can be and c) I'll have less of a chance of seeing them back with the same problem in a week or two. Sure it means less repeat business for me in exchange for more money upfront, but all in all its for the common good.

This site cited

My previous entry on the Anonynet has been cited at Double-Tongued Word Wrester, which is cataloging "neologisms". As I later noted I was not the first to use the term "anonynet", however its fun to have my definition cited in its definition. Go visit Double-Tongued for plenty more weird, whacky and sometimes useful "neologisms".

Sometimes, against all odds, technology just works

I recently returned from a vacation break in Hawaii. Apart from the usual vacation stuff, this was my first attempt at a tech-enabled trip. Included in the high tech adventure was my new Dell 700m laptop (still going great since its purchase last November). The laptop was used for checking email, web surfing, archiving photos (from my aging, but still reliable Olympus C-2020 digital camera), as a DVD player, and it was also stuffed full of almost every CD in WMA format.

Since the 700m speakers are basically crap and I wasn't sure what kind of audio equipment our room would have I brought along a Belkin FM transmitter and 3.5 stereo to phono cable. Both got used but the latter proved best as it allowed the laptop to be used away from the CD player/radio. The Belkin TuneCast II transmitter was purchased just before leaving for Hawaii and worked out well as it could be tuned over the entire FM range and used two AAA batteries and smart power controls that power off when no audio is present. The only problem I had was that the car power adpater didn't work with the American rental car due to some physical mismatch of the 12V socket and the adapter plug. Transmit range was at least 10ft indoors and good inside the car, occasionally the transmitter needed to moved around in the car to get clear reception, but it was never really a big problem.

Mobile tunes were provided by copying files to a venerable FrontierLabs NexII MP3/WMA player that is going great and with the addition of a bigger compact flash card will probably last for several more years. That's the way I like my technology - stuff that just keeps going and going until its obsolete. The FrontierLabs guys were smart enough to make the storage removable and based on a standard that would be around for a long time. I bought it with a 256MB CF card, and now a 1GB card is just $70 or so. The NexII also uses standard AA batteries and is actually designed for NiMH AA rechargeables so I never have to worry about some builtin recharageable battery dying after a few hundred cycles (which could easily be about one year) and then having to send it off for expensive servicing. I'll *NEVER* by an device that uses a builtin proprietary rechargeable battery - I'm prepared to buy a new proprietary battery, but not to send off a device to have one replaced, that's nuts.

Connectivity to the Internet was provided for free by my fantastic ISP, sonic.net whose DSL accounts include free dialup backup that works anywhere in the USA. I was able to get a 56kbps dialup connection at local call rates which from where I was staying was free. I was then able to VPN back home when necesary (although the VPN connection was somewhat flakey for reasons yet to be determined). The only network connectivity hiccup was when my home server got disconnected on the last day due to the WiFi access point serving it accidentally losing its power connection. Until then I was able to monitor our dynamic duo of cats using a motion triggered web camera, downloading short .avi files of their activity when they decided to camp in front of the camera or wander by it.

As a backup for connectivity I took the cable to connect my Motorola V300 phone to my computer which on my current cellular plan would have provided a 5kbps dialup connection for free during in the evenings (after 9pm), or a 30kbps GPRS connection (for email only due to port blocking that T-Mobile does on my cheapo data plan) the rest of the time. However since my Sonic dialup worked so well and I never took the computer on the road with us (since we had the NexII player for the car) there was no need to ever use the mobile phone backup. While on the road I was surprised to find that T-Mobile had excellent connectivity in most parts of Hawaii including GPRS connectivity so if I really wanted to I could check email using the builting IMAP/POP email client in my Motorola V300.

Overall my tech enabled vacation was a positive experience. It wasn't even really much to lug since its a compact and light laptop (4.5 lbs) and the small case I have for it easily contained all the extra gadgets and cables I needed for connectivity. Along with my digital camera, a few DVDs, extra batteries and a AA NiMH charger it didn't add much at all to my total baggage. The benefit was access to all my music collection, a handy DVD player, instant viewing and archiving of all the photos and movies taken on the digital camera, and of course email, web access and cat monitoring for free!

Unpatent this!

This may be a dumb idea I think it needs to be published, if it hasn't been suggested already. Since if I publish it then its unlikely it'll successfully be patented I figured I would. I call this process "the unpatent", as they say, information just wants to be free. So here goes...

The latest fad in generating spam seems to be sending email from domains that either haven't yet, or have only just been registered, and then terminating their registration. Also a lot of spam will point you to a website that is from a similarly fresh, or as some would call them, unborn domains.

Therefore why not create an email and browser extension that warns the user then they are about to visit a website or read an email from an IP address that is either a) not attached to any domain, or b) attached to a very recently registered domain. Also add the option in case a) or b) to validate that its IP address against some database (similar to the RBL lists used to combat spammers) and not visit it. Such a database could be self-populated by sending in the IP addresses and domain names harvested from emails identified as spam by the current collection of Bayesian filters that are in use. Some kind of scoring system would separate wheat from chaff in the database and let users set thier own threshold of tolerance for recently spawn domains.

If such systems were widely deployed it would make the identification of spam and rogue websites much faster since Bayesian filters are widely deployed and could much more rapidly put IP addresses and domain names into the database than occurs with the RBL databases. Since spam is now a necessarily inefficient process spammers have to send millions of messages to get any significant response which takes time even with fast links. During that time you can guarantee at least someone will have recieved and filtered the spam with their current Bayesian filters. Therefore if this occurs within the first few minutes of the spammers deluge, the rest and be effectively rejected at the SMTP level, and all the website addresses they refer to also filtered out for the population at large.

There are two claims:

1) Spam can be reduced by filtering email and websites based on their use of raw IPs or domain names that resolve to recently or not registered domains.

2) Spam can be stopped early in its sending by using feedback from standard Bayesian filters at the client side and maintinaing a CDDB like database of such IP addresses and domains contained in the spam email.

I look forward to someone implementing such an extension in Firefox and Thunderbird.