Now You Can Have A Good Old Time...Keeper

From Engadget:




Nixie clocks, which use little vacuum tubes to display the numbers, have been around for a while. Geeks build them, hipsters put them in their lofts, and they range from very cool to not so cool. Now Friedhelm Bruegmann, a member of the German Tube Collectors Association, has spent seven years of his life putting together an all-tube digital clock. Instead of a little quartz module, he uses 103 tubes to calculate and display the time. Yes, it looks like a small army of pointy silver-headed robots. No, it's not for sale, but Friedhelm's site is so detailed, you can probably hack one together yourself in a decade or so.




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Yet Another Reason to Hate AOH*LL

So, you want to cancel your account?
Be afraid, be very afraid....

Much More

And a followup

What Puddle?

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Sorry About The Gaps

Thing's have been hectic in my world. It should settle down by mid July.

Critics Say Antiporn Effort Could Affect Wrong Sites

Photographer Ron Hildebrand believes the black-and-white nude portraits displayed in his online gallery are "more sensual than sexual."
Even so, the Nevada-based artist said he thinks people should take responsibility for the content they publish online, so he posts a brief disclaimer on his home page. Among his cautions: "Please do not enter if you are offended by such imagery."
That voluntary warning may not be enough if a bill backed by the Bush administration becomes law. Under the Stop Adults' Facilitation of the Exploitation of Youth Act--or Internet Safety Act--introduced last week in the U.S. Senate, all "commercial" Web site operators who fail to flag each page containing "sexually explicit material" could risk fines, up to 15 years in prison, or both.
While backers say they are mainly targeting child pornography and trying to keep kids away from mature content, legal experts argue that a broad range of less obvious material could be affected as well, including, for example, a news report that details a sordid sex crime, a computer animation that demonstrates condom use, or even an online lingerie catalog.

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And we all know the law would never be used other then intended....Sure!

Is PayPal Your Friend?

A security flaw in the PayPal web site is being actively exploited by fraudsters to steal credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to PayPal users. The issue was reported to Netcraft today via our anti-phishing toolbar.

The scam works quite convincingly, by tricking users into accessing a URL hosted on the genuine PayPal web site. The URL uses SSL to encrypt information transmitted to and from the site, and a valid 256-bit SSL certificate is presented to confirm that the site does indeed belong to PayPal; however, some of the content on the page has been modified by the fraudsters via a cross-site scripting technique (XSS).





More From Netcraft

The Outsourcer's are Outsourcing

CICI OneSource, one of India's largest business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, is to create the jobs at two sites in Northern Ireland.
The first is due to be up and running by the end of next month at a site in Belfast and staff are already being recruited. The hunt for a second location is already underway.
ICICI OneSource's decision to expand in Europe comes as a number of companies want to outsource their call centre operations but don't want that work migrated to India.

The firm's chief exec Ananda Mukerji said: "Our Northern Ireland centres will be our first outsourcing operation based in Europe. We have a strong market presence in the UK and we see significant demand for high-end business processing which our Northern Ireland centres will be ideally placed to fulfil."

With its HQ in Mumbai, ICICI OneSource employees more than 8,000 staff and generated revenues of $74m for the year 2004 - 2005. It provides BPO services for firms in the financial services and telecoms industry, among others. ®
I love it!

From The Register

This is Why I Don't Trust Microsoft.

This screen gallery shows the process that some Windows users will see in the course of updating their computers. [See my blog entry MS anti-piracy tools phone home regarding disclosure and consent when it comes to the types of software that Microsoft pushes to Windows users through its Windows Update technology.] The following screen demonstrate the extent to which users are notified of the "update's" expected behavior (sufficient disclosure was identified as recent a problem in a News.com report by Joris Evers) as well as the extent to which users have an opportunity to consent to particular updates, or deny it. The screen image below shows the four basic modes of Windows Update that end users can select from when accessing the Windows Update configurator from Windows' Control Panel. In the automatic mode, updates are automatically downloaded to end-users' computers and then automatically installed. The process happens transparently and the opportunity to consent to or refuse specific updates only comes up if the end-user must accept an End User License Agreement (EULA) from Microsoft. By not accepting the EULA, you're essentially refusing the update. The question is whether or not the EULA is effective in accurately communicating the intent and behavior of the software, as well as the ramifications of not accepting it. More on EULA's later.

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Time for a Reality Check!

From MSNBC:


One year ago, Hank Gerbus had his hard drive replaced at a Best Buy store in Cincinnati. Six months ago, he received one of the most disturbing phone calls of his life.

"Mr. Gerbus," Gerbus recalls a stranger named Ed telling him. "I just bought your hard drive in Chicago."

Gerbus, a 77-year-old retiree, was alarmed. He knew the old hard drive was loaded with his personal information -- his Social Security number, account numbers and details of his retirement investments. But that's not all. The computer also included data on his wife, Roma, and their children and grandchildren, including some of their Social Security numbers.



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This is Getting Ridiculous!

From IPac Blog:

The worst bill you’ve never heard of

This will be a busy week in the House -- Congress goes into summer recess Friday, but not before considering the Section 115 Reform Act of 2006 (SIRA). Never heard of SIRA? That’s the way Big Copyright and their lackey’s want it, and it's bad news for you.

Simply put, SIRA fundamentally redefines copyright and fair use in the digital world. It would require all incidental copies of music to be licensed separately from the originating copy. Even copies of songs that are cached in your computer's memory or buffered over a network would need yet another license. Once again, Big Copyright is looking for a way to double-dip into your wallet, extracting payment for the same content at multiple levels.

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NASCAR

I'm going to be in Dover Deleware for the next few days for the NASCAR Craftsmen Truck, Busch, and Nextel Cup races. I'll post some pictures when I get back. I'll also have a review of a New Dell E310 Media center PC some time next week..