Vista Security hole... I know but this is also funny

Apparently if a wav file is downloaded and played at sufficient volume and quality on a machine running Vista where speakers and microphone are enabled, the machine may respond to commands issued in the wav file. There's also a technet article about it. Funny stuff!

Development

This video on YouTube is of a fascinating lecture about development across the world (as in economic / social development, not computer development) presented as data on charts. Presented by Hans Rosling

New Word Processor (Joking...)

You can have some fun with (Flash gimmick) this.

"Isotope 2" Online Drawing Game

You set the parameters for the machine to draw and set it off

Problems with the Vista User Interface

Steve Wiseman over at IntelliAdmin laments Vista's problems in this piece called "The 5 Sins of Vista"

Fortune Cookie Website

Blogthings will tell you all sorts of things about yourself and all free. It's like a fortune cookie machine that will spout on various subjects, such as What American City You Are, and Are You a Drama Queen or King?. It does also have a Fortune Cookie Generator, which told me "A man can keep his youth by giving her money, furs and diamonds".

I made a password generator in Excel, maybe I could do something like this with it. I remember David Bowie used to create the lyrics for his songs by chopping up lines of text and juxtaposing them.

Flash Game Fun

Try this Flash game - it's fun.

I've Forgotten my Password

Did you forget your password over the Christmas holidays? Daily Dose of Imagery has a nice picture of BCE Place in Toronto. Sam Javanrouh, who takes the pictures, also mentions how it was stitched together using this "panorama tool"

"Hold Your Wee For a Wii" Contest Ends in Death

A competition at a radio station in Sacramento USA ended with the death of a woman who had been competing. The contestants were given water to drink, but to win they had to hold it until everyone else had given up and relieved themselves. The woman died of "Water Intoxication". The prize? A Nintendo wii.

Trying out Linux

I've just installed Ubuntu Linux and I'm starting to learn how it works and what I can do with it. So far I've been impressed, except the installation took several attempts. I have a 700mhz cpu, 256 MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive, so the server copy of Ubuntu that my boss gave me wasn't going to work. I had started to download the free version of RedHat Linux called CentOS, but I had only downloaded 1 out of 4 cds and I saw lots of stuff about Ubuntu and it was only one cd, so I decided to switch to that. I've a feeling that I'm not getting the best out of it yet though; there are some issues with the media player, but actually I've been pleasantly surprised at the applications and the ease of use. I had to try the installation several times, but I didn't get any difficult questions and most of what I need has worked without me having to make any changes. I've been able to play cds on the media player (called Sound Juicer), browse the Web with Firefox (which means the Operating System auto-configured my broadband router), play games... haven't done much work yet though – having too much fun. My printer installed without a problem and Ubuntu saw my usb stick itself.

Hopefully I'll be able to improve the performance a bit with some tweaking; the Word Processor is a bit slow to start, but it's quite easy to use and some of the most common shortcuts work fine. Surprisingly the dictionary doesn't include Firefox or shortcut (what are those several dictionaries?).

Adult wii news

There's an interesting story on the Opposable Thumbs site about how a porn site has added a "wii-friendly interface". It would be cool to have other ways of working with a website than a keyboard and mouse. You need a lot more room with a wii though. Here's a nice article on neatorama called "13 Photographs that Changed the World".

Microsoft Digital Rights Management

Charlie Dimerjian at the Inquirer says Windows Vista is not an option because of the heavy-handed way it protects content. Karel Donk says maybe piracy is a better choice. In 2004 Cory Doctorow gave a talk about DRM to Microsoft in which he pleaded that they "turn the wheel on the old Buick". Peter Gutmann wrote an article about the performance overhead incurred by adding in DRM to the Operating System. So is this storm going to grow into a tempest for Vista?

Disease and Invasion in the Multiplayer Online World

Second Life and Word Of Warcraft are "virtual worlds" created by developers and open to anyone who wants to play. Players sign up and create avatars and then interact with the virtual world and other players. According to the Wikipedia page about Second Life, its use has exploded in the last few months, going from 1,000,000 users in October to double that in mid-December 2006. World of Warcraft is a little different from Second Life, because it comes from a tradition of "Role Playing Games" (RPGs), starting with Dungeons and Dragons. World of Warcraft is massive at 7,500,000 players. Another difference between the two games is the extent to which the game has objectives. In WOW the player can gain money, skill and experience through winning fights against other players, whereas in SL there are no such developments; you develop your own goals much like in real life. What I find interesting is the particular kind of digital problems that have affected these virtual worlds. Blizzard, the developers of WOW, created a virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood" in part of their world. The disease got out of hand, because malicious players, or "griefers" intentionally spread it and laid waste to large parts of the world until Blizzard restricted its effects more decisively. Second Life has its own particular problems. Since it allows free accounts and doesn't monitor processor usage by players and you can run scripts, hackers can get away with a lot; in particular they create objects that self-replicate continuously and overload servers. Because Second Life mimics real life (RL) - for instance the money earned can be exchanged for RL money - some people have started to take it more seriously, to treat it in a similar way to RL, whereas the greifers refuse to allow that to happen unchallenged. They disrupt events by invading with multiple phalluses and swastikas, grey goo and rings.

Update 15 January: The number of WoW players has just been reported as 8 million!

Inveneo Snowflake Bentley

Inveneo looks like an interesting organisation - They help developing communities access the Internet with open source solutions. I've posted about snowflakes before (they make cool pictures) and I just found this site about the man who first found that they were each unique - "Snowflake Bentley". I found that on my new favourite blog "The new shelton wet/dry"

Pretexting

"Pretexting" is variously defined as impersonation of someone in order to obtain proivate information, or in a wider definition, creating a fictional scenario in order to persuade someone to do something they otherwise would not do. Earlier this year, the Chair of Hewlett Packard's board left after accusations that private detectives had impersonated members of the HP board in order to obtain their phone records (this was in pursuit of a leaker on the board). There was also a Congressional investigation at which HP management testified (and refused to testify). Because many authorities are quite slack in the way they implement security, often asking only for date of birth, mother's maiden name etc., pretexting is likely to continue. In the US California legislators introduced a bill aimed at stopping the practice, but Wired News claims it was killed by the Motion Picture industry, who claimed they used it as a method of tracking file-sharers.

Spend Some Dialog Time; Abuse by Proxy

You could spend a lot of time with this dialog! There have been a number of cases in the US where someone impersonating a policeman has called a restaurant (usually a fast food restaurant) and told the manager to detain a member of staff or customer. Because the manager believes the caller, they do as they are told. The caller then instructs the manager to put the victim through all sorts of humiliation and abuse, including rape. It's quite shocking what people will do when they believe in the authority of the person telling them what to do. I knew about this affect because I've heard of the psychlogical experiments, but I hadn't heard of this kind of abuse by proxy over the phone before.

10 Minute Email Address

Here's a cool idea. You go to this site and click on the link to automatically create a new email address. The address will work for 10 minutes and messages will appear on the page you bookmark. Any messages appearing there you can read and reply to, but when I tried attachments didn't work (there's a warning on the site saying attachments may not work but that they will be fixed soon). You get a countdown on the page and you can click on another link to allow yourself another ten minutes. I emailed the address from a yahoo account and it was fine.

Will You Upgrade to Windows Vista?

Scott Granneman at The Register thinks Microsoft is trying to pull a fast one in the EULA (license agreement) for Vista.

Gothic Posters, Be Careful When You Sell Your PC

Morbid, gothic posters by Franciszek Starowieyski, a Polish poster artist. Oh. My. Goodness. A story from Scott Granneman on The Register about the perils of being careless with your data when you sell your computer. Phew.

Clever Guy, Very Cool Job

Google do Tech Talks and publish them on Google Video. I found a very interesting talk called (video link) "Human Computation" about how they are going about the task of tagging / labelling images so that image searches can retrieve accurate results. The clip is over 50 minutes long, so I'll give a summary, but if you're interested it is quality stuff, definitely worth watching the whole thing. The solution they've come up with is to get people playing games that use image tagging as part of the game. Ingenious idea, well actually there are several creative solutions to problems in this talk. Clever guy Luis von Ahn, but they still spell his name wrong (Louise!?) in the subtitles.

In the video Luis talks about "captchas", which are those images of text that you have to read and copy in some web forms in order to prove that you're not a software agent trying to hack the form. He says that spam hackers have found a way to hack the forms, which is they pass the image of the text back to a porn website and interrupt users with a message saying "you must copy this text before you can continue watching". When the user enters the text it can be passed back to the form. So that's a hacker solution that gets humans cooperating with computers, albeit unawares. Luis uses games to involve people in the task.

So anyway, Luis and his team have built a game where an image is displayed on the screen. Two players are teamed together by the system and they get points when they both tag the image with the same word - thus tagging the image. The only communication between players is when they win a round because then they know the other player used the same tag. Several tags can be useful for one image, so Luis and co. have started to make some tags "taboo" for each image after it has been labelled with the same tag several times.

Luis says that the game has been very popular and a lot of images have been tagged. His team can now also use tagged image as a second level check that players are genuine. In theory a group of sabateurs could join the game together and respond with the same tag to every image. That would damage the accuracy of the tags if it was successful, so the team have started to include test pictures; images that most people label with the same tag; if players gets all these wrong, their tags may be treated as suspect.

There are several other cool solutions to sub-problems of this general area in the clip. That is one clever guy.