Seinfeld Pitches Microsoft, Fair Use Upheld

Here are some interesting links from today:

  • Seinfeld to be pitchman for Microsoft
    Seinfeld will be a key pitchman in a planned $300 million fall advertising campaign for the software giant, a person familiar with the plans confirmed to The Associated Press on condition on anonymity because the deal has not been formally announced. The Wall Street Journal first reported the plans. Citing people close to the situation, it reported the comedian will be paid $10 million for appearing in ads with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
  • Microsoft enlists Seinfeld in Vista battle
    Microsoft is reportedly paying Seinfeld $10 million for his role which will focus on the slogan “Windows, Not Walls,” and will stress the need to “break down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting.” The advertising campaign follows on from the recent Mojave experiment which attempted to prove that Vista’s biggest problem is perception, rather than actual flaws.
  • Fair Use Must Be Considered In DMCA Notices
    US District Judge Jeremy Fogel has ruled that an ‘allegation that a copyright owner acted in bad faith by issuing a takedown notice without proper consideration of the fair use doctrine thus is sufficient to state a misrepresentation claim,’ which paves the way for a lawsuit against Universal Music over a ridiculous DMCA Takedown notice they filed.
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Dell & Facebook, IPv6, Make Money With Your Computer

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

  • Dell and Facebook prepping ‘significant’ announcement
    Two of the biggest names in tech are teaming up on a cloud computing project that they plan to announce at a special event next week.  Facebook amasses billions of photos, friend connections, and status updates and stores them up in “the cloud,” and Dell is working on being one of the main providers of the infrastructure–servers–that makes the cloud possible.
  • Almost one mobile phone for every South Korean
    Tech-savvy South Korea now has 45 million mobile phones, equivalent to 91 percent of the total population, the Korea Communications Commission said Wednesday. The data means each of the country’s 15.8 million households has almost three mobiles on average, it said.
  • 24 Ways to Make and Save Money With Your Computer
    You probably rely on your computer to accomplish a lot of things (and waste some time), but do you realize that computers and the Internet are some of the most powerful tools you can have in your financial toolbox? There are many ways that your computer can help you make and save money that weren’t available just a few years ago.
  • We’re running out of IPv4 addresses. Time for IPv6. Really.
    Unless something unexpected happens, we’ll be out of IPv4 addresses at some point in the neighborhood of 2012. So when the next Olympics come around, it’s very possible that some of us will have to watch them online over IPv6. (Actually the official website of the 2008 Olympics is already available over IPv6.)
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Lenovo Veriface Technology

Tonight I flipped away from the Olympics during the trampolene competition and caught Lenovo’s new ‘Cast Away’ commercial featuring their new IdeaPad Y Series of notebooks.  This not so original commercial was however quite eye catching.

Lenovo is advertising their Veriface technology which is basically a facial recognition program that uses their built in webcam to automatically recognize the face of an enrolled user and log him/her on to the computer.  Pretty slick.

According to Notebooks.com, Veriface is quite secure and will only enroll, in the flesh, human faces and can’t be fooled by glossy photographs.  Veriface isn’t exactly new technology as IBM was bundling it with webcams years ago.  As cool as it is, I’m not sure it’ll actually sell any laptops but I can guarantee that anyone who puchases a Lenovo with Veriface will definitely use it.

Here’s the commercial.

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Georgia-Russia Cyberwar, iPhone Dropping Calls

Here are some interesting links from today:

  • How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar.
    After making sure that I wasn’t downloading a virus, I installed DoSHTTP and started playing around with it. Along with offering customizable options to advanced users, there was also a nice option for beginners like me. After entering a URL, I could initiate an attack by clicking something that said “Start Flood.” A flood did follow—war at the touch of a button.
  • Dropped calls plague iPhone 3G, and not just in U.S.
    If you’re having problems with dropped calls on your new 3G Apple iPhone, you’re not alone.
    From New York to Stockholm, 3G iPhone owners are complaining loudly about connection failures – sometimes repeatedly – during calls. The problem typically occurs when the device attempts to move from 3G to another network.
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Quick Links for Aug 14th

Here are some interesting links from today:

  • Sharing 2999 Songs, 199 Movies Becomes ‘Safe’ in Germany
    Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.
  • Network Access Control: Deploy Now or Wait?
    Network Access Control (NAC) sounds like something of a panacea—: technology that can not only authenticate who is using your company's network, but also ensure that users' methods of access are virus-free and fully comply with your company's corporate security policies. And NAC has been getting a lot of press lately—proponents tout its ability to keep corporate networks clean and healthy in ways that technologies of the past couldn't.
  • VMware Bug is Worse Than a Glitch To Users Who Depend on It
    When VMware VI3 Update 2 was release, VMware placed incorrect sizes for the ISO images on their website, apparently due to some automation issue. However, a worse problem awaited people on August 12th; A problem that would disable licensing and keep new VMs from being booted. But already running VMs worked just fine.
  • New PCs can wake up when they get phone calls
    Intel Corp. is unveiling new technology that will let computers wake up from their power-saving sleep state when they receive a phone call over the Internet.
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Dell E Series Out, Email Reminders

Here are some interesting links from today:

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Olympics Insider, Password Security

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

  • Behind NBC’s Olympics Website
    Four years ago there was just a few dozen hours of video up on the site. Thousands of machines are needed to encode and serve the video and the site. Interesting conversation, hope you enjoy a little look behind one of the people who worked behind the scenes for months on this site.
  • 6 Reasons Today’s Olympic Swimmers are Breaking so many World Records
    For some reason every swim event in this Olympics is a record smasher. And it isn’t just Michael Phelps who’s seconds ahead of that daunting green world record line. Curious what’s making this year’s athletes so much faster? Here are 6 possible answers.
  • Moving Beyond Passwords For Security
    The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both partie
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Vista's "useless" security, Black Hat, Password Security

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

  • Security pros completely bypass Vista’s now “useless” security
    About all those fancy security measures Microsoft put into Windows Vista… well, they’re now pretty much useless, according to security experts from IBM and VMware presenting a new attack methodology at this week’s Black Hat security conference.
  • Reporters booted from conference for hacking
    With thousands of hackers milling around the Black Hat convention here, and widespread snooping on the public Wi-Fi network, one place was supposed to be off limits: the press room.
  • Moving Beyond Passwords For Security
    The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both partie
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5 Essential WordPress Plugins Every Blog Needs

A couple days ago I wrote about the plethora of plugins needed to create a secure family style blog.  Today I’m going to tell you about the 5 most essential plugins everyone needs to have installed and activated regardless of your blog style or niche.

WordPress.com Stats
Wordpress.com Stats is a pretty powerful “real” time stats package that was built for WordPress.com blogs.  It’s also been ported to a plugin for WordPress self hosted blogs as well.  The Stats info sits in your Dashboard and gives you data for number of visits (by day, week, or month), top posts of the day, top searches of the day and most active posts all time.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is also a traffic stats plugin but is much more powerful than WordPress.com Stats, however, the data only updates once per day (at night) so you can’t view real time statistics which is why you should use both.  Analytics provides the same data as Stats but also includes map location of visitors, visitor information such as browser version, OS version, screen size, ISP info, detailed referrer stats and much more.  Also included in Analytics is report functionality where you can schedule reports to be emailed daily, weekly or monthly.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
FeedSmith is Feedburner’s own plugin designed for WordPress.

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Postalicious
Postalicious is a great, recently updated, plugin for casual bloggers (like me) who want a quick way to keep their blog activity going even when they don’t have the time to create new original content.  Postalicious takes your Delicious, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes feeds and creates a blog post.  It’s very configurable and automatic.  I have Postalicious post my links daily (when there are at least two links).  You can choose what categories to assign to the post, have it auto published or saved as a draft, etc.  Delicious has their own tool , which they still refer to as “experimental”. Don’t waste your time, Postalicious is way more powerful.

Akismet
You have to have a comment spam killer if you have a blog.  Akismet, was built by Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’ creator.  Generally installed automatically when you install your WordPress self-hosted site, Akismet should be a no brainer.

Akismet is a spam-fighting service that is different from others such as Spam Karma 2 or Bad Behavior in that it checks the content of the comment anonymously with an online server, to determine whether it is spam or not.

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Twitter is Down!

Here’s a hilarious video produced by CrunchGear. If you’ve used Twitter for more than 3 days chances are you’ve seen the “Fail Whale”… Twitter’s effective blue screen of death. If Twitter users jump ship to one of it’s competitors, horrid server response will be the reason. (slight subtitle language warning)

Not sure what Twitter is? Here’s the best explanation.

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