news – Page 10

Bluejacking

Both The Register and the BBC have stories today on bluejacking – that is, the practice of sending unsolicited messages to open Bluetooth relay points, typically mobile phones. There’s even a web site dedicated to bluejacking.

One of my personal favourites is the cinema. It’s fun to fire off pictures of fridge magnet letters with my web site URL, or note text, to random people as they come in to the cinema or as they turn their phones on and leave. Lectures, too: had a bluejack-chat with somebody a little while back. As always, us geeks are well ahead of the technological fashion trends.

I’ve gotten no work at all done so far today. Hmm.

Fresher’s Week – Part Two

I’ve registered for modules this year which better than last year reflect my individual interests within my field – an emphasis on telecommunications and the internet and on software engineering practice, and away from artificial intelligence and from hardware-layer stuff. Some of my new modules – many of which were not available as courses last year – look quite stimulating.

As the end of the week approached I helped Nightline to lay their new carpet – the benefit to the organisation that the money we raised by selling hot dogs – in their office. This involved first removing their old carpet, laying it out on the road, and using it as a stencil for the new one, such that the new one fit almost exactly before we began to stick it down (an important consideration when laying flooring in a room no larger than 11 by 11 feet). I made hats for us all out of the offcuts of the carpet and masking tape.

Saturday Night’s Troma Night saw Liz bringing a date along, Rob (or was it Bob?), who we managed to scare off before the opening credits of the first film had finished rolling or any pizza had been consumed. Apparently all is well, though.

Aberystwyth’s first sex shop, part of the Little Amsterdam chain, is due for it’s delayed opening on Wednesday. I’m arranging for a party to go and visit on it’s opening day to applaud it on it’s success over the efforts of many members of the council, and for it’s manager’s success so far in court in another (possibly related) case.

Update: 25 October 2017 – fixed a minor spelling mistake.

At Long Last

Yet again I was correct. The BBC just released this article on Verisign.

VeriSign Gets Sued

VeriSign’s controversial abuse of the domain name system on Monday led to the first lawsuit against them, today, as reported by SlashDot. In addition, today’s UserFriendly cartoon, too, takes the piss out of them.

In other geeky news, did you know that it’s now possible to get broadband internet on a Commodore 64. It takes all sorts, eh?

My last day at work. I have lots to do.

Stealing From A Police Officer… In A Police Station

What kind of idiot steals a police officer’s sandwich, in a police station, while taking part in an identity parade? BBC News reports.

VeriSign Kicking Up Yet More Of A Fuss

Still no word from BBC News on the bastards that VeriSign are being, but The Register are on to their second news report on the subject, and SlashDot have information about the technological “fight back”. What does a person have to do to keep their state news agency up to date these days?

Have you seen VeriSign’s web site at www.VeriSignSuckCocks.com (only works thanks to their own controversial configuraion changes)

In other news, I’ve worked out how to set up wildcard DNS of my own in BINDs configuration files. Now all I need to do is buy an interesting domain name, and I could run the next IsGay or YouAreLame site. Which would be cool. I have a few ideas… suggestions welcome…

UserFriendly And VeriSign

Today’s UserFriendly cartoon strip plays on the issue highlighted by yesterday’s entry about VeriSign trying to take over the Internet. Really – the geeks are up in arms.

Still no word from BBC News, but the following other agencies have picked up on the story:

“VeriSign redirects error pages” from C|Net News

“VeriSign slammed for helping spammers” from ZDNet Australia

“ICANN up in arms over Verisign DNS hijacking” from The Inquirer, UK

And tongue-in-cheek technical debate on morons.org.

Told you this would kick up a fuss. You read it here first.

VeriSign Adds Wildcards To TLDs

I am outraged.

VeriSign, the company which manages the .COM and .NET domain names, has done the unthinkable. They’ve taken advantage of and abused their power by setting up a wildcard filter on the primary DNS, pointing to their own server – sitefinder.verisign.com.

Now for those of you who are less technically-inclined, this basically means that every mis-typed .COM or .NET domain name will now go to them, and they can do whatever they like with it. They’ve said that their goal is to provide a list of ‘did you mean?’ links, but it’s been demonstrated that their search engine is powered by a pay-per-click advertiser. In other words, if my company’s web site is at www.hardtospelldomain.com and somebody mis-types or mis-spells my domain name, VeriSign could well give a list of ‘who you might have meant’ with one of my competitors, who’s paying VeriSign for the priviledge, at the top of the list!

In addition, many existing types of anti-spam software, which check that the domain names that suspicious-looking e-mails come from, will fail (remember that now, technically, all .COM/.NET domain names act as if they were valid). We can all expect to get more spam as a result of this disgusting abuse of power.

Do not stand for this! The Internet must not be allowed to be so misruled!

See also SlashDot “Resolving Everything: VeriSign Adds Wildcards”. This news doesn’t seem to have made it around the globe yet, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing it on The Register by this afternoon and BBC News by the end of the week.

Quacks Do Echo, Thank You Very Much

At long last, I feel justified! As a long-time arguer (as much out of reason as playing devil’s advocate) that a duck’s quack should make an echo just like any other sound, recent research reported by the BBC demonstrates the fallacy of the widely-accepted myth!

In other news, it looks like my suggestion to Paul to go in to Burger King and meet the manager paid off – Paul now has a job:

About time I updated… I have a job. Sure, it’s only at Burger King (I start on Wednesday morning) but it’s still a job. They’re keen to work around my studies, so I get more hours now and in the holidays, but during term time I just work evenings and weekends…..

Having fun getting an Infra-Red transmitter to work under Windows 2000/XP (Microsoft removed the Virtual COM ports because they thought it would confuse users) but it works fine now…

Stan has done no work in the bathroom or on the living room since I last updated, although a set of stepladders has appeared, suggesting he intends to work sometime in the near future, though I won’t hold my breath

We all had Toad in the Hole last night. I was consulted for culinary expertise, although I don’t know why. I can’t really cook. While we’re on the topic, I nearly conned Claire into doing some cooking, but she twigged half way through chopping the potatoes and went into the living room for a lie down to recover….

I’ve sneaked a copy of DVD Maestro onto Dan’s PC so now I can master a DVD at home and bring it to D&Cs to burn. Convenient, as I can’t find a SCSI DVD-Writer anywhere….

That’s all

Timewasting

Look what I found while I was wasting time on the ‘net this morning.

A Vasectospectacular Mistake

So this Brazillian man with a ear infection goes in for surgery, and, as a result of his sore ear, mis-hears the name announced in the doctor’s waiting room, and accidentality gets a vasectomy.

What? Didn’t he think anything of it when the doctor applied a local anaesthetic to the area under his balls and produced a scalpel? Apparently, he thought that the doctor knew best and that the infection must have travelled down that far. And didn’t think to ask. It’s a weird world.

Those Commie Martians

This story about the European Space Agency by the BBC reads:

…The Mars Exploration Rovers will touch down in January next year, just after the Europeans arrive with their Marx Express mission in December…

Marx Express? I suppose we should have guessed that the so-called ‘red planet’ was communist.

Excellent Article On Music Piracy And CD Sales

A must-read! An excellently-written and concise article in dot.life about the falling sales of CDs being blamed on file-swappers, playing devil’s advocate. Go read it, people!

Now Where Did I Put My House?

Did anybody see the story about the American who had their house stolen this weekend? That’s a fantastic theft to pull off. Wish I’d thought of it first. Ah well.

Also this weekend, a man is killed in a collision between a car and a train. Not particularly noteworthy under normal circumstances, I know, but the train in question is a tourist attraction – a one-third scale steam train with a top speed of 15mph, and the car was a Ford Escort, probably about the same size as the steam engine and weighing about half as much. It takes a special kind of bad driver to get struck on a level crossing at which the trains go barely fast enough to outrun a sprinting child.

Enough newssurfing – back to work;

Science Graduates Earn More, Live Longer, Smoke Less

This report by the BBC, published yesterday, gives evidence that we science/engineering graduates live longer than our artsy opposite numbers. Made my day.