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July 30, 2008
The IOC feeds the Ducks
Ah the Olympics! The International Olympic committee work hard to provide the joys that they bring: sportsmanship, competition, web censorship:
The Chinese government confirmed Wednesday what journalists arriving at the lavishly outfitted media center here had suspected: Contrary to previous assurances by Olympic and government officials, the Internet would be censored during the upcoming games.Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages - politically sensitive ones that discuss Tibetan succession, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.
On Wednesday - two weeks after its most recent proclamation of an uncensored Internet during the Summer Games - the International Olympic Committee quietly agreed to some of the limitations, according to Kevan Gosper, chairman of the IOC press commission, Reuters reported.
I guess you can say China walks like a duck.
Posted by Peter at 07:54 PM
If it walks like a duck....
And now the latest news from Egypt:
Hossam Bahgat, the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, says the detention of Maher and 14 other members of the activist group "Facebook Youth," is tied to its continued detention of dozens of textile factory workers and townspeople from Mahalla, a large city in the Nile Delta."These detentions are vindictive," Mr. Bahgat says. "Security agencies appear to be still bitter about the overwhelming public support for the April 6 strike and the new detentions... are clearly aimed at deterring any similar mobilization in the future by sending a chilling message that a price will be paid."
Jay Nordlinger has the best quote on the whole situation:
Turn to Egypt: I’ve met a fair amount of Egyptian officials in my time. Some of them are golden (really); some of them are louses (really, really). All of them get huffy when you suggest that Egypt is a dictatorship — even a “presidential dictatorship.” They get very huffy when you suggest that Egypt is less than free. Well, lately, they’ve been jailing bloggers and Facebook users. If you don’t want to be called a police state — don’t act like one.
Ditto
Posted by Peter at 01:37 PM
July 28, 2008
Still true two years later
Two and a half years ago in this post we quoted Glenn Reynolds on Wikipedia:
My sense is that the wiki format works pretty well when issues are uncontroversial, but that it doesn't handle politics very well.
Gawker proves the point again today. This prompts Roger Simon to say this about the lockdown:
Especially do not trust those whose expertise pretends to be encyclopedic. No one’s is, not even an organization that pretends to use the wisdom of crowds in the manner of Wikipedia. Too often we reference Wikipedia as if it were authoritative. It isn’t. Not even faintly.
Wikipedia the site that anyone can edit, except when they can't.
Update: However there are other topics that aren't beyond the pale:
The following are among such techniques described in vivid detail: beheading, cutting oneself, drowning, suffocation, electrocution, use of explosives, hanging, vehicular impact, jumping from bridges and towers, drug abuse, inhaling and ingesting poisons, suicide by fire, stabbing, shooting, starvation and suicide attack.When WND contacted a representative of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, she said, "A site detailing the different methods someone could use to kill themselves could definitely be harmful to the public."
However, Jay Walsh, head of communications for the Wikimedia Foundation, said the organization does not take responsibility for editing the content of its pages.
Even funnier is this quote later in the story about pornographic content:
We don't censor any of the content...
I guess it all depends on the meaning of the word content.
Posted by Peter at 09:58 PM
Solve a simple annoyance
Have you ever accidentally dragged a window totally off the screen and can't figure out how to get it back?
Well what people generally do is click on the box at the bottom and attempt to use the move button but you hit the move button and the window doesn't move and when you move the mouse it just removes it, what next?
Well the move button is controlled by the arrow keys not the mouse. In these days of mice and men the reliable arrow keys are sometimes forgotten. If you ever find yourself in this mess, you'll want to remember them.
Posted by Peter at 09:53 PM
July 27, 2008
The cruelest comparison
What a headline:
Forrester: Windows Vista rejected like 'new Coke' by enterprises
It doesn't get much worse than that.
Posted by Peter at 11:19 PM
July 25, 2008
And the money just clicks away....
One of the big disadvantages to the internet is the ease of it. For example it is very easy to give out info, it is very easy (in some cases downright hard) to avoid porn and popups but the thing that can really nail you is how easy it is to spend money.
As you might guess from previous posts I'm a fan of the Doctor Who audios at Big Finish. Unfortunately with the dollar weak these days the new ones run nearly $30 each with shipping. I bough a sub which gives a discount on new ones but for the 110+ back issues $30 each is but kinda pricey for me. Even US sites are in the $20-25 range with shipping so I've been checking out ebay.
For the last two months I've been a flurry of bidding. This week some fellow in Florida was selling a couple of dozen of them at $13-15 each so I pounced. Felt really good about it, saved 67% off the list price and have enjoyed the stuff I got. Then the credit card bill came in....
I found that I literally spent hundreds of dollars in 60 days that I normally would never spend. What's worse I had teased my wife about the very same thing over Pfaltzgraff items just a couple of months ago. They were all just 10 or 15 dollar charges but add up dozens and viola there goes a bunch of money that isn't paying the electric and cable bills.
So her is my advice. When you buy something online either using paper and pen or using notepad write down the amount you have spent and keep a running total. Keep it next to your pc and you will be less likely to bust your budget online.
...Oh PS the wife insists I say that pfaltzgraff makes high quality stuff that is worth having. Just watch the budget.
Posted by Peter at 09:48 PM
July 23, 2008
Olympics Osmipics China is still China
You didn't really think that China was going to treat web speech differently during the Olympics did you?
Chinese police have arrested a prominent Internet dissident for violating his probation terms, a rights group said, as the country steps up a pre-Olympic crackdown on dissent to ensure the Games go smoothly. ADVERTISEMENTDu Daobin, from the central province of Hebei, was given a suspended sentence for subversion in 2004 having been detained by police in Wuhan for posting online essays in support of fellow dissident, Liu Di.
Du was then released into house arrest, Reporters Without Borders said in an emailed statement, but was arrested this week having been accused of posting articles on overseas websites and receiving guests without permission.
Yup just another day on the internet in China.
Posted by Peter at 03:47 PM
Stray thoughts on a Wednesday
Some stray thoughts and little nic nacks:
Had a windows 2000 customer about a week ago, discovered that the latest version of Firefox 3.0 wouldn't install on it. Time eventually marches on....
But not for everyone had a customer just two days ago running 98 as their primary machine that didn't want to lose their 98 games. I can sympathize. There are quite a few games I played on 98 that I miss. Colonization and Aces of the Deep to name a pair...
Speaking of not moving on I generally use the old Mozilla for personal sites it now crashes every time that I go to Slashdot in it crashes, sooner or later I will have to move to the modern age...
Spent half a day on my day off moving files to an external hard drive since our families main machine had under 1 gig of 70 gig left. I noticed during my cleanup that a set of photos had been imported twice. When you have 50 or 60 gigs left in your drive you don't notice or bother about that stuff but sooner or later it gets down to 1 gig and then you have to scramble...
This has convinced me that an external hard drive is a MUST for a house with multiple PC's...
There is nothing more annoying that starting up your work laptop after your kid has used the alternate account for a few hours and finding that some functions just don't work anymore...
When the above happens remember system restore is your friend...
I really have to get more ram for all of my systems but there are too many things I'd rather spend the money on, in that respect I'm a very atypical tech...
Speaking of atypical its become atypical for anyone else to post on the blog lately...
You know I'm sure there are a few companies out there still using pre xp equipment and there might be some overseas guys that are still using old stuff but it is really past time that router manufacturers stop including WEP in brand new products. It only encourages people to use a bad security choice and retain obsolete stuff...
...Says the man who is constantly talking up windows xp over vista...
Finally has there ever been a more useful website than Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit? I know this sounds a bit overblown but has there ever been an average person who has not only had a bigger influence over the world in history without really trying just because he likes his hobby? I know there will be some who cry that Hotair, or Daily Kos or other sites have bigger audiences, but Reynolds did it without an agenda, just as a regular guy doing his hobby who suddenly became sort of famous. Our podcast with him is here. >here. I think history will look at this as a striking event.
Posted by Peter at 12:55 PM
July 22, 2008
It's ALIVE iT'S ALIVE! xp IT'S ALIVE!
Well Microsoft has finally stopped sales of the XP OS on new systems...except for where it hasn't:
Microsoft Corp said it will extend support for the Windows XP operating system on a new class of low end hardware until June 20, 2010.The software giant said that the machines can cost as little as $300 and typically do not have enough memory and CPU power to run the most basic version of the Windows Vista operating system.
In other words when the choice is abandoning a market to Linux or keep xp, xp will win every time.
So much for the need to retire the OS.
Posted by Peter at 12:19 AM
July 20, 2008
Wikipeda and Anonymity
One of the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia is the anonymity of the posters.
But the real dirt will appear when Griffith's upgraded tools are publicly released in about a week and thousands of users begin combing over the entries.To make tracking corporate misbehavior on Wikipedia even easier, Griffith has also created a "conflict of interest" filter for the site. By automatically linking a company's edits with a database of its registered trademarks, Wikiwatcher can automatically flag a company editing its own entries. A Microsoft employee's change to an entry on Zune, for instance, could be identified immediately.
Wikiwatcher can also analyze long-running disputes between users on Wikipedia. At the hacker's conference, Griffith showed a long list of edits and counter-edits made between Yahoo! and Microsoft. Searching for "edit-wars" between Irani and Israeli IP addresses, he found heavy disagreement on an entry devoted to the Holocaust.
This is a big deal, and frankly I think its a good thing, the problem with Wikipedia is that you don't know who is editing so how do you know if there is a motive, most people don't bother with the supporting pages.
The idea that information on the net would remain hidden is rather funny, the net doesn't keep secrets well and Ezra Levant is betting $1000 that at least one secret is not going to be kept.
Both stories via Glenn who is a font of info as always.
Posted by Peter at 02:40 PM
He who lives by the suit dies by the suit
I'll wager that a lot of our customers will get a kick out of this story:
Stephanie Lenz is an angry Pennsylvania mother who refuses to back down from the music industry.Lenz's attorneys were in federal district court on Friday morning, trying to thwart a motion to dismiss her lawsuit against Universal Music Group. A year ago, the music label ordered YouTube to pull down a 30-second video she shot of her infant son dancing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy."
Lenz, who resides in a rural Pennsylvania area, claims that her video is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Fair Use provision in copyright law. She fought the order, and eventually, Universal Music abandoned any claim that she violated Prince's copyright. YouTube has since reposted her clip.
Now Lenz is out to teach the music industry a lesson.
I suspect that there will be a lot of cheering if she wins?
Posted by Peter at 02:33 PM
July 17, 2008
Web and the election
Web spiders are often thought of as annoyances on the web, but for the McCain presidential campaign there are a friend. Who says you can't teach an old dog a new trick:
The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista.
The service, which launched two months ago, allows users to track and cache changes to specific web pages up to an hourly basis, depending on the level of filtering requested, says Peter Bray, its creator in Portland, Oregon.
This type of stuff will become more common as time goes by.
Posted by Peter at 10:49 PM
July 16, 2008
Remember that repaired system
Had a nasty surprise this weekend.
My son's Nintendo Wii had failed. Since it was in warranty it Nintendo quickly sent a package and repaired/replaced it. We were delighted as the device was back in time for the oldest's birthday party.
Unfortunately I didn't remember that the security settings were now back to day one and one of the boys friends went to a site that I didn't want him going.
So remember when a system comes back from repair don't forget that your parental settings might need to be re-established. Otherwise don't be surprised when teenage boys act like teenage boys.
Posted by Peter at 02:23 PM
July 14, 2008
The end of an era on eBay?
Everybody knows eBay the online store where you can get anything from a power supply for a laptop to a Doctor Who scarf.
Well it looks like eBay has decided to shift away from the standard auction model pairing with buy.com to offer Amazon like products and services in a big store style format. This hasn't pleased the small seller that was the eBay bread and butter for years:
To accommodate Buy.com and other large sellers in the future, eBay last month announced a new "Diamond" level for its power sellers. Unlike its other classes of sellers, which pay eBay fees to list each item and share a percentage of each sale, Diamond sellers can negotiate their own fee arrangements with eBay.Details of eBay's deal with Buy.com are being kept private, though it appears from the sheer number of Buy.com listings flooding the site that Buy.com is not paying listing fees.
That has enraged many sellers, who have uncorked a wave of vitriol on eBay's community forums about this and other changes. Many believe that eBay has violated the sacred tenet of the "level playing field," which its founder, Pierre Omidyar, established as one of the company's basic principles.
I guess the day of the little man on the net may be fading, well there is always craigslist.
Posted by Peter at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2008
Today's quicktip Vista wireless security
Now for a quick tip....
If you change or add wireless security Vista unlike XP will occasionally have an issue with the new configuration. Here is a way around it
Go into network and sharing center and click on manage wireless networks. Delete the ssid of the network you changed and detect it from scratch. Barring disaster this will make it detect and connect the new configuration right off.
This has been your quick tip for the day.
Posted by Peter at 11:08 PM
July 11, 2008
iPhone today, wake me when its over
The new iPhone is coming out today.
Am I the only person on the net who doesn't care?
UPDATE: Via Glenn Firmware already cracked.
Posted by Peter at 08:43 AM
July 10, 2008
You can take PC Magazine's word for it.
Well I've moaned in the past about not being nominated for best tech blog.
However PC Magazine has given us the big prize as they have named us their Editor's Choice for online support services!!
The article is here money quote:
Support site HiWired distinguishes itself from fix-anything services like Geek Squad by being focused solely on PC service and by offering a money-back guarantee (though SupportSpace does this too). While testing HiWired, I encountered the best processes, tools, and techs of any support services I've reviewed. They also did the most thorough job of getting my messed-up test PC back into top running form. Thanks to this impressive performance, HiWired unseats firedog as our Editors' Choice for online support services.
The whole article is a source of a lot of smiles around here. If you are looking for US based tech support for your pc and its bits and pieces, then we are ready to serve you.
Posted by Peter at 08:47 PM
July 09, 2008
Play it again, and again and again
I know I am sounding like a broken record but sooner or later people will believe me or articles like this one:
Sometime late last year, an employee of a McLean investment firm decided to trade some music, or maybe a movie, with like-minded users of the online file-sharing network LimeWire while using a company computer. In doing so, he inadvertently opened the private files of his firm, Wagner Resource Group, to the public.That exposed the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 2,000 of the firm's clients, including a number of high-powered lawyers and Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.
The breach was not discovered for nearly six months. A reader of washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog found the information while searching LimeWire in June.
If a member of the supreme court isn't immune what makes you think you are? Please avoid this stuff.
Posted by Peter at 03:07 AM
July 07, 2008
XP is dead long live XP?
Well it has been a full week since the official death of windows XP so I guess there is no way for you to get a brand new system running windows xp.
Or not:
For those of you who still aren’t ready to make the leap, but think you might want to one day, Dell Small Business is now offering Vista Business and Vista Ultimate with Downgrade Service free on Latitude, Optiplex and Precision, and for a small fee on Vostro systems. With this service, we exercise your downgrade rights for you and factory-install XP Professional on your system while shipping you a CD for XP and a DVD for Vista. This way, you get the OS you’re comfortable with using now along with rights to upgrade to Vista when you’re ready, which offers investment protection for the future. When you’re ready to migrate to Vista, simply use the Vista DVD provided to run the install.
PC world says it best:
You know the PC biz has gotten weird when offering a 7-year-old OS becomes a marketing advantage. But the reason why is obvious. Vista is such a dog it qualifies for the Iditarod.
That is certainly an insult...to the dogs who run the iditarod, but in fairness they make an important point later on.
When Windows XP came out, it was panned for being slow and incompatible, just as Vista has been (in InfoWorld, no less). It was also woefully, almost laughably insecure. Imagine shipping an OS with the firewall turned off by default. Yet that was XP in 2001.
Then again the operating systems it replaced in 2001 came without firewalls period.
Posted by Peter at 03:03 PM
Ego Surfing what is it?
I was bopping around Slashdot today and found this interesting post:
I was ego-surfing the other day, and was surprised to discover that I was listed as a member of an on-line dating service. It turns out these scamsters generate web pages for lots of (FirstName, LastName) combos, each claiming that the named individual is a member of their service.
There is more than one way to use an identity, but that raised an interesting point.
"Ego surfing" is doing a search of your name on the internet. There are doubtless many people with the same name as you but it is worthwhile to do so just to see if something that doesn't have anything to do with your might come up. I discovered that the top 4 results pertain to me but then it is mixed with many others.
It is worth noting that somethings I posed comments on nearly a decade ago are in the top 20 list, so remember what you say in the past will define you in the future.
Posted by Peter at 01:01 PM
July 04, 2008
Self evident vs Self Serving
It is the 4th of July THE national holiday.
As always HiWired is open 24/7 for your computer needs.
The day really give perspective on what makes this country special. Today In my local parade I saw a Jewish Group and a Muslim group marching one in front of the other no problems no big deal. Only in America.
Because when you have a free country you get some self evident things:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
On the other hand in a country less free other things are also self evident as well:
A recent analysis of web sites pushing malware (software that helps hackers steal data) revealed that half of them are connected with just ten ISPs (Internet Service Providers), and six of those ISPs are in China. This came as no surprise, as China has become the favorite hideout for Internet criminals.There's just one catch. The Chinese Internet is highly policed by a special force of 30,000 secret police technicians. On the Chinese Internet, you don't do something the government does not want, at least not for long. So how do these criminals manage to survive on such a heavily policed portion of the Internet?
Some things are no surprise if you've been reading our stuff.
Posted by Peter at 08:08 PM
July 03, 2008
Nothing you want your mother to see? How about Viacom?
A court ruling on the suit between Google and Viacom has let to a shocker:
Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.
I've already had a talk with my boys, might be time to talk to yours.
Posted by Peter at 07:19 PM
July 02, 2008
Why delete the spam mails? Here is why.
Ever wonder what would happen if you answer spam, Network World has the answer:
What would be the experience in 10 countries when everyday people, armed with a PC and e-mail account McAfee provided for the Global S.P.A.M. Diaries project, clicked through the spam and chronicled the results?
Remember this when you get that e-mail that is too good to be true.
My guess is they would become very popular very fast
Overall, the most obvious result of the S.P.A.M. experiment was that the PC that McAfee had provided for the project noticeably slowed down, clogged up with spyware, Mooney says.
That was to be expected, another result might not have expected is this:
the effect of entering a home address was extreme. Immediately, a deluge of mail landed at her doorstep, directed to the attention of Penelope Retch.
Posted by Peter at 12:58 PM