Forbes has a free service that lets you send an e-mail to yourself and have it arrive in 1, 3, 5, 10 or 20 years. FutureMe has a similiar service, but does it better — via Boing Boing
Big guns in the software industry are massing behind OpenDocument as government customers show more interest in open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s desktop software. IBM and Sun recently convened a meeting in New York to discuss how to boost adoption of the standardised document format for office applications. The ODF Summit brought together representatives from a handful of industry groups and from at least 13 technology companies, including Oracle, Google and Novell
Sony BMG has been hit with a class-action lawsuit by consumers claiming their computers have been harmed by anti-piracy software on music CDs
The Earth just got one step closer to true global broadband through satellite based communications. With the launch of the Zenit-3SL rocket the Inmarsat-4 F2 satellite brings 3G high speed mobile technology to North America. Their onboard technology is designed to allow people to set up virtual offices anywhere around the world via high-speed broadband connections and new 3G phone technology
The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Somalia. The Seabourn Spirit had a Long Range Acoustic Device installed as a part of its defence systems
CBS and NBC have announced deals to offer replays of prime-time programmes for 99 cents per episode, shifting television toward a sales model that gained popularity with downloaded music. But the shows will only be available over Comcast on Demand, not for download
Grokster has agreed to shut down its service under a settlement with the RIAA
Sony is likely to abandon its practice of region coding games for its PlayStation 3 console. Sony’s current crop of PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles contains technology that blocks the use of illegal copied games. It also prevents the use of game and DVD discs that have been region coded for other markets. However, Sony Computer Entertainment Australia managing director, Michael Ephraim, said the company was unlikely to continue the policy as international television standards emerge
The nation’s third-largest ISP has stopped accepting ADSL customers in regional areas in protest over claims of unrealistic pricing by Telstra
A Trojan horse discovered on Tuesday includes a fully working — but pirate — copy of an anti-virus application called ExoVirusStop by exoSyphen Studios. Mobile phone malware is often disguised as a security application in order to dupe the user into installing it. However, the latest version of Doomboot, which attacks the Symbian platform, is the first to contain a fully working copy of an anti-virus application
Physicists at the Australian National University have successfully used bright lasers to prevent transmitted data from being hacked. Their breakthrough was based on work done by Einstein and his colleagues in 1935 who uncovered a phenomenon known as entanglement, a theory which described the way particles of energy interacted predictably with each other
Five ISPs have been recruited by the government to hunt down virus-infected computers used to send spam or launch DDoS attacks from Australia
There is a draft proposal for law in Westchester County in New York state that would outlaw unsecured wi-fi connections. Public internet access would require a network gateway server with a firewall and also require home/business office users to install firewalls to protect personal info, even if their connection is encrypted. Violations would carry fines of $250-$500
Carnegie Mellon University is fighting back against a requirement that taps on campus internet access must be quickly obtainable. The technology that would allow the FBI to monitor internet access, after a court order, at the flip of a switch
would cost at least $450 per student
Federal prosecutors have indicted a 20-year-old California man for installing adware on 400,000 Windows machines he compromised with a variant of RxBot. Jeanson Ancheta allegedly pulled in $60,000 in affiliate fees from porn pop-up company Gammacash, and 180solutions subsidiary ZangoCash. The feds hope to seize his BMW.
Sony has issued a patch to purportedly kill the rootkit, in which they lie about the danger it posed. But it seems that the patch does not remove the rootkit, it just gets rid of the $sys$ cloaking. A lot of the chatter about the Sony rootkit has been about other malware authors using files/processes/reg keys starting $sys$, which would then be invisible on machines with the Sony rootkit installed. It might be worth checking to see if you own any of the corrupted CDs — via Boing Boing
As Google put thousands of public domain books online Thursday, Amazon.com responded by announcing plans to allow people to read books on the Web. Meanwhile, Random House, the world’s largest publisher of trade books, said it had come up with a business model for allowing people to pay to view its books on the Internet
Mark Russinovich was doing a routine test this week of computer security software he’d co-written, when he made a surprising discovery: Something new was hiding itself deep inside his PC’s guts. A SonyBMG CD had used a sophisticated cloaking technique that involves a rootkit
— something not dangerous in itself, but a tool often used by virus writers to hide all traces of their work on a computer
Anyone who’s been on a Yahoo mailing list with an absentee list owner knows that they tend to be a spam magnet. I’ve ditched several that became spam lists because Yahoo refuses to appoint new list owners, block the spam, remove the spam or even cancel the spammers Yahoo accounts.
For a company that seems to welcome spammers with open arms, it was a bit of a surprise a couple of days ago to find my Yahoo account had been deactivated.
If I didn’t have a couple Yahoo Groups set up I would have killed the account and created a new one, but having seen Yahoo’s laxness in hosting Groups, getting my account reactivated seemed the best option. Once that was sorted I could create a backup Yahoo account (you have to be a Yahoo account holder to own a Group) on my Yahoo Groups in case they screwed up again.
Trying to contact Yahoo about anything is almost impossible. You have to just through the hoops of their useless help
section before you can find a contact form, and even then it’s only after answering that no, this useless response didn’t help.
Firing off a request for help results in an automated reply full of the same garbage that I’d just told the service wasn’t helpful. Right at the bottom was a section telling me to reply to the e-mail if I needed more help.
Forget about prompt action. These guys aren’t getting back to you for at least two days. If you’re lucky. And don’t expect help then either.
Despite the names of the supposed Customer Care Specialist
— Monique and Pablo — the e-mails were routed through an Indian outsource centre in Haryana and, judging from the canned responses, I have serious doubts if they even came in contact with a human at all.
There were several repeated e-mail asking for my details, before I was informed that: You have been deactivated due to abuse
. What the fuck? A request for details was promptly sent off. I did point out that if my Yahoo address had been spoofed in spam that it’s pretty bloody easy to check whether the e-mail had actually come from me or a mail server in Kazakhstan. This time it resulted in a blank response.
Oddly enough, my account was magically working again this morning.
I still have no idea why my account was deactivated or what the supposed abuse was, but am far from impressed at lack of help offered by Yahoo. This is a company that needs to get a serious clue about customer service, how to recognise false-positives and how to handle genuine abuse of the system.
Taking a leaf from Lucie’s book, this is the pre-emptive anti-moronic comment note:
- I do not work for Yahoo
- I cannot turn your deactivated account back on
- I have no idea why mine was turned off, nor why it was turned back on
- The only way to get it turned back on is to contact Yahoo through their silly anti-help pages; most of which are inaccessible if you don’t have a working Yahoo account
- If you leave stupid comments that indicate you haven’t bloody well read this article before you dribbled on your keyboard, the resident webmonkeys will point, laugh and possibly throw shit at you
The Hippo Water Roller is a simple tool for transporting water from water-holes to homes, an alternative to the traditional barrels-on-heads. The Hippo Water Roller is like a barrel with a handle that you push ahead of you like a steamroller’s drum — via Boing Boing
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