The Blurring of Blogging: A Reply

By | November 24, 2011
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 Further to my posting about AkibaLive, and my comments that it was a marketing tool masquerading as a blog, here’s the owner’s reply (I won’t post his earlier message, since as he says, it was “fired it off in a state of unexpected agitation”):
Your blog about AkibaLive has an evident tone that we are somehow trying to mislead, or conceal, our identity.  That is far from true, and really does reflect a lack of diligence.  “AkibaLive is a Dynamism.com blog” is right there on the home page.  At every point that we talk about a Dynamism product, for instance, the headphone review, we further state that AkibaLive is a Dynamism blog.  If you poked around a bit, these things would be evident. (Douglas Krone)
 
Now, one very well may dislike the idea of blogs being used for marketing and customer relations.  That a strong position with a strong argument to be made.  There are plenty of good and reasonable ideas that support that view, but implying we are misleading people is not one of them.  Do we really, “conceal their identities to adopt the persona of blogs to peddle their wares?”  Is that a responsible statement?  Personally, I think a clarification is in order.  Of course, it’s your blog.
And here’s something from one of the editors, Matt:
I recently read your thoughts on the creation of Akibalive.com.  As one of the editors of Akibalive I have to say that, while you are of course entitled to your own opinion, I believe you have overlooked what we are trying to accomplish/portray ourselves as.  The Akibalive.com site explicitly states that it is a Dynamism.com blog.  Also, the products currently being blogged, for the most part, are not products being sold by Dynamism, rather they are products we feel the Dynamism customer base would be interested in.  If we post information about an upcoming computer release, someone reading that information gets the facts (release date, specs, etc.). Whether or not there is a person or a company behind the site, the way factual/informative news is presented to an interested reader should not matter.  When and if we decide that we want to use Akibalive.com as more of a direct marketing tool for Dynamism?s products, we will make sure there is no confusion that Akibalive and Dynamism are one in the same.  For example if you take a look at the Noise Reduction Headset Review (http://www.akibalive.com/archives/000198.html), you will see: Sony MDR-NC20 ($149) and MDR-NC11 ($149) are available from Dynamism (www.dynamism.com). (Dynamism is the parent company of AkibaLive.com.)

Clearly there is no ?marketing gimmick? or concealed identity and by no means do we want there to be.

 

News: The End To Our Compression Woes?

By | November 24, 2011
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 A Singapore company has just launched what they say is a technology that will change the way which we compress, store and distribute digital content. MatrixView says that, compared to existing compression solutions such as JPEG and MPEG that are based on complex and predictive techniques to eliminate redundant data (JPEG is a widely used format for storing pictures, MPEG for video), its Adaptive Binary Optimisation (ABO) does not eliminate data.  “On the contrary, it achieves significantly higher compression ratios by value-adding to data in such a way as to permit superior speed and security without data degradation.” 
 
 
The first product based on the new technology, EchoView, developed by MatrixView, enables ultrasound images to be compressed beyond 30 times compression ratios without any loss of data, meaning doctors can store, retrieve and transmit “diagnostic quality” images to anywhere in the world.
 

Update: The EBay Scam

By | November 24, 2011
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 Sydney Low from anti-spam service AlienCamel warns of a new take on the email scam which tries to get you to hand over all your personal details. This one, which has been reported in a couple of places elsewhere, is worth repeating here to show how realistic these things are.
Thought you might want to alert your readers to a very dangerous scam that we’ve just observed in our Aliencamel.com service. It’s a very cleverly constructed email that purports to be from ebay - getting users to reconfirm their details.

The email contains a graphic which is designed to look like “text” with a hyperlink – but is actually a mime part that has a gif. Clicking on the graphic causes you to jump to a web page purportedly from ebay.

It disguises the fake web page using hex encoding of parts of the URL so that when the user opens the web page with a web browser, it apppears to be from scgi.ebay.com, but they don’t observe that the real site is at 211.217.224.10 on port 4901. If you click on the email, it  sends you to: <scgi.ebay.comindexupdateyourinformationsecure@211.217.224.102:4901/check1/index.htm>

What’s unbelievable is that it the scammers attempt to get:

– Your ebay userid and password
– Your name
– Your date of birth
– Your US Social Security number
– Your Credit card number
– Your Expiration date
– Your credit card’s verification code
– Your ATM PIN number

This is clearly a very well orchestrated attempt to fraudulently obtain banking information as well as ebay account info. You should alert people to it ASAP.

Thanks, Syd. Definitely these scams are getting better. My advice: never trust any email that asks you to do anything, unless it’s to call your mother more often.

News: Microsoft Realises Patches Don’t Work Shock

By | November 24, 2011
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 From the About Time Dept comes news that Microsoft realises the whole ‘issue a patch to cover a hole, knowing only a few people actually download it’ approach may be, er, flawed. CNET reports that Microsoft plans next week to outline a new security effort focused on what the company calls “securing the perimeter”. Details are thin, but appear to involve a deeper relationship with firewall providers.
 
Watch this space. My tupennies’ worth: The Windows Update process, where your computer tells you what’s new and what needs downloading, is actually not bad. But the wordings of the messages are too nerdy, and there’s no easy way to compare what you have installed on your computer to the most salient threats. Tell the user what the problem is and what needs fixing. Give the patches names or numbers we can understand. Oh, and write better software.

News: Wanna Get Rich? Sell Porn

By | November 24, 2011
17 Comments

 
 
 

Online porn is big. Really big.   According to figures collected by CyberAtlas:
       

  • Growth rate of 1,800% in five years: 14 million pornography-related     webpages in 1998 to roughly 260 million in 2003. An additional 28 million     pages during the month of July alone.

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  • Nearly all (90 percent) of kids aged 8-16 have viewed porn online, mostly     while doing homework.

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  • Internet pornography accounts for $2.5 billion of the $57 billion     worldwide market.

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  • There are 4.2 million porn Web sites ? 12 percent of the total amount of     sites ? allowing access to 72 million worldwide visitors annually.

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  • One-quarter of total daily search engine requests, or 68 million, are for     pornographic material.

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  • Daily pornographic e-mails: 2.5 billion.

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  • Average daily porn e-mails per user: 4.5.

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  • Monthly peer-to-peer porn downloads 1.5 billion.

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  • Men accessing porn at work 20%.

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  • Women accessing porn at work 13%.

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  • Adults admitting to Internet sex addiction 10%.
There is another side to this. A lot technological innovation on the web   has been spearheaded by porn sites. Not always good innovation — pop up   windows, for example — but there has been good stuff: online credit card usage,   for example. My worry is less that there’s a lot of porn around, but that it   uses more intrusive techniques to propagate. As one reader recently pointed out,   if you’re an upright, traditional citizen, opening your email these days can be   an unnerving and unpleasant experience. Porn online must be fenced off, as it is   in the high street, so that it doesn’t offend and scare away ordinary folk from   the Internet.