BOFH: Remote access malarkey">BOFH: Remote access malarkey
By pat | September 19, 2008
Episode 31 Don’t mark yourself as a target
“…And so you can just log in to my machine and look at it whenever you like?” our user asks indignantly.
“Uh-huh,” the PFY says, fixing the user’s printer settings while he’s talking.
“And I don’t have to give you permission or anything?”
“I’d have assumed that was implied by ringing the helpdesk?” the PFY says.
“Yes but …
ePassport tests put biometrics through their paces
By pat | September 19, 2008
Vendors sweat ahead of June dabs and iris scan deadline
Results have emerged from tests held in Prague last week designed to put ’second-generation’ electronic passports through their paces, and guess what - no-one failed.
Farewell, Scrabulous
By pat | August 26, 2008
A while back, we reported on the conflict between the two Indian brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who created Scrabulous, probably people’s favorite application on Facebook, and the company that owned the North American copyrights for the board game Scrabble. Following a legal complaint from Hasbro, Facebook was forced to restrict access to Scrabulous for US and Canadian users.
Consequently, non-American subscribers to the services offered by the social network thought that they could br…
Localized P4P to Take the Place of P2P
By pat | August 26, 2008
A group of researchers from the universities of Washington and Yale have announced that they plan to develop a new file sharing system to replace the popular peer-to-peer. The idea behind P4P is that files should be transferred mostly between people from the same area, to avoid network congestions. “Right now the choice of P2P source is random: A college student in a dorm room would be as likely to download a piece of a file from someone in Japan as from a classmate down the hall,” says a Univer…
“No Trespassing” Signs Ignored by Google’s Street View
By pat | August 26, 2008
Google's Street View is being accused, once again, of having infringed privacy rights. Betty Webba, a resident of Sonoma, Humboldt County, US, told PressDemocrat that one of the cars carrying a camera meant to shoot the imagery necessary for the development of the Street View network trespassed on her property. According to the woman, the driver of the car entered her property knowing that there was a household in the remote place, therefore being informed of the consequences of such an act…
Firefox 3.1 Gets Major JavaScript Speed Boost
By pat | August 26, 2008
The latest Firefox 3.1 nightly-built comes with a new JIT compiler for SpiderMonkey, Gecko’s JavaScript engine. The compiler is part of a project called TraceMonkey, which aims at bringing significant improvements in JavaScript performance. The tests so far show major speed boost in JavaScript functions.
TraceMonkey is based on a technique called Trace Trees which in essence determines and compiles the most often used code. The technique was developed at the Irvine University of California (U…
Olympic Wrap-Up – Who Is Guilty of Internet Censorship?
By pat | August 26, 2008
As the Beijing Olympics closed yesterday, this is as good a time as ever to draw the line and analyze the bad and good of what was the first edition of the Games to have global digital coverage. Although international forums said that giving a communist country the right to host such an important event could have repercussions on human rights, the Chinese authorities assured that, during the Olympics, special regulations would be made in order to create perfect conditions for them to be respecte…
Google Offers Geo-Location APIs to Web and Mobile Developers
By pat | August 26, 2008
Google has released two APIs to enhance geo-location. One is AJAX-based and the other one makes use of the Gears browser extension. This enables web and mobile developers to easily distribute content or to authenticate users based on location.
The AJAX API determines the location of a user based on their IP address. It works by populating the google.loader.ClientLocation property, which is part of the AJAX API Loader. The developers need an API key in order to use this service. A successful l…
US Search Market Reaches Mature Stability
By pat | August 26, 2008
The latest comScore report that shows what the search preferences of Americans were in July indicates a rather stagnant situation at the top of the chart. Google sites are still on the first place, with 61.9% of the total market, which represents a 0.4% growth in comparison with the previous month. Yahoo! and Microsoft sites, the eternal second, respectively third runner ups, register insignificant losses, of 0.4 and 0.3 percents, but, on a long term, these mincing steps towards a decline can ha…
Hacker Comes with Another Proof of Chinese Gymnast’s Real Age
By pat | August 26, 2008
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) is determined to find out if the media speculations, which said that at least two of the six members of China's gymnastics Olympic team are underage, are true. But the organization that has in sight the right conduct of all gymnastics competitions has even more doubts, namely that the number of the competitors who shouldn't have had the right to be in the Olympics might raise to five.
“In recent days, additional questions have resurfaced…
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