I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this news story from ComputerWorld. NBC TV producer, Michelle Madigan, for the show Dateline, was at the DefCon security conference as an undercover attendee. It was believed that she was going to film other attendees at the conference with a hidden camera in an attempt to ‘out’ them. I must admit if I were an IT manager and found my network guru was attending such a conference, the first thing I’d want to know was what freebies he’d gotta his grubby little mitts on. Anyway I digress, the conference organisers had got wind of her dastardly plans which probably wasn’t surprising as the producer had told a show volunteer ‘I have to go into the bathroom and put on my hidden camera’. I don’t think the CIA will be asking her for any tips on undercover operations.

The farce situation came to a head when conference organiser Dark Tangent (!), aka Jeff Moss, outed Madigan during a conference session.

“It came to our attention that a reporter might be here with a hidden pinhole camera,” Moss told the crowd. He said that he had two options: to let her corner some 13-year-old and get him to admit to hacking, or to escort her away.

At this point Madigan made a swift exit from the conference building with chants of ‘burn the witch’ ringing in her ears!

As I said at the beginning I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over this - DefCon is obviously based around a ‘shared knowledge’ principle, it’s a place where people can go and discuss security concepts (aka hacking tips) openly and without fear of their motives being questioned. If I was responsible for network security at a big corporation, I’d be keen to attend as well. What Madigan tried to do was despicable and would have irreparably broken the trust that DefCon has built up amongst its attendees. If people say that hackers are the scum of the earth, then TV producers are the next layer down.

Oh yes, except to see the NBC site down ‘for maintenance’ soon!

Source: ComputerWorld

Featured Tags defcon, nbc, security


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On Wednesday KOTV posted a report on its website that a lightening strike had caused a fire at an oil refinery in Oklahoma. The company that owned the oil refinery announced that there had been no fire and the report was wrong. KOTV removed the story from its site but meanwhile the price of crude oil had increased by 40 cents a barrel. Now admittedly that was a less than 1% increase but after the finger of bad journalism was pointed at engadget recently, you think that the mainstream media would get this kind of thing right.

As an aside, oil prices had dropped by US$2 the day before after expectations that a new president in Nigeria would stablise the supply from the country. The more cynical amongst us may think that a greedy oil baron had phoned in with the news of the fire to KOTV.

Source: I4U

Featured Tags internet, oil


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Never underestimate the power of the blogger. Engadget posted about an internal email at Apple stating that the iPhone and Leopard launches were to be delayed to October and next January respectively. Later Apple stated that the original email was a fake and the product launches are still on track.

Despite there only being twenty minutes between engadget’s post and the response, Apple’s share price fell by 2.2 percent. Needless to say Apple investor’s would have been none too pleased at the power of the blog.

However there’s an interesting follow up article at the Inquirer regarding a post at Information Week. The post suggests that engadget behaved irresponsibly and it was naive journalism to post about the email without checking with Apple first.

Lessons learned in Journalism 101, however, would have prevented the debacle.

The post at IW seems to be confusing journalism with blogging - sure there are many similarities but a blog tends to be an opinion rather than a ‘news items’. They try to blame engadget for the share price dip yet surely that was more due to the nervousness of the shareholders than anything else. Also this is not the first time a company’s share price has moved due to rumour or speculation - in fact the markets thrive on such movements.

No, as far as I’m concerned engadget did the right thing reporting information as they discovered it.

As an aside the Apple share price currently stands at $109.44 - over a dollar up from where it stood PRIOR to the fake email post. If I was a Apple investor (of the less nervous variety) I would be cracking open a cold one right now and saying ‘Go, go, engadget’.

Featured Tags apple, engadget, iphone


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Russian authorities originally charged school teacher, Alexander Ponosov, with installing pirated versions of Microsoft Office and Windows on PCs at the school where he taught. The case was thrown out of court after the court said Ponosov’s actions were “insignificant”. Posonov had claimed the PCs had come with the pirated software pre-installed by sub-contractors.

In a bizarre twist Ponosov has ended up being fined US$200 (about half a month’s salary or a crate of Stolichnaya) after he joined prosecutors who lodged an appeal after the first case was dropped. The appeal led to Ponosov’s retrial and subsequent guilty verdict and fine. Bet he wishes he’d kept quiet now. But no, he does plan to appeal again. Just keep on digging mate, keep on digging.

However the story sounds a bit fishy to us? How come there’s no reports of the authorities pursuing the ‘sub-contractors’ that Ponosov bought the PCs from? Also Russia is on an American ‘watch list’ regarding copyright protection, perhaps the Russian authorities think that Posonov’s conviction will satisfy the Americans? It just smacks of a political manoeuvre by Russia in its effort to join the World Trade Organisation. What do you think?

Source: CNN

Featured Tags microsoft, office, windows_xp, world_trade_organisation


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No, neither of the merger names really work, but despite this Microsoft and Yahoo are again looking at a merger. According to the New York Post Microsoft had made an offer for Yahoo a few months ago which had been rejected but it looks as if Microsoft have made yet another more vigorous offer this week. Yahoo’s share price reacted appropriately to the rumors, ending Friday at around $31 an increase of 10% for the day. Yahoo’s price tag was a mere $50 billion at the end of trading.

Ever since Google purchased DoubleClick Microsoft has been under pressure to increase it’s own web advertising presence. Purchasing Yahoo would achieve that goal, although it would not make much difference to Google’s search domination. We’re certain that it would take more than a merger of the competition to worry the guys at the plex.

A lot of the media reports stated that the merger would not happen due to the diversity in the culture of the staff. We’ve never noticed that being a problem before with any mergers we’ve been a part of. There’s always a bigger partner whose culture slowly infiltrates the smaller.

With this merger it’s just a question of how much Microsoft want this, will they stump up the cash? And if Bill opens up his wallet Yahoo may not get to play much part in the joint role.

Would a MS-Yahoo merger be a good thing, could it spell the end of Google’s domination? Let us know your thoughts.

Featured Tags merger, microsoft, yahoo


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It’s been an interesting 48 hours for the guys at Digg. Having taken a decision to remove a post displaying the hexadecimal code which breaks the protection on HD-DVDs, the site was inundated with posts re-displaying the keys. At one stage the whole front page of the site contained posts with the keys either in the title or description. Digg temporarily closed the site down and then released this statement via their blog.

After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

They unblocked all posts regarding the HD DVD keys and within a few hours the site appeared to be back to normal with only a few posts about the keys showing on the home page.

What a fiasco, Digg not knowing what to do and Digg users screaming ‘free speech’. The Digg Terms of Use clearly state

Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all.

so the guys were quite within their rights to remove the posts if they so desired.

But what about free speech or more correctly ‘Freedom of Speech’. The term is generally used when a government censors a citizen or citizens from expressing their views no matter what the views are. To apply it to a website removing user content seems extreme in my opinion. Digg own, manage and run the site, they should be ‘free’ to display whatever they want on their site. They should listen to what their visitors want on the site, but it’s still their call.

Probably the most ironic thing all about the whole fiasco is that the keys are easily available on the net and have been for a while. Perhaps it was all just a big scam by Digg ….

Featured Tags digg, freedom_of_speech, hd_dvd, hexadecimal_code


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For the moment Google is the biggest player when thinking of search engines. But although Google has a good head-start there are lots of search engines out there trying to make it. And I think that these new search engines, that are forced to innovate in order to stand any chance, are the future.

So what can be added to a search engine that Google hasn’t added already? Well some tried more relevant ads, or advanced search features, category searching and even tabbed searching but let’s be honest, how many of them are really successful? There is even a top 100 alternative search engine chart.

But when it comes to it, all that matters is how effective is your engine and how useful are the functions you provide to your users. Practically Twerq.com is not even a search engine by itself, it’s more of an easy way to search the web using existing services like Google and Yahoo! search. And this is where TWERQ shows its best, it has some functions I’ve found quite interesting and useful at the same time, as you can see in this video:

The simple syntax it uses enables you to create relevant searches in no time at all. But the true power of TWERQ comes out when you register and create custom search lists. In this way you can search images, blogs, news, etc in the same time with only one search. It’s really helpful to configure this kind of search domains for information you need daily, it saves lots of time.

So is this the search engine of the future ? Certainly not, but I’m sure that functions like the search syntax and tabbed searching will be part of future search engines.

Featured Tags future, google, search-engines


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