Strangely Perfect

Introduction A few month’s back the Adobe Acrobat Reader landed itself in doo-doo with some Javascript security worries.  Adobe were slow off the mark informing their customers (like me) what to do.  So it was the blogs that provided the answer: Turn off Javascript Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough.  After a week a huge patch was [...]

Following on from the Google Street View roll-out, two issues have popped up – again; People’s privacy on the streets vis-a-vis a commercial organisation like Google People’s privacy on the streets vis-a-vis government organisations like local councils For the first, the self-appointed guardian “Privacy International” have made an official appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office [...]

The acknowledged founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, created the idea and much of the system that allows information to be shared, from the web page, by hyper-links, across the globe.  His was a basically altruistic idea. Brilliantly, it has brought disparate peoples together in hitherto unforeseen ways.  Anyone (like me), can [...]

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ispphorm/ Please fill in the form (no pun intended – well actually, it is!) at the number 10′s office.  Phorm is clearly breaching or “avoiding” compliance with a host of moral and legal charters.  It seeks to monitor all users browsing habits, store them up and then flog them on to provide you with a [...]

The Triumph of Wishful Thinking over Common Sense The recent previews of the Microsoft Vista replacement with it’s unreliable “hands on” dragging experience (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7695933.stm) are another reminder that desires aren’t always satisfied and that designers don’t always design what people actually want for their daily work. PCPro Magazine have duplicated the recently banned Apple iPhone [...]

Following on from my post a few days ago about EuroSoftware, I had an interesting spam today. I used “The Complainerator” to automate some abuse mails to see what happened.    Well… fortunately I used my old email spam sucker-inner trap as the “from” address, because that’s where today’s spam came to. Addressed from myself – to [...]

Following my little hit on Crawling Chaos tune nickers here google-security-to-crawling-chaos-and-morals/, the latest news is that a London woman, Isabella Barwinska, has been fined and costed a total of £16k! Pirated Dream Pinball 3D Draws £16,000 Payment Game sharers face legal crackdown Game sharer hit with £16,000 judgement The original case is reported here, which [...]

I can wholeheartedly agree with the Intel gaffer, Craig Barrett in his speech the other day which is reported here, IDF: Intel chairman’s anti-Bush keynote What more can I say except to repeat his words: He slags off Bush’s short-sightedness He notes that R&D is the way forward, else we have stagnation He bemoans the [...]

Following on from my post http://strangelyperfect.tv/442/why-buy-vista/, I’ve noticed that Hewlett Packard have now put some of their stats into the public domain which refute the Microsoft notion that Vista sales are whizz-bang and superb. This posting, http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/215502/hp-windows-xp-accounts-for-majority-of-vista-sales.html, reports the fact that Microsoft is double-counting sales of Vista and XP because customers are getting new machines [...]

The BBC has taken a lot of care in cracking open a few flaws in the Facebook monolith, see click_online. This is good, although really, they should have waited until Facebook had reacted in some way before telling all the petty coders out there to start wreaking havoc. It’s also a shame they didn’t give [...]

The latest news is that SP3 has been delayed due to a bug in some shopping/WMS software that Microsoft makes called DRM. This isn’t the Digital Rights Management so beloved of the Hollywood film studios and Record Company Executives, but a WMS for shops etc. Here’s an news example on Computer Buyer Magazine. The trouble [...]