Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

Credit card details found on hotel key

This from Boing Boing:

A geeky biz traveller decided to find out what info in on the mag-stripe on a hotel key (an item that is often left behind on checkout) — turns out that some hotel keys have credit card numbers, names and addresses.

What’s scary is how easy it is for even a novice to steal this information. He says he bought a $39 card reader at a local retail store and plugged it into his laptop’s USB port. Now when he scans a card, the device inputs the data directly into an open Excel or Word document.
I asked Wallace how often he finds his personal data on the cards. “Certain chains have that information [on their cards]. I’ve noticed it on three different chains,” he says. While he declined to name specific hotels, he says the most recent incident occurred in June at a resort. In that hotel the magnetic strip yielded his credit card information, street address and full name.

Link

Free at last

Another highly regarded internet browser, Opera is now free and without ads. Downloads quickly and installs cleanly.

The most full-featured Internet power tool on the market, Opera includes pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, integrated searches, and advanced functions like Opera’s groundbreaking E-mail program, RSS Newsfeeds and IRC chat. And because we know that our users have different needs, you can customize the look and content of your Opera browser with a few clicks of the mouse.

Imported my Firefox bookmarks easily enough.

Random is as random does

From Wired News:

My playlist has a total of 17 songs by the band, so it seemed highly unlikely that two of them would be bunched so close together in a random order. But I was wrong about that.

The problem, it turns out, isn’t that the programs aren’t randomizing my playlists. They are. According to Jeff Lait, a mathematician and author of randomm3u, it’s what’s happening between my ears, specifically, in my expectations of what it means for something to be random.

To illustrate his point, Lait referred to a phenomenon statisticians call the birthday paradox. Roughly stated, it holds that if there are 23 randomly selected people in a room, there is a better than 50-50 chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday. The point: Mathematical randomness often contradicts our intuitive expectations of randomness.

What we want, Lait says, isn’t a list that’s been randomized, but one that’s been stratified, or separated into categories that are weighted by a listener’s preferences. A stratified playlist might select songs randomly but would be smart enough to throw out choices that, say, would repeat a band within 10 songs.

The article goes on to describe iTunes’ new Smart Shuffle that will randomize music with selected parameters.

Of course, until iTunes can read your mind and determine what you really want to hear next, it’ll never totally satisfy. But they’re getting scarily closer.

Disgusted!

Blogging may be slowed because I have a $2300 laptop with two broken $5 cover hinges. Hard to keep the lid open and the monitor titled at a usable angle. And, of course, any movement of the laptop — like to my lap — makes whatever Rube Goldberg arrangement I’ve configured inoperable.

NewMexiKen admits this 32-month old computer has been dragged around the country and been a workhorse, but I’m still irritated that they used what appear to be plastic hinges. Previous desktops lasted 4½ years each. And, in fact, the latter HP is still going stong after 7½ years.

For the record, the computing part of this Toshiba Satellite seems to work great. External hardware is the problem — the hinges, a speaker that shorts out, a broken key, an original power pack that died, a battery nearly dead, stuff like that. Am I expecting too much after this amount of time?

Cell phone music players — too soon to buy

After a week or so of testing the ROKR, along with a couple of competing music phones, my assistant Katie Boehret and I share Apple’s indifference. As a music player, the Motorola ROKR is OK, as are the two other music phones we tested. But none of them approaches either the style or the functionality of the iPod, and none lives up to the full potential of what a combined cellphone and music player could be.

— The Mossberg Solution

Apple Unveils Cellphone Music Player

Also on Wednesday, Apple announced a new iPod, the iPod Nano: “1,000 songs in your pocket and impossibly small,” Jobs said. It’s “thinner than a No. 2 pencil,” he said to oohs and aahs from the audience. “The iPod Nano is 80 percent smaller than the original iPod.”

iPod Nano comes in two models–the 4GB iPod nano holds up to 1,000 songs and the 2GB iPod Nano holds up to 500 songs. They cost about $249 and $199, respectively.

“iPod Nano is the biggest revolution since the original iPod,” Jobs added. “iPod nano is a full-featured iPod in an impossibly small size, and it’s going to change the rules for the entire portable music market.”

The iPod Nano features the same 30-pin dock connector as the iPod and iPod Mini, allowing it to work with a wide range of more than 1,000 accessories developed for iPod, including home stereo speakers and iPod car adapters.

— Excerpted from an article in The New York Times

Update September 8: Walter Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal just loves the new iPod Nano.

The whole world can talk for free

“Skype is a little program for making free calls over the internet to anyone else who also has Skype. It’s free and easy to download and use, and works with most computers.”

Last week, The New York Times had an article on internet telephony including this paragraph:

Skype (www.skype.com), a popular VoIP network based in Luxembourg, has had 51 million users register worldwide since its inception, with five million in the United States and an average of three million users logged on at any one time. To make free calls to other PC’s, users simply download the Skype software from the Web site; the PC receiving the Skype call also has to be connected to the Skype network. For PC-to-phone calling, the company has added SkypeOut and SkypeIn. With SkypeOut, introduced last year and now having more than two million users, PC’s with the Skype software are able to call conventional phones. Minutes are purchased in advance, and the price depends on the destination. Calls within the continental United States, for example, are 2.1 cents a minute; calls to New Delhi are 15.4 cents; São Paulo, Brazil, 2.5 cents; and Beijing, 2.1 cents.

So, you can see, Skype is free only between Skype users. Still …

[Update: NewMexiKen tested Skype and found the quality and ease of use to be superb.]

Making Your Own Coffee-Table Book

The Mossberg Solution reviews photo-book applications. The essential findings (but check out the whole column):

Using about 40 of the same digital photographs each time, we created photo books using MyPublisher BookMaker, Apple’s iPhoto, Shutterfly and Kodak EasyShare Gallery. Each book had the same photo on the cover, and we chose classic black leather for each cover, except for the Apple book, where we used black linen because leather isn’t offered.

Each company’s book costs about the same — $30 for a hardcover with up to 10 double-sided pages, and $40 with a leather cover. Additional pages cost a dollar in iPhoto and Shutterfly, $1.49 for MyPublisher BookMaker and $1.99 with Kodak Gallery.

Our tests produced a split verdict. We preferred both the creation process and the finished books from MyPublisher and Apple over the newer, Web-based entries from Shutterfly and Kodak. While we found Apple’s software for designing the books to be the best, we preferred the finished product received from MyPublisher to the book we got from Apple, even though they were both produced on MyPublisher’s equipment.

In smarts, she’s a perfect 10

Sitting down for a personal meeting with Bill Gates this week, 10-year-old Arfa Karim Randhawa asked the Microsoft founder why the company doesn’t hire people her age.

Under the circumstances, the question wasn’t so unreasonable.

Arfa, a promising software programmer from Faisalabad, Pakistan, is believed to be the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in the world.

The Seattle Times

Gee, I hope The Sweeties aren’t being slackers.

Show me

If you’re on the job, and you’re reading this story, you should probably get back to work. The average worker wastes more than two hours a day, and that’s not including lunch, according to a new survey by America Online and Salary.com. That means companies spend as much as $759 billion on salaries annually for which they receive no apparent benefit, the research found. The No. 1 state for wasting time was Missouri, where workers who responded to the survey reported slacking off 3 hours and 12 minutes a day. The survey didn’t specifically look at why Missouri is the worst in the nation, but if Missouri workers think the perception is unfair, “We would encourage people to visit the home page and weigh in further on that,” said Richard Cellini, Salary.com’s head of research.

Associated Press via Wired News

Podcasting

The Mossberg Solution talks about podcasts and the newest iTunes feature.

But text blogs are yesterday’s news. The hottest new trend in personal online content creation is something called a podcast, essentially a short personal radio show or audio blog. They can be downloaded and played back on a computer or a portable music player like Apple’s iPod, whence the genre draws its name.

Podcasts range from slick productions offered by big media companies and amateur broadcasters; to clever and entertaining offerings from smart, undiscovered talent; to crude diatribes and snooze-inducing lectures by people the mainstream media proved wise not to hire. Some are just talk, some include music. Some sound like they were recorded on a 1971-vintage RadioShack cassette recorder, others — even from amateurs — are studio-quality.

These audio blogs, once the province mainly of techies, took a big step toward the mainstream last week when Apple began offering thousands of them, free, through its market-leading iTunes music store and iTunes music software. Anyone can submit a podcast for distribution through iTunes, and any iTunes user can download it. The company doesn’t charge a penny for listing or downloading podcasts.

Fly the Wi-Fi Friendly Skies

United Airlines, the world’s second-largest carrier, received regulatory approval Monday to install wireless internet access to its fleet in a partnership with Verizon Communications.

The Federal Aviation Administration will let United’s parent, Illinois company UAL, install the cabin equipment necessary to provide wireless internet connection to passengers and crew members on U.S. domestic flights.

AP via Wired News

Crew members? If they need connectivity, why don’t they have it now and if they don’t need it, what will they be using it for?

The photophone

Wow, did you know this?

On June 3, 1880, Alexander Graham Bell transmitted the first wireless telephone message on his newly-invented “photophone.” Bell believed the photophone was his most important invention. The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light. Of the eighteen patents granted in Bell’s name alone, and the twelve he shared with his collaborators, four were for the photophone.

Bell’s photophone worked by projecting voice through an instrument toward a mirror. Vibrations in the voice caused similar vibrations in the mirror. Bell directed sunlight into the mirror, which captured and projected the mirror’s vibrations. The vibrations were transformed back into sound at the receiving end of the projection. The photophone functioned similarly to the telephone, except the photophone used light as a means of projecting the information, while the telephone relied on electricity.

Although the photophone was an extremely important invention, it was many years before the significance of Bell’s work was fully recognized. Bell’s original photophone failed to protect transmissions from outside interferences, such as clouds, that easily disrupted transport. Until the development of modern fiber optics, technology for the secure transport of light inhibited use of Bell’s invention. Bell’s photophone is recognized as the progenitor of the modern fiber optics that today transport over eight percent of the world’s telecommunications.

Library of Congress

Apple Offers $50 Credit for iPod Batteries

As part of a tentative settlement announced this week, Apple agreed to give $50 vouchers and extended service warranties to as many as 2 million customers whose older iPods had batteries that needed to be replaced or didn’t fully charge. …

The settlement applies to consumers nationwide who bought versions of the digital music player through May 2004. Last year, Apple changed its iPod and now advertises battery life of up to 12 hours for its 20-gig model.

The Washington Post