Typo When Booking Takes Tourist 13,000 km Off-Course

This is crazy. I can’t believe this guy … he booked a flight to visit his girlfriend, but made a typo and booked the flight to Sydney, Montana instead of Sydney, Australia. Coming as he was from Germany, at first he thought it was possible he was making stops in the U.S. before heading for Australia.

Dressed for the Australian summer in T-shirt and shorts, Tobi Gutt left Germany on Saturday for a four-week holiday.

Instead of arriving “down under”, Gutt found himself on a different continent and bound for the chilly state of Montana. Source: CNN

I still can’t understand it. He never checked his ticket, didn’t notice the signs in the airport indicating destination? Someone sure was flying on “autopilot”.

Cheating via Cell Phone Earns Chess Player 10-year Ban

Shoot, you can’t even trust chess players now. Much as many students have tried to do, a chess player was discovered to be using a Bluetooth headset to cheat at a recent tournament. The player, Umakant Sharma, had risen so quickly officials were suspicious.

Sharma was finally caught at a recent tournament when officials discovered that he had stitched a Bluetooth device in a cloth cap which he always pulled over his ears.

He communicated to his accomplices outside the hall, who then used a computer to relay moves to him, Indian chess federation secretary D.V. Sundar said on Wednesday. Source: Reuters

Hey, at least it wasn’t steroids, right? As a former player of my high school chess team (yes, yes, don’t say it … geek), all I can say is … dang, they didn’t have Bluetooth when I was around.

SDelete – A Key to Safely Donating Your PC

As the year draws to a close, charitable institutions and non-profits see a marked increase in donations. For people like me, sometimes those donations include used PCs. How do you make sure your information is secure when donating a PC?

Obviously, you can format the drive. But is that enough? Not really. All that space on your hard drive still contains traces of the original files, meaning it is still possible to recover sensitive information.

Enter SDelete. From SysInternals (whose founder, Mark Russinovich has since joined Microsoft, thus making SysInternals also part of Microsoft), “SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M, to give you confidence that once deleted with SDelete, your file data is gone forever.”

It’s a command-line utility, meaning you have to open a command window to run it. From the site:

SDelete Usage

SDelete is a command line utility that takes a number of options. In any given use, it allows you to delete one or more files and/or directories, or to cleanse the free space on a logical disk. SDelete accepts wild card characters as part of the directory or file specifier.

Usage: sdelete [-p passes] [-s] [-q]
sdelete [-p passes] -z [drive letter]

-p passes

Specifies number of overwrite passes

-s

Recurse subdirectories

-q

Don’t print errors (quiet)

-z

Cleanse free space

I love SysInternals’ utilities, and I’m currently preparing 2 PCs for donation, so it’s getting a workout!

Wikipedia Founder to start Search Engine

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, intends to start his own search engine. The project would be called Wikiasari (from wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”). He indicated it would use the same user-based technology, which sounds like the idea would be to have users contribute to the search engine, much as they do with articles on Wikipedia.

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” he said.

Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans. Source: Times Online

He’s right about some of the results, but really, for the most part, I am satisfied with Google results. On the other hand, this could be a good idea, but as we know with such famous incidents as Stephen Colbert asking his viewers to edit the article on elephants to state that the population of African elephants had tripled in the last decade, since “wikiality” would make it so, user-contributed information can be easily corrupted. In fact, Wales himself has said Wikipedia should not be used for academic research (for obvious reasons). Will Jimmy tell us not to trust his search engine results “if you really need to find something”, too?

Audiovox / Terk VR-1: The Solution (?) for Overly Loud TV Commercials

For as long as I can recall, many times (not always) when a commercial comes on during a TV show it is a LOT louder than the show itself. So loud that you have to reduce the volume to be comfortable. Of course, with remote controls that’s not really a big deal, but now with this new device it can be automated.

It’s a simple little box that automatically detects when a program has gone to commercial and lowers the volume accordingly. You take the audio output from your cable or satellite box, plug it into the VR-1 then plug the VR-1’s outputs into your TV. Audiovox provides you with an RCA patch cord to help complete the task.

On the front of the VR-1 is a switch to turn the active circuitry on or off and a light to tell you the included AC adapter is plugged into the wall outlet. That’s all there is to it. Source: MSNBC

The reviewer sat next to the device so he could turn it off and on, but he couldn’t really discern a difference. Now maybe that’s really good design, making usage transparent … or maybe he just didn’t have a commercial come on that was particularly loud. At any rate, we Americans have gotten lazy enough already with remote controls that I think I can forego the extra (admittedly reasonable) expense of approximately $40. Also, with PVRs so popular, I see this device as having limited sales potential.

President Charged with Hacking

No, NOT that President. It’s the class president at a high school in Cooper City, Florida.

Cooper City High School’s senior class president was arrested Tuesday and charged in a grade-tampering scandal that has rocked the campus.

Ryan C. Shrouder, 18, of Cooper City, was taken to jail from school and charged with two counts of computer crime with intent to defraud, a second-degree felony, according to a Broward Sheriff’s Office report. He was released from jail on bail, has been suspended from school and will be recommended for expulsion, said Joe Melita, head of the Broward County School District’s investigative unit. Source: Sun-Sentinel

Shrouder’s attorney is upset with the felony charge, but I have always said that people (especially young adults and kids) need to stop making excuses and start taking responsibility for their actions. This person was, besides being the senior class president, an alternate student advisor on the Broward School Board. This, besides the class office, showed a level of trust in him by the School Board. In this case, the punishment should be tough … at least to the point where he is, yes, made an example of, and where he won’t forget a hard lesson,

I am Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year … and So Are You

Yep, I … and you, and you, and especially, you … are all “Person of the Year”. Why? Because You were responsible for the growth of user-generated content on blogs, such as this one, as well as video sharing on sites like YouTube and social networking on sites such as MySpace.

“For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you,” the magazine’s Lev Grossman wrote. Source: Reuters

So, congratulations to me … and to all of you. Time’s cover will feature a mirror, so you can know who really won. On the other hand, it would have been nice to see a real winner … somehow the word “lame” comes to mind.

However, blogging has exploded, and despite Gartner’s predictions that it will peak in 2007, the popularity of blogging, social networking and video sharing, which are all, as the article says, propelled by the Web (fight for net neutrality, hint, hint), will still give us another chance to win again next year.

Google Becomes Latest Spy Agency Tool

Can’t get your answers from the CIA? That’s the problem the State Department faced. It recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a secret nuclear weapons program and was turned down, as the CIA was too busy. They turned to that wonder of wonders, Google.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way — by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as “Iran and nuclear,” three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations. Source: Washington Post

So here’s my question: why don’t they simply type “Bin Laden” AND “Cave” into Google maps and bomb the location that comes up?

Secrets of the Empire: Why Cell Phone Outage Reports are Secret

If you are looking at a cellular carrier, it would be great to know how many outages customers have experienced. But where to find that data? The FCC keeps a database of cell phone provider outages, but even under the Freedom of Information Act, you can’t get it. Why? Terrorists, they say.

A federal Freedom of Information Act request for the data, filed in August by MSNBC.com, has been rejected by the agency. The stated reasons: Release of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved.

What use would wireless outage reports have to would-be terrorists? Not much, said NBC terrorism analyst Roger Cressey, the former chief of staff of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.

“There is nothing mysterious behind it, it is corporate competition protection,” said Cressey, now a partner in Good Harbor Consulting. “The only reason for the government to not let these records get out is then one telco provider could run a full-page ad saying ‘the government says we’re more reliable.’” Source: The Red Tape Chronicles

You do get 30 days to try and return a phone, but that doesn’t tell you how many outages a carrier might experience over a much longer period, typically. On the other hand we wouldn’t want to help terrorists, now would we (and I say this with tongue firmly planted in cheek).

CPUShare to Allow Users to Profit from Spare PC Cycles?

I have 7 computers at home (soon to be 8). While only 2 are only on a consistent basis, I usually have my work laptop on also. Much of the time they just sit there idling while I surf the web, write email, etc. etc.

I have participated in distributed computing projects such as SETI@Home and Folding@Home; these projects use my spare CPU cycles to do research to help researchers. Now an enterprising developer has launched a service that may eventually (the key word is eventually) allow users to make money off of their space computer cycles.

In the CPUShare system, sellers will post asking bids on how much they want for their spare processor cycles, while buyers will put out bids on what they’ll pay. Currently, Arcangeli is testing the system with virtual money called “CPUCoins,” although several real money sellers’ bids have been listed at 2 Euro cents per hour. No buyers have logged bids, however. Source: TechWeb

So, no buyers yet, eh? With my work PC running all the time at work, it would be a shame not to put it to a “profitable” use. Investigation into this, though, showed that you currently have to run Windows and Mac clients via a bootable CD. That means, unlike the other projects I mentioned above, you can’t share the PC resources. I’ll have to keep an eye on this and see where it goes.