Tue 12 Sep 2006
RegTLD.com is now up and running. This is a new hosting and domain registrar which I have been using personally but is now available to the public. Current specials are .com domains for US$7.85 or US$1.99 with a non-domain product. The prices are excellent and the service is provided by Godaddy (World’s No 1 domain provider).
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Sat 19 Aug 2006
A couple of posta ago, I pointed to an online search site where anyone can look at random AOL user’s searches. This data will be quite useful to researches, private investiators, the police and just about anyone who could gain from intimate knowledge on peoples private lives. I can see huge issues with the easy availability of this data, including what I consider is probably the scariest and that is I think people are going to die because of it. Seriously.
Just a minute ago I played witht the random search tool wondering just how hard it would be to identify a user. Turns out it is way too easy. I don’t wont to put any details here (I think this guy is going to have enough problems as it is) but the particular record I looked at was an American minor (under 18), who asks the AOL search engine some very personal questions. He also searches for his name and his school. There is no doubt that a complete ID can quickly be made and due to the private nature of his searches I think that the next time he looks online for his name the poor young bloke will have a devastating realisation that his private life is now out there for all (including his friends, enemies, school mates, etc) to see.
There are around 600,000 possible stories like this in the AOL data and I think that if this young man or 1000’s like him are in anyway depressed, then this may have them thinking of suicide. AOL have apologised for releasing this data, but I think that they should in some way be held accountable for the likely devastation they are going to cause and I seriously believe young lives are at risk.
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Sat 19 Aug 2006
Recently AOL decided it would be a good idea to release search data from their customers for research purposes. Natualrally this is a stupid idea, as it is quite easy to decifer enough details from many of these “anonymous” records to identify people. This has already been done, but if you want to have a look through the data and even search it then http://www.dontdelete.com makes that easy for you. There is even a random search button which as they say can give you hours of entertainment.
Be careful what you look at though. The list of URL’s from the 4th person I looked/ laughed at was decidedly dodgy.
One interesting little snippet is that the number one search term on AOL search is “google”- now that’s funny.
have fun
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Sat 19 Aug 2006
OneAndOneIs2 - Why doesn’t Linux need defragmenting?
Why don’t hard drives on linux/ bsd systems require defragmenting? Click the link for a really good explanation.
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Tue 8 Aug 2006
SCO stocks are up a little today after a deluge of press releases of no content to gullible people. I have added a stock ticker and SCO news module over on the sidebar. I will take it down if it causes any issues, but watching the demise of this company is interesting to many people.
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Thu 3 Aug 2006
Salt Lake Tribune - Market slide: SCO Group’s stock falls to $2.28 per share
SCO’s stock has finally fallen behind their 2003 level (before they started the linux license scam) and the world is a better place.
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Wed 26 Jul 2006
William Bartholomew - GTD with Vim
This is a software tool to help implement David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” in vim (Basically the only editor I use). I am currently using a text file with vim’s marker based folding, but am experimenting with the above and also the vim outliner.
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Sun 9 Jul 2006
I spent the afternoon looking through some quite good php and javascript code. I am trying to help ActiveCollab become an excellent opensource project management app. I installed it yesterday and noticed a few minor typos, so thought I would help them out with some corrections. The really good news is that I was able to downgrade my basecamp subscription from way too much to free :)
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Sat 8 Jul 2006
activeCollab is here to provide free alternative to Basecamp, great service developed by 37signals. I just installed this amazing software. It has a little way to go, but is working fine for me as a solution to my project management needs. I will be saving around $60/ month and it’s opensource :)
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Sun 30 Apr 2006
My main compuer is suffering from a quickly accelerating oncoming death. The main OS drive is locking up and making head crash sounds. I just picked up a 250GB seagate IDE for au$160 and have installed freebsd 6.1RC1 on it. I have been using FreeBSD 4 stable (currently 4.11) for my desktop since it was 3.4 so I am looking forward to trying the new OS.
The rest of the hardware is vintage (1ghz AMD with a Matrox 450 dual head and a S3Virge for combined tripple head setup) so nothing that needs acpi yet. Should be fun.
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