Teknovis

The Register is running an interesting competition to test people’s ability to distinguish camouflaged mobile phone base stations from normally occurring objects. There are 20 photos in total, and most of them are quite tricky! My answers are:

1. Cellular mast
2. Cellular mast
3. Dead tree
4. Flagless flagpoles
5. Tree
6. Flagless flagpole
7. Unrelated microwave relay
8. Lonely tree
9. Suspicious black thing
10. Fire alarm bell
11. Cellular mast
12. Cellular mast
13. Ideal fixer-upper opportunity
14. Cellular mast
15. Cellular mast
16. Unexplained post
17. Cellular mast
18. Dead spot
19. Cellular mast
20. Drainage pipes

If you feel like testing yourself, then proceed to Would you know a base station if you saw one?.

Tags: The Register

The Register describes some security vulnerabilities in two of Barack Obama’s websites in Congratulations, Barack – Now fix your websites. The most significant security issue that the article highlights is the fact that the administration pages load the Google Analytics JavaScrip file urchin.js. from the Google website. In theory, this means that Google can use this JavaScript file to do almost anything that they want with Barack’s websites. Not a good situation :(

Apparently, many readers did not share the author’s view on this security issue. So the author wrote a follow-up article that provides more details, and opinions of experts from OWASP, in Google Analytics – Yes, it is a security risk.

Independently, it seems that Barack is currently in negotiations in order to continue using his PDA! Apparently, communications devices are banned in the White House, and there are accountability and traceability issues associated with their use! That is an inconvenience! More details about this in Obama tries to stay connected.

Finally, I have heard that a considerable number of websites have appeared that are designed to help the Obama family choose what type of puppy they will get :) Gosh, it must be nice to have enough time to be able to create websites like this!

Tags: Barack Obama, Google, JavaScript, OWASP, PDA, The Register, US Election 2008

The Register has two articles describing how a 19 year old college student in Florida discussed his proposed suicide online, and how he then broadcast his suicide live online to an audience of over 1500 people! The articles are Teen discussed suicide plan online 12 hours before webcam death and US teen tops himself live online.

Naturally this story is very sad, but I think that somebody was bound to commit suicide online some time based on the popularity of the Internet.

I think that if somebody is suicidal then he/she is likely to commit suicide, and it is wrong to blame the Internet for this. Nevertheless, I now expect the usual backlash of people wanting to ban the Internet, YouTube, or whatever website or technology is currently deemed to be the cause of all evil in the world!

Tags: The Register, YouTube