Cognitive Dissidents

I've just spent a morning using the Crispy News website tools to make a near "digg" clone - but focused on Extreme Tales

I cheated a little - by recycling old Extreme Tales blogposts to fill it up with news a bit - but it allowed me to get a feel for the interface and figure out what I could and couldn't do.

I use digg quite a lot - but the emphasis is on technology - the recent update to digg v3 included video games - but no sports of any description, not even under "entertainment" - and nothing about Extreme Sports either.

So I have built my own digg clone thingy totally focused on Extreme Sports - you can try it here - and please add stories, vote on some stories and give some feedback - and it does RSS as well.

I'll report back in the future about how it goes - early days yet ....

Tags: extreme sports, extreme tales, digg, digg clones, crispy news, rss extreme tales news

Posted by Dr. K at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

According to this report the AV market is now worth $4 billion.

How did we ever get into this mess?

Why aren't the security holes we knew about 10 years ago fixed already?

Enquiring minds want to know ....

Tags: computer security, anti-virus, virus

Posted by Dr. K at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Wired News: Just Give Me a Simple Phone

OVERLAND PARK, Kansas -- Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn't like using them to surf the internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn't stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work.

I can't use them because they are un-ergonomic to me - and to millions of older mobile phone users.

I have here on my desk a calculator that is about 160x100mm in size and the same weight as a my mobile - it has a large clear screen that I can read without glasses and buttons that I can easily hit with my fingers.

Why can't the mobile phone companies make a phone of this size and design? There would be enough screen space to do whatever was needed and the buttons would be easier to access. Not only that but it would fit nicely into an inside breast pocket of a jacket, inside my waistcoat pocket - almost anywhere.

If I had a phone that was easy to use I would use texting more - but right now texting is the last resort - because the phone was designed for much smaller hands than mine - and the idea of doing email and wap over my phone (which is is quite capable of doing) is out of the question.

So you can forget "convergence" for a large sector of the market - they already have problems programming the video - and loading new features onto a phone only sells the phone to people who want - and use - those features.

My phone is feature laden - but which feature do I use most? The ability to make and take a phone call.

Everything else is ignored - the calendar, the agenda, the alarms, the wap, the games - the whole lot is dead to me.

Phone companies take note - the reason why we only have one mobile phone in the house is that they are too small and difficult to use - if they were easier to use you'd sell me 2 - one to replace the old one and one for my wife who currently refuses to have anything to do with them.

So don't be talking to me about "market saturation" - the market is not saturated - you aren't reaching all of the market.

Time for a rethink - please.

Tags: mobile phones, convergence, market saturation, ergonomics

Posted by Dr. K at 10:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

According to PC-Pro Magazine the US has been under a simulated cyber attack for the last week.

I was wondering how you "simulate" a "cyber-attack"? Build an imaginary network in the middle of the desert? Take over the national backbone for a day? Ask every hacker and script kiddie you know to an all night party? Upset the Moslems with some cartoons?

and how do they know that every simulated attack on whitehouse.gov is not a real attack?

Unless it's a simulated whitehouse.gov site

In which case all the real glitches, misconfugrations and shared passwords that exist in the real whitehouse.gov site won't be there.

So even if the simulation works fine and proves that everything is secure it won't be - because It didn\t put human fallibility into the equation.

Tags: cyber-attack security homeland security hacking computer security internet security

Posted by Dr. K at 4:56 PM | Permalink

Despite my earlier report that SuitSat had frozen after two orbits, it now seems that Radio Hams from all over the world are still getting signals from SuitSat 1.

This is good news for space, radio and technology enthusiasts everywhere.

The AJ3U website has a wealth of reported sightings.

It also has audio recordings of SuitSat 1 as it passes over - I predicted that net-savvy hams would post these - and I was right.

I love technology crossovers like this - "space nerds" + radio hams = an interesting technological mashup.

Tags: suitsat nasa iss space AJ3U technology science

Posted by Dr. K at 12:48 PM | Permalink

After listening to the live broadcast of the launch of SuitSat late last night I had high hopes for this novel project.

Unfortunately it would seem that:

Reports have been received that SuitSat froze after two orbits and is no longer sending data. Radio amateurs around the world continue to monitor 145.990 MHz.

This is a real shame - the batteries were meant to last 2-4 days and then the recycled space suit would have burned up in the atmosphere after about 6 weeks.

Radio hams all around the world - or interested parties equipped with a scanner - would have been able to monitor SuitSat as it orbited the Earth - giving out telemetry readings for temperature, battery power and mission elapsed time.

Now it's gone - RIP SuitSat 1

I think that the low cost of this experiment coupled with the interest generated amongst radio hams and "space nerds" means that it won't be long before SuitSat 2 is launced.

The lessons learned from the telemetry data this time around will mean that SuitSat 2 will be better designed - it will last longer - and the lessons learned can be applied to SuitSat 3 and 4 and so on.

Meanwhile SuitSat 1 will continue to orbit the Earth until it's orbit decays and it burns up.

I guess if it's reflective enough you can see it under the right conditions - you'd need to go to one of the Satellite Spotting sites to get more info on this.

Tags: suitsat nasa iss space

Posted by Dr. K at 1:17 PM | Permalink

Another thing that stood out in the article The End of the Internet was the following:

Senior phone executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

Did the Telegram companies say this when national newspapers used their "pipes" to build medai empires - no they just benefited from the money they made by the extra traffic.

Did the Post Office say this when mail order empires were built on their "pipes" - no they benefited from the monet they made from the extra trafiic.

Did the phone companies say this when telemarketing companies made profits on their "pipes" - no they just benefited from the money they made from the extra traffic

The big carriers should be happy they are making money off the Internet, not trying to get a bigger slice of the pie at everyone else's expense - otherwise they might find that they kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Tags: fcc regulation the nation monopolies

Posted by Dr. K at 8:18 AM | Permalink

I've been reading the discussions on the End of CyberSpace for over a week now.

Personally I kind of agree with David Sifry's view that we "don't need a new word".

Once it was called "ArpaNet", then it was called the "Internet", and it then it was called "the Web" and now these days some people talk about "Web2.0" or the "semantic web".

But "CyberSpace" has been adopted from Science Fiction -from WIlliam Gibson who invented the term - and somehow it has stuck around.

Perhaps it's because the word "Cyber Space" is convenient in so many ways.

Continue reading "The End of Cyberspace" »

Posted by Dr. K at 1:13 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

It is my belief - after the SONY DRM disaster - that the long term business plan of "BigMedia" companies is not just an attempt at "content lockdown" - the prevention of unauthorised copying of copyrighted media.

It is also my belief, in disagreement with other pundits, that this is not an attempt at "platform lockdown" - where you have to buy multiple copies of your media to play on alternative devices.

I now believe that the long term aim of the BigMedia companies is nothing more than "Content Lock-In".

Continue reading "Platform Control vs Content Control" »

Posted by Dr. K at 6:23 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I've been migrating from my old, bad, IE habits to FireFox.

Sure I prefer an open-source browser.

Sure I don't want to be beholden to the "evil empire".

But for many years the only computers I used had that little IE logo - everything else was forbidden - except at home.

Habits like that stick - you look for the icon and click when you want to get on the web - that's why Microsoft bundled it so hard.

Continue reading "Performancing FireFox Extension" »

Posted by Dr. K at 12:53 AM | Permalink

The other day while ranting about SEO killing creative writing I created the following piece which I used as sample text.

Vailankanni: Beggars & Pilgrims
Vailankanni, also known as Velanganni, is in Tamil Nadu in India.
Vailankanni is famous for being a pilgrim center.
The Virgin Mary has been seen here three times.
Pilgrims come from all over India to pray at the chapel of "Our Lady of Health Vailankanni"
Early in the morning you can hear the bells call the faithful to their Catholic rites.
Imagine the scene as the pilgrims bathe themselves in the sea before the sun comes up.
In Vailankanni there are many beggars who prey on the pilgrims.
There are also stalls selling holy souvenirs and fish fryers on the right of the beach road.

I was using the Yahoo Content Analyser to extract keyterms for the "Vailanakanni" text and looking at the XML output when I noticed that the XML looked incomplete - but not in an XML type of way - a content type of way.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
< ResultSet xmlns:xsi="http://www >
<Result>india</Result>
<Result>fish fryers</Result>
<Result>pilgrims</Result>
<Result>tamil nadu</Result>
<Result>beggars</Result>
<Result>pilgrim center</Result>
<Result>virgin mary</Result>
<Result>catholic rites</Result>
<Result>bathe</Result>
<Result>souvenirs</Result>
<Result>prey</Result>
<Result>bells</Result>
<Result>imagine</Result>
<Result>fish</Result>
</ResultSet>

Now the odd thing about this XML file is that there is no mention of the keyword "Vailanakanni" - which is strange as it is the highest density keyword (37.50%) in the entire text. It should be in there somewhere bracketed by <Result> tags .. but it isn't.

The Yahoo content analyser finds the next highest density keyword "pilgrims" (32.25%) and the third highest "beggars" (18.75%) - I'm not concerned with ordering and density when using Yahoo like this - just the keywords extracted by the content analysis service.

The strange case of the missing "Vailankanni" from the results makes me wonder about the accuracy of other web sites using the Yahoo REST services.

For example Tag Cloud uses the Yahoo content extraction service to automagically tag pages and build tag clouds using automatic semantic extraction to build tags for the description fields.

If Yahoo is missing out a 37.50% keyword when contructing the results then anything we build on top of these results is like a castle built on sand - shaky foundations with a guarantee of eventual collapse.

I'd like to hear from other people who have played with the Yahoo content extraction REST service - do you have this problem? What is the problem? Anyone got any ideas?

Sure as hell I haven't .. and my enquiring mind wants to know.

Tags: seo yahoo tags tagging folksonomy tagsonomy semantic web keyword density keyword analysis tag cloud tagcloud tagclouds

Posted by Dr. K at 7:00 PM | Permalink

According to this report from Wired today.

Hmmmmm ... it seems like forever that people in the London 2600 group have been complaining about CCTV & Privacy Issues.

Now they have moved on, and expanded their horizons to include wider social concerns, like human rights and stupid legislation ..

Not surprising really - the UK has the largest number of CCTV cameras per head of population in the world - and London has more than its fair share of them.

It dosn't bring down the crime rate, doesn't stop terrorism, and costs a king's ransom in taxes.

Oh yeah, maybe if you are very lucky, the CCTV facial recognition is not outsourced to a robo-cop program - which the politicians can then blame for all the mistakes they make when somebody innocent gets stopped and searched, or or maybe even killed

Now that the UK Government has enacted the draconian email and phone snooping RIP Act, widened the Terrorism Act to supress politically motivated computer hackers, and promoted mass technological surveillance of millions of innocent citizens, you have to *trust* the likes of former Home Secretary Jack "Big Brother" Straw or the disgraced ex-Home Secretary David "Mastermind" Blunkett or the current incumbent Charles "detention without trial" Clarke, that your email is not being routinely monitored and that some cruel automatic traffic pattern analysis program is not adding points to your electronic secret police dossier.

Me .. I can't decide about CCTV .. it is all way too complicated for me .. all I know is that ..

Tags: big brother privacy bad government wtwu CCTV spy blog surveillance

Posted by Dr. K at 10:29 PM | Permalink

So I bought a copy of the latest album by "Instituto Mexicano de Sonido" and it had this tiny little freebie promo CD with it.

I love promo freebies because you normally get all sorts of odd outtakes, tracks that almost made it onto the album and material that can best be described as "non-commercial" i.e. plenty of material for a chill out dj.

I wanted to mix a track of this promo CD with something else so I popped it into the CD player.

That was a big mistake.

Continue reading "against DRM ... again" »

Posted by Dr. K at 1:18 PM | Permalink

From Spy Blog .. more on ISP Data Retention.

Guess what - they are going to keep our data for longer now - even if you are not a hacker, criminal or terrorist.

Who checks the integrity of the data? Who will be able to access it?

They should put the database on the web with SDK's and API's to allow anyone to query it.

Public information should be public knowledge.

No I don't think they will do it - unless there was a NuLabour rebranding ..

I know - lets call it Web 2.0 Open Government!!!

NEW GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCEMENT!!
Blair 2.0 - the next generation - coming to a p2p, blog-served, xml-enabled, rss-feeded, technorati-tagged webserver somewhere near you. (Unless we outsource it)

Just don't bother writing to your MP - OpenGov 2.0 will even VOTE for you by aggregating your personal tags - before telling you what YOU really think.

REGISTER YOUR VOTE!!
Fill in your name and address and we will decide how you will vote based on your (a) credit card rating, (b) your current folksonomy rating, (c) criminal record, (d) whether you are on any "watch list" or not, (e) whether someone arbitrary has decided you are a "subversive personality" or other "kind of risk" and (f) any other reason we haven't thought of yet.

Please click the "accept" button for our EULA.

Apparently it's called "The Wisdom of the Crowd"

Sorry .. but try telling German Jews in WWII about the "Wisdom of the Crowd" ... they might laugh at you .. or cry ..

Bah!! - Whoever we vote for the government still gets in!!

Continue reading "Data Retention" »

Posted by Dr. K at 1:09 PM | Permalink

Casting around for a method of selecting random numbers I happened upon a site which uses atmospheric noise to generate truly random numbers.

Could be pretty useful when looking for that truly random WEP key - but for other uses - as the author notes:

I should probably note that while fetching the numbers via secure HTTP would protect them from being observed while in transit, anyone genuinely concerned with security should not trust me to generate their cryptographic keys.

However, the coolest way to generate random numbers MUST be to build your own device to use radioactive decay to generate the numbers using a geiger counter and a commercially available radioactive source .

I was almost shocked - hackers playing with geiger counters and radioactive sources etc etc.

Then I realised that I was at the website of John Walker, a founder of Autodesk, which is responsible for AutoCad .

Still ... I'm sure that if most people tried to purchase a "60 microcurie Jordan Nuclear Krypton-85 (85Kr) source capsule, model BB-0005" they would have the police, or worse, knocking on their door in no time.

Luckily he had one spare in his toolbox ....

Posted by Dr. K at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

According to this report out today from LOT 49 out today:

Researchers Ask for Exemption to DMCA Protection of Spyware

If the DMCA protects a company like Sony when they foist an unwanted, uninstallable spyware rootkit which subverts the basic security and integrity of the operating system while still allowing unwanted malware to run undiscovered then we have a real problem.

Sony should shorten their EULA: "YOU HAVE BEEN OWNED"

Posted by Dr. K at 7:45 PM | Permalink

I've resisted commenting on this so far because everyone else is doing it so much better than me.

Now, in the light of the recent EFF DMCA report that suggests that DMCA rulemaking is failing consumers completely and the latest from Mark's sysinternals blog

That was two weeks ago and still there’s no uninstaller. I could write an uninstaller in an hour based on my own research of the software without access to the source code. They have source code and an existing uninstaller. I find the delay utterly inexcusable.

I have to ask the question:

If Mark writes an uninstaller "based on the research of the software without access to the source code" is he guilty of "circumventing copyright measures" as defined by the DMCA?

Posted by Dr. K at 11:33 AM | Permalink

Good work from the man who allows ...

Not only does he allow me blogspace but he also upgrades it and makes it even better ...

I've been meaning to change the blog layour to 3 columns for some time now ... and now I don't have to ... all my hard work has been done for me!!

YO! BlogMaster ... We who are about to BLOG salute you!!

Thanks mate .. I just wanted to say it in public ... I really appreciate your efforts ...

Yeah ... and also a big hand to the people at Six Apart ... who wrote the software my BM uses ...

Posted by Dr. K at 10:28 AM | Permalink

That's all I can say about this report today ...

Posted by Dr. K at 9:04 PM | Permalink

From The Guardian website, this little gem from a user who argues, quite rightly, that "Instead of terrifying us with tales of doom, software companies should write programs without holes".

Not too much to ask for is it?

Posted by Dr. K at 12:12 PM | Permalink

After further thought I realised I should buy a 2x2 USB MIDI interface.

That would be good because the Opcode drivers have a nasty habit of hanging applications when driven with too much midi data.

When you kill the app and reset the machine the drivers are gone and have to be reinstalled.

Continue reading "MIDI Woes" »

Posted by Dr. K at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wanted to set up a scanner so I could scan images for this blog.

After hunting through the (unpacked) boxes I found my old Canon-320P scanner.

The problem with this scanner is that (a) it is a ancient parallel scanner, and (b) my parallel port is taken up with an antique "OpCode Translator PC" MIDI interface.

I plugged the scanner into the "through port" of the OpCode and got .. nada, zip, nil.

Continue reading "Scanner Woes" »

Posted by Dr. K at 12:43 PM | Permalink