Tag: Technology

Your Daily Dose of Irony

It appears IBM slipped up a little bit:

Delegates to AusCERT, Australia’s premier information security event held this week on the Gold Coast, have taken home a little of the stuff they spent the week agonising over – a virus.

In an email this afternoon, IBM advised visitors to its AusCERT booth that its complimentary USB key was infected with a virus. An IBM spokesman and conference organisers confirmed the email was genuine.

There has to be an award for distributing a virus at a security conference.

3D Printers

There are several technologies I absolutely adore and 3D printers are one of them. 3D printers are devices that can make objects from a design file using a series of printer heads to slowly piece the object together from raw material. For instance you could make a Glock pistol frame from strings of plastic by melting the plastic which would be ejected from the printer heads in the desired form. I didn’t realize how far this technology had come along until I found out the made Robert Downy Jr.’s Iron Man armor for Iron Man 2 using such a device.

The suit parts were constructed using 3D printers which made fabrication as simple as designing them on a computer. Likewise they were made to fit Downy’s body making them more comfortable to wear on set.

I got excited about this technology when it was used in Daemon and Freedom(TM) by agents of the Daemon to construct pretty much everything they used. Of course the 3D printers used by Daemon agents were able to use metal dust to construct objects that plastic just wouldn’t work for (such as machine parts for their automated vehicles). Having such devices in your household would be a huge boon. Just imagine being able to construct a 1911 frame out of metal dust (Oh that would make the anti-gunners shit themselves endlessly). Or maybe construct replacement parts for your vehicle. So long as you have raw materials around you could conceivably create anything you want or need.

Currently this technology is pretty pricey although there is a project called MakerBot which is an open specification for creating such machines. MakerBots can currently made almost anything that is within 4″x4″x6″. Obviously that’s not very practical yet but it most certainly will become more advanced and cheaper as time goes on, that’s the benefit of technology.

Frankly this technology is practically limitless in it’s potential. I’m glad to see it’s advancing pretty fast.

The Kindle Isn’t a Textbook Replacement

A few colleges were doing trail runs of the Kindle DX as a mechanism to replace textbooks. Well Princeton’s review wasn’t so hot (in fact it was downright damning) but now Darden is backing Princeton up:

“You must be highly engaged in the classroom every day,’’ says Koenig, and the Kindle is “not flexible enough. … It could be clunky. You can’t move between pages, documents, charts and graphs simply or easily enough compared to the paper alternatives.’’

Yeah I can also confirm this. The Kindle is great for reading novels and other books you go through serially. But it’s not so hot at books where you jump around a lot. The interface and page turning is too slow for such a process. I think e-ink displays will need to advance another couple of years before e-readers will be viable textbook replacements.

Like most technology in its infancy e-ink displays will take some time to become viable general purpose tools.

Evolving Iron Sights

The Firearm Blog has a post about a new iron sight idea. The new system used a lens and “zone plates” and allows the user to focus on both the front sight and target at the same time.

It looks like an interested idea with certain applications for target shooting. I don’t think I’d put such a device on my defensive firearms simply because if you break the lens I imagine the sighting system would be useless. But this thing looks cool regardless.

Here I Thought They Were Already Doing This

This shows how paranoid I’ve become. MSNBC has a story about Amazon uploading notes and highlights taken on the Kindle is aggregating the data in such a way other people can view it.

Since the Kindle is able to sync things like notes and highlights I already knew they were being uploaded to Amazon’s servers. Likewise since the file storing said notes and highlights is a plain text file I assumed it wasn’t be encrypted. Finally I assumed the data was being sifted through and aggregated at some point. In other words I’m paranoid and trust nobody.

Well apparently Amazon wasn’t really doing anything with the data but will be soon. They’re trying to turn the Kindle into a social network reading device (yeah I just made that up and it’s officially my buzzword, wait this is under Creative Commons… crap). What Amazon is planning on doing is making popular highlights and such available for Kindle books.

If you don’t like this feature there is only one way I know of to disable it, never turn on the wireless card and do a sync operation. Either way you should know about this feature before they implement it and I’m sure Amazon will do everything in their power to not alert anybody of it.

Obama Doesn’t Like Technology

This article perfectly portrays the meaning of double speak. Apparently Obama believes the following:

“What Jefferson recognized… that in the long run, their improbable experiment — called America — wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn’t have the best interests of all the people at heart.

“It could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged, if we held our government accountable, if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship.”

I actually agree with Obama on something, namely this. I think part of the problem with America today is the apathy of its citizens and their lack of being informed. If you ask most Americans who their state representatives are they won’t be able to tell you. Of course if you ask a really important question like who won American Idol they can tell you right off of the spot.

One of the best things about technology is that is provides you with a constant 24/7 stream of news and information. There is no excuse to not being in the know these days. Thankfully Obama is bringing this to light and asking everybody to embrace this technology… oh wait:

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

Like everything Obama says:

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

He bemoaned the fact that “some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction,” in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets.

So being in the know and having access to information is great unless that information doesn’t jive with what he thinks. For instance it’s just crazy to believe that people could be cooking the books on global warming climate is changing OMG!!!! climate change. It’s also crazy to think that GM used government money to pay back their loan from the government.

I love how Obama is all of the sudden an expert on technology that he admits to not knowing how to use. Seriously what a smug asshole.

Upcoming Kindle Firmware

I mentioned Amazon is planning on rolling out a new firmware for the Kindle sometime back. Well Ars Technica has a good review of the firmware (lucky dogs got it early).

I have to say overall I’m excited. The categories feature is enough for me to be excited. But it appears as Amazon also implemented a decent password system. If you don’t enter your password properly it pops up a message saying if you forgot your password call Amazon and gives you a number. This leads me to ponder if you have to reset the password remotely. If so it would be a boon for times when the device gets stolen because Amazon could just refuse to reset the device if it’s reported stolen making it a paperweight. On the other hand they would need a mechanism in place to reset the password on Kindles not within range of a cellular data network.

I’m far less excited about the social networking features. Needless to say it uses a URL shortening service (which I talked about today) to post passages from your books on Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand Amazon controls the service so you can be fairly sure (although not completely) the links you see from them are legitimate.

The other feature I’m looking forward to wasn’t covered much which is the ability to zoom and pan PDF files. PDF files don’t scale well on the Kindle’s small screen and are only legible if you put the device in landscape mode. Being able to zoom in and pan will allow you to read PDFs in portrait mode on the regular small Kindle.

Now Amazon just needs to hurry up and release the Kindle Development Kit so I can start writing applications for the bloody device (yes I have ideas for applications for me Kindle).

More on Laptop Spying Case

I mentioned some time ago about a situation occurring where a school was caught spying on students via webcams built into laptops that were issued to students. Well apparently there is nothing to see here:

An “independent” investigation into the Lower Merion School District laptop scandal has concluded that there’s no evidence that students were being spied on. This is despite the existence of 58,000 photos surreptitiously taken of students on or around their computers and e-mails between district IT people commenting on the entertainment value of the photos. The 72-page report (PDF) from law firm Ballard Spahr claims, however, that most of the photos were not seen by anyone and that the district merely failed to implement proper record-keeping procedures.

Yeah obviously there was no spying. Sure they had 58,000 pictures of kids doing who-knows-what but most of the pictures weren’t actually seen by anybody, scouts promise. After all I’m sure the Ballard Spahr law firm has evidence proving none of the pictures were viewed:

Ballard Spahr admits that there is no way to determine how often the images were viewed, but says it found no evidence that the IT staff had viewed any of the images. Additionally, it says there was no evidence that district administrators knew how TheftTrack worked or even understood that large numbers of images were being collected in the first place.

Oops I guess not. Oh wait there was evidence… of the pictures being viewed:

This, of course, is the problem: because there was very little record-keeping going on and no official policies, there are few ways to know who knew what and when. However, claiming that there’s no evidence whatsoever that IT staff saw the images seems disingenuous, considering the fact that e-mail records were dug up last month that showed at least two IT administrators chatting about the photos. One staffer that has since been put on leave, Carol Cafiero, described the pictures as “a little [Lower Merion School District] soap opera,” while another staffer responded, “I know. I love it!”

Yes the school gave all the students laptops, installed spyware (in the most literal sense) on the machines, but didn’t really document it nor put any polices in place of when the cameras were to be used. That’s doesn’t scream trying to cover your tracks because you knew what you were doing was going to land you in very hot water.

But the fact of the matter is the school went to great lengths to ensure an outside party chose an independent entity to carry out the investigation so no possibility of bias could have entered into the equation:

One detail of note is that Ballard Spahr was hired by the Lower Merion School District itself to carry out the investigation, casting doubts on the true “independent” nature of the report.

Fuck me. I’m still hoping that school district gets sued right into oblivion.

I know quite a few parents who don’t want their kids having a laptop with a webcam because pedophiles may be able to access the camera without anybody’s knowledge and watching everything going on. I usually write such concerns off as over-the-top paranoia but I guess when the school is providing the laptops you should be worried about such things (the cameras being activated remotely without anybody’s knowledge, well and possibly the pedophiles doing it depending on the truth reason for installing that spyware).

My ultimate question here is who requested the installation of the spyware? Did the IT people do it without asking the school administrators or did the school administrators ask the IT people to do it? This will ultimately show the guilty party.