News: Remote PC Users, Beware

By | November 24, 2011
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 For those of you using software to connect to your computer remotely, here’s a chilling, cautionary tale from the New York Times of a guy who, for almost two years, used an arsenal of computers in his bedroom on the 14th floor apartment he shared with his mother to break into others, steal their credit card information and shop. GoToMyPC is mentioned in the story, which was one of the programmes the guy used to access and hijack other PCs, raising some serious warning flags about the downsides of these kind of programs, which allow you to access your PC remotely.
 
 
The bottom line: Be very careful when you use a PC in a public place, including your own. This guy mainly used software he had installed on public computers to capture the information needed to get access, but shoulder surfing — folk walking behind you, looking to see what you type — is another way. Certainly, don’t leave your computer unattended and still attached to the Internet if you don’t intend to use things like GoToMyPC. (And if you do, consider the information on your PC to be vulnerable.

Software: Psst, Want Another RSS Feed?

By | November 24, 2011
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 Here’s another way to get your daily dose of blogs, news and RSS feeds (blogs that dripfeed their way through to your desktop without you having to do anything). NewsMonster is “a news, weblog, and RSS aggregator that runs directly in your web browser.”
 
 
“NewsMonster offers a superior web experience and outstanding integration with existing websites and weblogs that support RSS. Even sites that don’t support RSS can work with NewsMonster.”  NewsMonster also incorporates an advanced reputation system to prevent spam and discover and inform you of important news. I have to say that I haven’t checked it out yet.

News: Checking the Pulse of Blogging With a Mallet

By | November 24, 2011
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 From the We’re In Trouble, The Dataminers Are Showing an Interest Dept, a company called Intelliseek (description: “a business intelligence company that leverages a breakthrough technology platform to help marketers, researchers and other business professionals transform unstructured data into insights!”) have pointed their datamining skills at blogs. The result: BlogPulse.
 
 
BlogPulse uses the datamining thing — machine-learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques — to comb through massive amounts of text and “look for meaning, trends, spikes and interesting facts”. Gosh, I wish them luck. The vast majority of blogs are unvisited, unappreciated, and, if this one you’re reading is anything to go by, unreadable.
 
No, seriously, it’s good to see marketing folk actually looking at blogs, which at their best are a repository of repartee and modern thought. But I suspect it’s somewhat typical that, instead of actually reading them and getting a sense of the intellectual flow behind (some of) them, they just throw a massive datamining bot at the whole kaboodle and hope to dig up some interesting “buzz”. Or am I being hopelessly cynical? Intelliseek, let’s hear your version.

News: Don’t Smile At Me, SMS My Teddy

By | November 24, 2011
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 From the That’s Interesting, I Think, But Why Exactly Do We Need It Dept comes news that the boffins at British Telecom — BT Exact, to be exact — are working on interactive toys that are linked to mobile phones so that SMS communication can be displayed through the toys’ actions. “This enables the texting experience to become more personable and fun”, reports The Register, who could well be making this up.
So it would work like this: Send a message to the toy — a smiley šŸ™‚ or whatever — and the toy would convey the emotion. For example, if a happy symbol was sent to a toy dog it would come to life and start barking. Alternatively a love message could be sent to a teddy bear, which would trigger its heart to glow and become warm to the touch. Lovely. The researchers, apparently, reckon this would “create a more natural and tangible mode of communicating for adults and children, which will encourage more imaginative text messaging”. Er, OK. Your medication’s ready, Sir.