The marketroids are taking over the world. Every bit of personal data about you is being stored, warehoused and harvested. From innocuous internet searches to store loyalty cards, they probably know more about you -- your hopes, aspirations, fears and financial position -- than you do yourself. And soon you could find yourself the target of a Direct Marketing campaign from space.

A research proposal entitled "Exploiting High-Resolution Imagery, Geospatial Data, and Online Sources to Automatically Identify Direct Marketing Leads" has just won a US$100,000 grant from the US National Science Foundation to...


Well, I guess it could also boost the sales of inflatable cars.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 7:53 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

"As the flood of data across the internet continues to increase, there are those that say sometime soon it is going to collapse under its own weight. But that is what they said last year."

This report from the BBC contains some mind-blowing figures - such as YouTube's daily download traffic is equivalent to 75 billion emails.

While it seems the high-speed optical fibre that forms the internet's backbone is in good shape and has plenty of spare capacity, all is not quite so rosy closer to home. This in particular struck a chord;


That rather smacks of Telecom's Max fiasco of late last year. I reported on it in this blog last October, so where are we now, almost a year on? Same old, same old it seems. With Telecom $2.24 billion richer from the sale of its Yellow Pages division, is any of that moolah going into beefing up our flagging broadband infrastructure? Nope. But half of it is going into the trouser pockets of shareholders. So that's all right then.

In May Telecom Chairman Wayne Boyd said "Any further investment in broadband will be contingent on being able to obtain sufficient regulatory certainty and being able to earn a fair rate of return on that investment."

If you replace "sufficient regulatory certainty" with "a monopoly" and "earn a fair rate of return" with "continue gouging end users forever", you'll get the real gist of what he was saying.

Meanwhile, for Wellingtonians and Christchurchians -- places, incidentally, where Telecom's phone rental and service charges are less than elsewhere (but not, of course, due to competition from TelstraClear; that's just a coincidence) -- broadband's getting better and better;


Whoo hoo! Bring it on! I mean, sorry rest of country.

Pundits have been predicting the collapse of the internet for more than a decade but it's still in robust good health. Shame the same thing can't be said for our local infrastructure.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Yes, it's a penguin! In fact it's actually a 3D model of a penguin and I made it all myself - with only a vast amount of help from one of the free software world's best-kept secrets.

Blender is... look, I don't have the words to describe it. Seriously. I only strayed into the world of 3D modeling a few days ago and it's like lifting the lid on a hidden universe. I've played with plenty of 3D models in games and simulations but I've never actually done any myself - until now - and it's utterly absorbing.

I'm told you can do 3D animations, complete games and even full video editing in Blender. I haven't got that far yet. In fact I'm still coming to terms with the terminology; vertices, edges, faces, meshes and NURBS to name but a few. (The latter, I can confidently relate, stands for Non-Uniform Rotational B-Splines. So there.)

Helping me along the path to enlightenment are a vast series of Blender Tutorials. I'm currently working through Blender 3D: Noob to Pro - which is where the penguin came from. Some of the tutorials aren't for the faint-hearted and I've got lost more than once. The best advice I can offer is if you get stuck, go on to the next one and come back later.

The best way to get your head around Blender's possibilities is to take a look at what it can do. Click on this fellow's friendly features or visit Blender's Features Gallery for an overview.

And Blender's not just for penguin lovers. In addition to Linux you'll find downloads for Windows, Mac OS X, PPC, Solaris, FreeBSD and Irix too - all at that delightful free software price.









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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 7:59 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Pop quiz: Who said, "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the [computer] industry would be at a complete standstill today."

C'mon, you know this...!

Yup, Bill Gates!

It comes from a 1991 memo to senior executives that went on: "some large company will patent some obvious thing" and use the patent to "take as much of our profits as they want."

How attitudes change. Sixteen years on and with a portfolio of more than 6,000 patents, it's Microsoft who are trying to bring the industry to a standstill and bleed it white.

These snippets come from a New York Times op-ed by Timothy B. Lee who concludes;

"Microsoft’s own history contradicts... claim[s] that patents are essential for technological breakthroughs: Microsoft produced lots of innovative software before it received its first software patent in 1988. As more and more lawsuits rock the industry, we should ask if software patents are stifling innovation. Bill Gates certainly thought so in 1991, even if he won’t admit it today."

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Hot on the heels of the my last post, comes news of another major flaw in fully patched versions of IE6 and IE7, as well as an equally severe glitch in Firefox.

...a JavaScript flaw in fully patched IE 6 and 7...  can allow an attacker to fiddle with a document's Document Object Model—a model for representing HTML or XML and related formats.

The result can be cookie stealing or cookie resetting, browser crash, page hijacking, code injection or memory corruption.

The Firefox flaw is also in JavaScript:

[It] can lead to interception of keystrokes and content spoofing, among other things. Mozilla said that the flaw allows attackers to display "offensive, misleading or dangerous contents on trusted sites" or to spoof login prompts. An attacker can also track user behavior, such as timing when a victim arrived and departed at a site...

Full details here, along with demos.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 6:21 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

"There is some malicious infection on my machine regarding IE 7, which Symantec hasn't worked out and Microsoft hasn't either."

That's how one Register reader is reporting a strange spoofing attack that appears to be undetectable by Internet Explorer 7 and Norton 360. Originally thought to only affect PayPal and eBay, it appears that bank sites too have started slipping through the anti-phishing net.

Practicing rigorous PC hygiene, using only the latest locked-down version of IE, running Norton 360 and AdAware scans still isn't enough, apparently.

But Firefox isn't affected.

More details (and screenshots) here.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )