No thanks, don’t want your drugs

Enough is enough.

I feel the captcha is coming back in unless theres someone out there with a name and address for me so I can track down whoever it is has been bombarding the blog this morning with spam comments. Think I’ve broken a hundred at this stage since being offered Viagra with my breakfast, auto loans with my lunch, and God only knows what else in between.

Can we jail spammers? Or make them use dialup? Can we?

Thinking About Passwords

Following an earlier post on how secure ones password is, I came across this interesting article. Whatever about fingerprinting, or retina scanning for user-logins, there’s something just damn interesting about biometrics and its advances when it comes to ultimate security. But what if your thoughts could be your password? The concept is based on using brain-wave signatures as “pass-thoughts” to allow access to secure devices.

Possible? Certainly something to think about for the future….

Pirate Software For Prison Term?

Via Reuters…

Seems like the big guns in Europe are out to stomp out piracy, something which is still a problem in this country be it movie, music or software. The punishment? At least four years in prison and a €300,000 fine. So far, the ruling, which should be approved in place of existing laws throughout all member states is only looking at those items available commercially (physical property for sale), and not download via online services or P2P services.

One amazing figure coming out of China is that they reckon that 90% of their DVD/Music/Software market is pirated goods. Anyone got that figure for Ireland or know where to get it?

Accessibility On The Web

Different jobs call for different rules…. If you’ve never come across the W3C Accessibility Guidelines I would suggest a read… Time for an educational lesson today!
In brief…

1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content
2. Don’t rely on color alone
3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly
4. Clarify the usage of natural language
5. Create tables that transform gracefully
6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully
7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes
8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces
9. Design for device-independence
10. Use interim solutions
11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines
12. Provide context and orientation information
13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms
14. Ensure that documents are clear and simple

The above points, explained in detail are available here from Sitepoint. You might also want to take a look at the W3C’s own site, or even Microsoft’s Accessibility Website

Open feedback…. finally!

Via Techcrunch….

Its about bloody time, but prepare to be rapped.. thats all I can say! Mind you, if eBay opened up their feedback via a nice little API then we wouldn’t have any problems now, would we? I say fair play, bring it on, and I hope to God that it works well….

How Good Is Your Password?

Over recent years I’ve gone from 5 letter passwords, to 6 and 8 letters, to a combination of letters and numbers to my current 12 character hybrid of letters and numbers. Yet no matter how big or strong you think your password is, or how you feel nobody could possibly guess the date of birth of your late great grandmother, or the nickname your best friend’s sister had in primary school – its always good to see how fast that password can be broken.

Password recovery speeds looks at timing for Brute Force attempts on your password… definitely interesting reading! Having studied various security attacks and methods of password protection and encryption, if you find it interesting, you’d do well to give it a read.

State Of The Blogosphere

Blogosphere splogosphere… David Sifry is at it again and has announced that the State Of The Blogosphere… is strong! Praise be to God and all that. The statistics are interesting, keeping in mind that they are primarily based on what Technorati is tracking – which is quite a lot (over 35 million blogs at this stage).

The stats in brief…

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Read the whole of the article right here at Sifry’s Alerts

The Internet – Now Available On CD

Tom Raftery points to Webaroo in a post today, a company who are in fact giving away copies of the Internet on CD. Bit late for an April Fool’s at this stage but it seems quite true… and quite interesting all the same! Years we spent in college taking the piss about burning a copy of the Internet onto CD and selling it…

…I guess not any more!

British Hacker On Terrorist Charges?

A hacking story this, missed it one yesterday but it seems like Gary McKinnon, who denies the allegation of doing over a half million euro worth of damage to Nasa and military systems by hacking in 2002 may well be facing a lengthy spell in Guantanamo Bay. If the trial goes ahead, George Bush himself is within length to execute Military Order Number One – detaining McKinnon in the US for an indefinite period.

McKinnon claims that he had been trying to expose bad security systems for some of the nations top computer networks across 14 different states while looking for government held information on UFOs.

But $700,000 worth of damage and a spell in Guantanamo Bay? Hardly…

Give me back my money!

April 7th I attempted to register a discretionary (non-trademarked) .eu domain, was told by a particular US registrar that I was successful only to find out yesterday that the domain had outstanding pre-registration attempts with other registrars and eventually slipped to one of them and not me.

Not happy to have forked out good money for a bunch of domains I would have used (legitimately I might add) I promptly emailed their customer support to explain my case. Low and behold Paypal informs that my credit card has been refunded for each domain I brought a case for… Makes my Wednesday morning that much better!

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