Your porn name could screw you

 Posted by on 14 May 2009  Modern Life
May 142009
 

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner is on the case:

Users combine their first pet’s name with the name of the first street they lived on to come up with a personalized adult-film star pseudonym.

Problem is, hackers may be mining those nicknames to target people for identity theft, gaining access to email and bank accounts.

I love how in “CP Style” your “porn name” becomes “personalized adult-film star pseudonym.” Yet in the next sentance they say “hackers” instead of “computer programmers with malicious intent.” (aside:  it’s kind of like when someone says it was 35 feet, but Canadian Press translates that to metres, so you end up with an artificially precise “10.7 metres”)

Cool job assignment: Working for the Dalai Lama

 Posted by on 20 April 2009  Modern Life
Apr 202009
 

tenzin_gyatzo_foto_1A post on Slashdot caught my eye:

I have been asked by the Office of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile to offer some policy recommendations in light of the ongoing targeted malware attacks directed at the Tibetan community worldwide. … One of the more controversial moves being actively debated by Tibetans … is a mass migration of the exile community (including the government) to Linux, particularly since all of the samples of targeted malware collected exploit vulnerabilities in Windows.

The discussion — although with some predictable Windoze-bashing — has been really interesting. This is a case where “security through obscurity” might not be a good thing. The argument is that Linux is (at least partially) more secure because fewer hackers target it. However, with the full resources of the Chinese government (allegedly) behind the Ghostnet hacking, writing a Linux exploit might be just as easy as writing one for Windows — and fewer people would be affected to notice it.

The counter-arguments are just as interesting.

Another interesting issue they have to wrestle with is the lack of good-quality fonts for Tibetan. Posters have offered up a couple of good unicode Tibetan fonts, but I found it near to learn that the Tibetan language doesn’t work well with discrete letters, like we use. They stack consonants into wild ligatures. I don’t really understand it.

But, as one commenter pointed out:

Combining letters aren’t an intrinsic necessity in any language, they are an affectation and a mechanism for keeping people illiterate. European languages used to have them and got rid of them because the only purpose they serve is to restrict access to reading and writing.

Tibetan can be written just fine in an alphabetic style. It would be prudent for the Dalai Lama to make that the standard for the Tibetan community.

Now that could be interesting! Overhauling a whole writing system and not just a computer system.

Make spammers do science

 Posted by on 20 April 2009  Modern Life
Apr 202009
 

Now here’s a thought. If we want computers to have artificial intelligence, it will take a lot of heavy programming work to make it happen. So why not harness spammers to do that work for us?

Think it’s far-fetched? We’re already doing it! Ever seen those things where you have to type in a word before you’re allowed to leave a comment? A CAPTCHA? Essentially, you’re doing something that’s easy for humans, tough for computers.

smallcaptchaspacewithroughalpha

The one I’ve inserted here is called a “reCAPTCHA” and it’s part of a project that aims to harness all the work that we’re doing solving these things. Essentially, the computer is scanning old books for the digital age, but it can’t recognize all the words. So it offers you a word that it does know, and a word that it doesn’t know. You type both words, and if you get one right, the computer assumes that you’re getting the second one right. By cross-checking your answer with other users, eventually all the missing words are solved.

But spammers and scammers want to beat this system, too, so they’ve developed ever-more-sophisticated programs to read the words and solve the CAPTCHAs.

What’s the upshot? Well, thanks to spammers, OCR — or optical character recognition — is a heck of a lot more advanced than it used to be. Computers are massively better at reading text than just a few years ago.

When spammers get too good at solving these problems, that sounds like a bad thing. But, really, they’ve solved a tough problem in the artificial intelligence community.

The next “prove that you’re a human and not a spam-bot” challenge should aim to direct spammers in the direction of solving a new AI problem, according to this article at New Scientist:

“If [the spammers] are really able to write a programme to read distorted text, great – they have solved an AI problem,” says von Ahn. The criminal underworld has created a kind of X prize for OCR.

That bonus for artificial intelligence will come at no more than a short-term cost for security groups. They can simply switch for an alternative CAPTCHA system – based on images, for example – presenting the eager spamming community with a new AI problem to crack.

One example … asks users to correctly orientate images randomly spun around (see image, right).

Without a telltale horizon, image orientation is difficult for computers. But if this new CAPTCHA becomes common, it won’t be long before spammers turn their attention to cracking the problem, with potential fringe benefits to cameras and image editing software.

Speech recognition CAPTCHAs are already being used, and image labelling ones could follow, says von Ahn. AI researchers are already working in both these areas, but they could soon be joined by spammers also helping advance the technology.

Of course, in this arms race, eventually we’ll end up with robots that are able to do anything humans can do, so we’ll eventually have to come up with emotion-based tests like the Voigt-Kampff machine.

But then we’ll have bigger issues than spam, likely.

If I was going to build a laptop, I wouldn’t base it on the Commodore 64

 Posted by on 7 April 2009  Vintage/Retro
Apr 072009
 

I found this over on BoingBoing — the story of an ambitious man who wants to build himself a Commodore 64 laptop. So he does. Why? Don’t ask why.

Like Boing Boing, I’ve only put up the “money shot” video, but if this interests you at all, I urge you to go to the guy’s actual site. The full story has more details that you could ever want, plus more videos, and lots of pictures, and plenty of insight into the build process.

He also builds XBox 360 laptops.

Haxx0red! Oh noes! Oh shame!

 Posted by on 6 April 2009  Everything Else
Apr 062009
 

2

If you happened to log on to this blog last night (Sunday) at about 9pm, the above page is what you would have been greeted with. Yup, we got “hacked.”

(click on the image to see a full-on screen shot sent to me by a concerned friend — thanks Stacey! bookmarks, etc, have been blurred for (some) privacy)

I say that we got “hacked” in quotes because it’s not like there was a movie-style security breach. It was only the front page — direct permalinks to individual posts worked fine, as did all the administrative stuff, like logging on. It happened in about a 20-minute window of me driving from one house to another, and it took me another 20 minutes or so to get that page down and replaced with something less, well, embarassing.

At first, I was even glad to just get a “this page is parked” by my webserver.

Now, as far as I can tell, this wasn’t a hugely malicious hack — just a drive-by job. And since I’m kind of anal about security updates, I think it’s because I got cheap hosting — and cheap hosting means shared hosting. So someone else I’m sharing a server with may have left a back door open.

I’ve taken the opportunity, in cleaning out the hijacked page, to update the blog a little bit more. You’ll notice first off that there are now threaded comments. You can now “reply” to people. I didn’t go crazy with it, but it’ll go three levels deep (to start — I’ll adjust if it seems necessary).

There should be some improvements to image galleries as well, plus a new “mobile” edition of the site coming soon.

I wish *anybody* would give me $1,000 for a laptop

 Posted by on 28 March 2009  Modern Life
Mar 282009
 

According to the new Microsoft ad — which is all over the blogosphere — Lauren has a budget of just $1,000 (which turns out to be Microsoft’s money, how kind) for a laptop, and she wants one with a nice keyboard and a 17″ screen. Now, if you go to the official Microsoft site, you have to install their proprietary “Silverlight” program to watch it. Thanks, Microsoft. Here’s a Flash version of the ad:

Now, as you will have seen, poor Lauren — who apparently doesn’t care about hard drive space, processor speed, memory, or whether or not she can burn DVDs — can’t find a single thing for her at the Apple store.

Well, duh!

I am no raging Apple fanboi. I happily use Macs at work, and I have an old iMac (thanks, boss) running my jukebox at home. But I also have a dual-booting WinXP/Ubuntu computer which I consider my main machine. Personally, I tend to find the tweakability and DIY factor of a PC to be more to my liking. And, since I don’t care overmuch about premium products, I find the budget of a Mac to be a little high for my tastes.

But, I certainly think they’re nice computers! They just don’t target the thin slice of market that Lauren represents (well, maybe not so thin). Even PCMag has “fact checked” the ad:

If Microsoft’s point is to stick it to Apple and claim that there’s only one Mac laptop for under $1,000 and it’s got a small 13-inch screen, they’re absolutely correct. You can’t walk out of an Apple Store with (any) laptop for under $1,000 after tax. Certainly you can’t walk out of an Apple Store with a 17-inch laptop for under $1,000. Apple’s 17-inch MacBook Pro is a professional product for people like pro photographers and videographers and is marketed and priced as such.

Exactly. Macs have a great operating system with unparalleled integration among all their hardware. The design is stylish, and the targeted market is professionals who want it to Just Work.

Sending Lauren into an Apple store with her stated list of requirements was ridiculous. What if she was looking for a vehicle? What if she was looking for something that was good on gas, easy to park and fun to drive — for less than $20,000? And what if Microsoft sent her into a limousine dealership?

“Geez,” she’d say, walking out disappointed. “Everything in there was big and stodgy — and expensive. They only thing they had for under $20,000 was a keychain.” Hyuck, hycuk.

But it’s not really making the point, is it? Straw man, much?

I hate advertising.

An interesting take on computers, multitasking

 Posted by on 20 March 2009  Modern Life
Mar 202009
 
Photo from the Citizen page, by Eric McCandless

Photo from the Citizen page, by Eric McCandless

Robert J. Sawyer, one of Canada’s most prolific authors, (and a guest speaker at Brandon’s inaugural Words Alive Festival) wrote an op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen about the use of computers and what he feels is the antiquated approach to learning.

Sawyer starts by saying there seems to be an “epidemic of attention deficit disorder– or, at least, we have an epidemic of diagnoses of that condition.” Sawyer feels that instead of looking at computers as a deterrent to learning, and feeling that multitasking is bad for us, perhaps we need to adjust the status-quo.

But is there really something wrong with huge numbers of young people today? Has computer use rotted their brains? Or is it — perhaps — that there’s something wrong with how we’re defining normal?

Our psychological tests for measuring attention were developed between the 1950s and the 1990s. But that was an aberrant period in human history. It was the era of the boob tube and couch potatoes, of people sitting passively in front of television sets for hours on end. Now, in a world in which young people constantly shift their attention from one thing to another, we brand them as ill if they don’t sit still in class.

He feels that instead of passively listening to a professor drone from a textbook, and be required to memorize facts and data, education should be more interactive and memorization should be taken out of the equation. As he says:

Just as pernicious as the canard about multitasking is the claim that Google is making us stupid. Again, the old model of learning — rote memorization — was a product of information scarcity. Does it really make sense to spend days in school memorizing the names of prime ministers or state capitals when literally the moment you ask the question you can have the answer?

…

We shouldn’t pack our brain full of facts and figures; instead, we should train ourselves to be able to quickly absorb and synthesize all the myriad sources of information that are available to us.

At first I didn’t quite agree with this, but the more I sit here and think about it, the more it seems to make sense in our Internet-driven world.

Overall, I think his stance is interesting, and I agree that instead of labeling every kid as having ADD, maybe we should start to recognize that the way in which kids learn and interact in their everyday lives isn’t the same as when we were kids, and that we should start to approach multitasking and computers less negatively.

Google has too much time on its hands

 Posted by on 10 March 2009  Modern Life
Mar 102009
 

buttons

It took several people, several iterations, and several months, but Google has finally — finally! — redesigned the buttons that you can click on in Gmail.

Whew.

Read an abridged version of the story — with comments! — here. A taste:

If we were going to undertake the task of recreating basic HTML form controls, we knew there were a lot of details that need to be accounted for and thought through. Like all the possible states of a button: resting, hover, focus, active, toggled-on, and disabled. There are also the accessibility ramifications of creating non-standard controls. I’m sure we haven’t factored in or solved every access issue yet. But engineers are working on that.

Bluegrass version of ‘White Wedding’

 Posted by on 3 February 2009  Modern Life, Music, Vintage/Retro
Feb 032009
 

Microsoft’s Songsmith is a computer program that attempts to play music — in a style that you suggest — to accompany your singing. It’s just as good as every other Microsoft product, which means that it gets the job done, and you can imagine some corporate suit being very impressed, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of artistry.

Artistry, as it turns out, is quite important for music.

Here’s what it would sound like if Billy Idol had decided to ditch his band and play a bluegrass version of “White Wedding” using Songsmith. It’s insidiously horrible, but the worst is that it actually makes me want to find a real bluegrass version of it!

Huh. Here’s the closest thing I could find to a real one:

The Harvey Girls – White Wedding

Oh, there you are!

 Posted by on 22 January 2009  Modern Life
Jan 222009
 
It's a real-life Google map marker. Actually, it's a Danish art project, by Aram Bartholl, which I found at datenform.de, along with some other cool ones (check out the "speech bubbles")

It's a real-life Google map marker. Actually, it's a Danish art project, by Aram Bartholl, which I found at datenform.de, along with some other cool ones (check out the "speech bubbles")

The other day, I was driving to an interview when I realized I wasn’t sure about the address — I knew the approximate area of town where the street was, but it was kind of a maze, and I wasn’t perfectly familiar with it.

I felt oh-so-modern when I fired up my phone, loaded Google Maps online and found the address I was looking for.

Then I felt futuristic when I flicked on the GPS functionality and followed my little blue dot as I drove there, in two-metre accuracy. Amazing.

Of course, while I love knowing where I am, do I really want other people knowing? Wired magazine has a great feature online about what “location-aware” phones are starting to mean:

The location-aware future—good, bad, and sleazy—is here …. That old saw about how someday you’ll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now.

(snip)

To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

Creepy! But also the future.

Nipping at Google’s heels …. YouTube?

 Posted by on 19 January 2009  Modern Life
Jan 192009
 

Weird. Apparently there’s been a bit of a shakeup in the online search world recently. Google stays the No. 1 search engine, but Yahoo has long been No. 2. Not anymore. Just passing Yahoo is YouTube, owned, of course, by Google.

The New York Times notes the paradigm shift in that:

The explosion of all types of video content on YouTube and other sites is quickly transforming online video from a medium strictly for entertainment and news into one that is also a reference tool. As a result, video search, on YouTube and across other sites, is rapidly morphing into a new entry point into the Web, one that could rival mainstream search for many types of queries.

It’s true that I’ve done an increasing amount of searching on YouTube, but I hardly considered it a search engine. I guess it is, though, but I turn to it for different things. As the Times article notes, I search YouTube, not Google, for specific kinds of entertainment, and some reference stuff (found it handy while working on my bathroom, for instance, with handyman tips on plumbing).

I’ve long resisted the idea that “the web” will migrate more and more to video, but it’s undeniable that there are things you can do with video that are more difficult to do with text. Still, text has it’s advantages — you can’t YouTube much info about George Washington or astrophysics, notes the Times. Plus, online video has no hyperlinks: “And the Internet derives much of its utility from the web of links connecting its sites.”

Still, interesting to think that the biggest challenger to Google’s search dominance is a video site. Good thing Google bought ‘em.

I love Ubuntu

 Posted by on 12 January 2009  Modern Life
Jan 122009
 

Ubuntu is my favourite flavour of linux — and I experimented with a few before settling down. Now, I’m no supergeek coder, but I am a bit of a communist, so the idea of everyone working together to make something just because they love it really appeals to me.

So nice to see it getting a bit of mainstream love.

Also I keep reading that this is part of Apple’s strategy, even. Apparently, although there is a demand for a lower-priced, more-expandable Mac desktop, Apple wants to stick to the higher-end, and they feel that free linux will soon start to dominate the low-end stuff, leaving Windows squeezed on both ends.

Can’t see it happening, honestly. It’s been the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” every since since I started paying attention, and people still get Windows “for free” when they buy a new computer, so nobody switches. But I’m happy dual-booting into Ubuntu, and playing around. You should try it, too — the price is right!

7th heaven?

 Posted by on 9 January 2009  Modern Life
Jan 092009
 

windows7Um, wow.

Apparently, interest in the new Windows 7 beta, slated for release today, was so strong that it crashed the Microsoft website. That’s incredible.

“Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta,” Microsoft said in a blog posting, which was itself hard to get to as of 1:20 p.m. PST. “We want to ensure customers have the best possible experience when downloading the beta, and I’ll be posting here again soon once the beta goes live. Stay tuned! We are excited that you are excited!” (link)

And that’s just website hits. Imagine when the beta iteself went live? It’s about a 3 gig .iso file — that’s an incredible amount of traffic.

So Microsoft has delayed the launch, and I’m guessing that they will offer up more than the 2.5 million beta keys that they were planning to offer.

If you were wondering whether or not Vista was going to kill Microsoft, wonder no more. There is just too much pent-up demand out there for a better Windows. My parents run Vista, and it’s not awful, but I’ve been happy sticking with the tried-and-true XP. Oh, and Ubuntu. I love me some Ubuntu.

And before the trolls come out, I’m happily posting this from a Mac at work, and I have an old iMac powering my stereo at home (more on that anon). But I can’t keep up with the upgrade cycle, and I need to be able to pry around inside it.

Also, say what you will about how you’re paying for quality, and how Macs use premium parts — it’s all true. But I’m not rich enough for that. All my current computer equipment is rescued cast-offs.

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