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September 23, 2006
Apple: wireless security weasel
When security researchers claimed the Apple Macbook was vulnerable to wireless intrusions, Mac zealots predictably went ballistic, and Apple insisted that there was absolutely no evidence for such a despicable assault against their good name.
Funnily enough, Apple has just released wireless driver fixes, which would tend to suggest that there was evidence, after all.
What makes Apple's conduct in this affair even more weasel-like, is that it continues to refine its hair-splitting procedures:
"They did not supply us with any information to allow us to identify a specific problem, so we initiated an internal audit," Apple spokesman, Anuj Nayar, told Macworld. "Today's update preemptively strengthens our drivers against potential vulnerabilities, and while it addresses issues found internally by Apple, we are open to hearing from security researchers on how to improve security on the Mac."Open to hearing from security researchers? Apple reflects one of Steve Jobs' worst character flaws: an inability to accept the slightest criticism. The correct response, Mr Jobs, is to say thank you to the researchers who almost certainly knew that they would be subjected to abuse - death threats, for God's sake! - but still had the courage to raise the alarm.
And over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber goes through some fascinating intellectual contortions to avoid acknowledging that he lacks even the tiniest shred of objectivity. Maybe we should mount a class action to force him to take that word "daring" off the site.
Posted by cw at 12:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 20, 2006
Toshiba joins Sony Laptop Battery Party
Toshiba have decided it might be best to join Dell and Apple in recalling batteries in their laptops manufactured by Sony.
Toshiba's recall brings the total number of Sony laptop batteries recalled since the reports of flaming laptops began surfacing to over 6 million. Via: ars technica
Posted by Stephen at 08:27 PM | TrackBack
Electronic mail ... with stamps
One of the problems that arise when you have to send an actual letter - you remember, don't you, one of those things with a stamp and a postmark? - is the post office queue. You may have noticed that an Australia Post queue offers the sort of experience that you tend not to get with other queues ... the sort of experience one had in the days of corporal punishment, when one waited outside the headmaster's office for the administration of six swipes of your palm with a whippy, knotted cane.
You don't really want to get to the end of a post office queue, in our experience, because you know that the price of whatever brought you there - the need to pick up a parcel, buy a stamp or an envelope, pay a bill etc - will be the subtle diminishment of your self respect.
Post office staff seem to undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis in their training which turns them into superior, judgmental, peculiarly unhelpful beings, administering a system that appears to have been uniquely designed to never quite work. They won't be able to find your parcel, perhaps, and somehow you'll know it's your fault. Only someone as stupid as you could know people who despatch non-existent parcels. Or the particular item you want to stick in an envelope will be slighly too large for one envelope, and too absurdly small for the next. Or your envelope will require some non-standard postage fee that may even require the opening of a special, top secret manual. We don't think we're imagining this. It happens to us every time.
That's why we're so excited about this brave new postal era, initiated by Britain's Royal Mail, that promises to reduce the frequency of these humiliating experiences.
People are now able to buy their postage online, without any stamps, for the first time under a new free initiative from the Royal Mail. Customers pay for postage by credit card over the internet for first-class, second-class, recorded, special and international deliveries. Each item of mail is given a barcode, printed off at home, and regular mail can then be posted in a post box.Unfortunately, you'll still have to stand in line for registered mail, parcel pick-ups etc. But it's a start, isn't it, along a path that who knows, one day, might lead to never having to go to a post office again. If we can solve that, global warming should be falling off a log easy.
Posted by cw at 10:12 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 19, 2006
What the bad guys are doing with Internet Explorer
The latest way of keeping abreast of Internet Explorer exploits, it seems from this report of spyware threats, is to track what the bad guys are doing.
Checking out a porn Web site - so that's how our security people spend their time? - the guys at Sunbelt Software discovered a new zero day exploit that gives visitors to rogue Web sites a sample bag of malware that includes BigBlue keystroke logger, that will capture and share "screenshots, keystrokes, web cam and microphone data, instant messaging chat sessions, e-mail information and your Web visits.
The exploit is also being used to install the incredibly invasive Spybot worm and VXGame Trojan, as well as adware titles that scam artists profit from on a per installation basis, such as Virtumondo, SafeSurfing, Avenue Media, WebHancer, Internet Optimizer, SurfSidekick, DollarRevenue, and the bogus anti-spyware program SpySheriff.
Posted by cw at 06:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 18, 2006
New York Times - 'Times Reader'
The New York Times 'Times Reader' was launched over the weekend and as Frank states in the title of his post 'A WPF Real World Application'.
"Times Reader is a new, downloadable software application that lets Windows XP and Vista users read The New York Times electronically, online or offline, in a paginated format as opposed to scrolling down a Web page. Times Reader lets users retrieve all the latest news and photos (a process that takes about a minute) and read the content offline. It also let’s you check to see how much of the paper you have read and easily navigate to articles of interest that you may have missed."
WPF is the Windows Presententation Foundation a subset of the .NET Framework 3.0. Most Windows XP users will already be using the .NET 2.0 Framework in the backend of your system as it passed through your Windows Update around January this year. This application from the NY Times utilises the .NET 3.0 RC1 Framework (Yes another 'beta' tag meaning 'Release Candidate') that will be downloaded as part of the setup of the application or if you are using Vista RC1 it is only a 1MB as the .NET 3.0 RC1 is included already though for XP it will be around ~50mb.
There are some screenshots on Read/Write/Web, Franks post gives you some great tips on what you can do with it (I love the integrated search with the Vista Search Bar) or you can download the 40Mb QuickTime Screencast Demo Long Zheng made or have a read of the NYT FAQ.
If you haven't decided all this WPF stuff is impressive or not you can look at some more demos of WPF Applications Tablet PC Ink, RezN8 Nascar Demo, iBloks or the BBC demo with Bill Gates at Mix06.
Posted by Stephen at 12:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 17, 2006
iPods: It's OUR music, dammit
We can't help but wonder if the music industry has any clue at all about their customers, or is ever likely to get one. They seem surprised to discover that most people who buy iPods don't immediately fill them up with tracks from the iTunes Music Store. On average, according to a Jupiter Research report on iPods and their contents, only 5 per cent of the music on the average iPod will have been purchased from an online music store. In our case we've bought precisely ONE iTMS track, and that simply to test the procedure.
The report makes the presumption that iPod owners fill them with "free music ripped from CDs someone already owned or acquired from file-sharing sites". We doubt that much of it is "free music". We'd bet most people fill them with music ripped from their own CDs. CDs they've already paid for.
Even in Australia, where the Howard Government actually declared it illegal to do anything but buy your music all over again in order to use an iPod - until, ironically, the US free trade agreement forced them to give us the same rights as American citizens - people didn't line up to tip their dollars into the bloated hands of Music Inc.
What the music industry needs to understand is that they've set the price of online music far too high, and unless they reduce the prices, people will find alternatives, including, in some cases, illegal alternatives.
Posted by cw at 08:15 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 15, 2006
Software: friend to democracy
This is, ostensibly, a story about a glitch in the Segway scooter's software which can unexpectedly put the thing into reverse, with dramatic results. It's not a funny story, because it's resulted in the recall of all 23,500 Segways. But the news of these backward-leaning devices is accompanied by a picture of George W. Bush falling off one of the things. Which raises the thought, in our admittedly perverse mind, that maybe the digital world is expressing its voting preferences by rejecting right-wing politicians.
Wishful thinking, of course. Otherwise Andrew Bolt's word processor would have locked him out, years ago. But just in case. Let's start a collection. And send John Howard a Segway.
Posted by cw at 05:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 14, 2006
Hard disks, and the forum news machine
Phew. It's getting hard to keep up with the news and tips that the Bleeding Edge community is contributing to the forum. Behind the face of this very ordinary tech blog, there's an incredible news machine. Stephen's a fount of information and helpful hints on Vista and Microsoft's Live offerings, for instance; Bazcaz has some handy hints on Windows Run commands; Dave's chimed in with some software that helps you keep track of library loans [just yesterday, gulp, we handed over $23 in fines to the City Library, so this could be EXTREMELY helpful); and Anandasim has just posted a link to a story of the 50th anniversary of the hard disk.
Bleeding Edge can remember paying a small fortune for our first 20MB - that's megabytes, not gigabytes - hard disk, back when the IBM PC first came on the market, and they used to be called Winchester hard disks.
We fondly imagined, way back then, that we'd never, ever be able to fill it. We couldn't dream of such huge amounts of data, back in those days. Now we've got a 1GB USB key that cost (this is a wild calculation), less than a fifth of what we paid for the 20MB drive. By comparison, it's blindingly fast, infinitely more robust. And we can fill it with one or two (video) files. That's progress.
Anyone got any good hard disk stories? We're feeling nostalgic.
Posted by cw at 05:43 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 12, 2006
WinXP SP1 + Win98 = Discontinuation
Following on from the End Of Life as we know it for Windows 98 we are now entering a similar phase for Windows XP SP1.
The Windows XP SP1 Lifecycle ends on October 10 2006 so to keep up to date with all of the joys of Patch Tuesday if you have not updated your Windows XP box with SP2 as of yet you may soon find that it will be a requirement to have your security vulnerabilities patched each month by Microsoft.
Blake has a great collection of links and information on why and how you should get Windows XP SP2 if you have not performed this task as of yet.
Posted by Stephen at 05:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Windows Live Search
Microsoft today announced that the beta tag is getting removed from the Windows Live Search site and by the end of the week it will replace most of the MSN Search sites such as http://search.msn.com and http://search.ninemsn.com.au
The ability to focus your search results to either Web, News, RSS Feeds, Images or Videos helps make this a quick and easy search tool. In previous versions of Live Search there was a great deal of AJAX overhead which has now been optimised giving the site a much faster experience which is definitely for the better.
With Windows Live Search you can create your own custom search engine with macros that can be saved or shared with friends or the world. I created a quick and easy search macro that will search all of The Bleeding Edge or DPExpert Blog posts and Forum topics, if you use IE7 or Firefox 2 Beta you can also just add that macro to your search providers box and you now have easy searching for the Bleeding Edge or DPExpert content by clicking the 'Add to browser search box' link. You can find a heap of custom search macros on the Windows Live Macro Gallery.
Source: Liveside.net
Posted by Stephen at 03:40 PM | TrackBack
How will Andrew Bolt save face?
You may recall that we predicted a huge about face by the Murdoch media on global warming, after the boss's son revealed that he's anything but your average eco-dummy. Now, according to today's Crikey - which took a few weeks to catch up with us - Rupert's London Sun has officially admitted that it was in denial when it poked fun at scientists who warned that we were killing the planet. Well, it didn't actually go quite that far. What it admitted though, was that
Too many of us have spent too long in denial over the threat from global warming. The evidence is now irresistible: Searing summers and dry winters in the UK; increasingly frequent tornados and hurricanes worldwide; the shrinking Arctic ice cap.But, as Crikey reports, the local Murdoch fanatics on The Australian and the Hun are still banging the same old drum.
We're prepared to bet, however, that James will prevail, and that eventually Herr Professor Doktor Bolt and all those brave so-called journalists who parrot whatever the boss believes, are going to have to change tack. If Andrew Bolt had even a molecule of spunk, he'd either (a) attack James Murdoch in one of his columns for being an environmental panic merchant, in the same way he's been dishing it out to scientists who've taken a public stand on the issue, or (b) make a public apology right now for his dangerous irresponsibility on the environment.
So what will it be, Bolt? More piss and wind? More pseudo-scientific crap?A brave declaration? Or a slow, wimpish retreat?
Posted by cw at 03:16 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 10, 2006
Really free Wi-Fi
Want some free bandwidth with that coffee? Tim Norton's put together a list of free wi-fi hot spots in Melbourne. One correction: I think Wagamama has closed in Fitzroy Street, but they've opened elsewhere. Anyone know where 'tis? And whether they still have free Wi-Fi.
Posted by cw at 07:39 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 09, 2006
Whatever happened to Bleeding Edge?
It's been a while since we posted. We've been laying low, trying to work out how we might survive financially. We've sold, let's see now, two subscriptions in about six weeks, and because we're so frightfully honest about hardware and software, nobody will advertise with us. So we're going broke.
We've cut our expenses by buying a motor scooter, and putting the Edgemobile up for sale.
Our latest proposal is to create a blog that might attract some advertising. That looks like being Scooter Affair. There'll be podcasts and a picture gallery. Lots of interesting things. We're fascinated by the topic, scooters are selling very well, plus, perhaps, somebody might advertise.
It's great to see the forum is still very active, and Anandasim has been posting the occasional interesting item. Maybe we'll kick in with something every now and then. Maybe we'll get re-enthused. Who knows? We'll keep it going, at any rate.
Posted by cw at 11:37 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
September 08, 2006
Why Geeks are Freaks
We've known this all along. But we didn't know Microsoft hires anthropologists...
The keynote speech at tech.ed this year was by a Microsoft anthropologist named Anne Kirah and she highlighted a simple, yet major difference.
How do you respond to a technical problem? When something goes wrong... how do you react?
This is how normal people react:
"Stupid thing is broken! I don't need this! I've got important things I'm trying to achieve!"
This is how a geek reacts:
"Ah! A challenge! Lucky me! Forget all my other priorities! Let me dig a little deeper!"
Source: Why Geeks are Freaks
Posted by Anandasim at 01:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 07, 2006
Wired News: The Ultimate Blog Post
Blogs and their ultimate perfect entry. - This is simply hilarious. Did I say I'm a guest writer?
Source: Wired News: The Ultimate Blog Post
Posted by Anandasim at 10:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack