hackbash

Everyone I’ve spoken to hates Facebook’s ‘frictionless sharing’ thing. You know, the thing that shows you every single article your friends are reading on supported sites.

On the occasions when the story sounds interesting, you click the link and get asked to install a social reader, rather than just taken to the story. Install the reader and you become one of the people pumping out endless ‘X read Y’ updates to their friends’ timeline.

The problem is that you can’t turn it off, so imagine my joy this morning when I encountered this:

Yes please!

Imagine the crushing disappointment when I discover that, like marking the fucking things as spam, it doesn’t work.

Tags: Facebook, frictionless, spam

Let’s face it, things have been a bit quiet on the blog. As such I’ve decided to start using it a bit more as a personal brain dump, probably – we’ll see if anyone objects.

That means it’s going to start wondering off-topic a bit. Hope that’s alright.

Tags: freeze, Hove, photo, sea, splash

Doubtless you’re all familiar with the CAPTCHA – those weird boxes with obscured words you have to type in when somebody in the building’s done something naughty to Google.

It actually stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and while they’re a pain in the arse they do serve a purpose – helping sites work out whether you’re a human or an unthinking robot. If you’re filling out a reCAPTCHA, in particular, console yourself that you’re also helping recognise words that have defeated the computers processing real book scans.

Wasted attention

However you feel about CAPTCHAs, I guarantee that you have never, ever, seen them as a wasted opportunity to be advertised at. Have you?

Well, all hail Solve Media’s TYPE-IN™, a proprietary branded CAPTCHA “which places relevant brand messages where users are already engaged”.

I encountered one of these for the first time this morning, and felt that being forced to sit through a short video advertisement before seeing a conventional CAPTCHA was offensive enough to merit swears. Isn’t the whole point of a CAPTCHA to stop automated spammy adverts spoiling a website for humans?

According to Solve Media, the ads offer “Guaranteed engagement for advertisers”, which is true in a sense because one particular format of TYPE-IN asks you to parrot back a “Brand Message” to prove that you’re a human.

That’s right; obediently mumbling back some advertiser’s unique selling proposition goes to show that you’re a human. Rather than, say, some kind of empty, unthinking machine.

Tags: adverts, captcha, evil, reCaptcha, Solve Media, TYPE-IN

Typical. You wait all summer for something worth posting and then your blog gets hacked by 4li from Iran.

It only took an hour or two to get unhacked, but we spent considerably longer puzzling over 4li’s manifesto: “If you hate Islam, We hate anyone who does not hate you!”

4li, we don’t hate anyone, except those two blokes in the BMW 1 series adverts. And hacking isn’t very nice.

Tags: BMW, hacked, hacking

Looks like the Android 2.3 update for the Galaxy S has finally landed, after Samsung announced it on Monday. Here’s how it went for me:

1) Ran Kies (yuk), upgrade found

2) Gave the relevant permissions. No, Samsung, you can’t have my personal information

3) Prompted for backup. This took quite a while on my lowly netbook

4) Downloading the firmware. This was suspiciously quick

5) Epic Failure. After momentarily preparing the firmware update components, Kies reported that it couldn’t obtain permission from the phone administrator. Which will be because it didn’t ask

I tried again (skipping the backup this time) but it failed in the same place and the same way. Will report back after a reboot of phone and PC.

**UPDATE**

OK, so when Kies says ‘phone administrator’ it means ‘computer administrator’. To get past this particular roadblock, close Kies and run it again, but this time right-click it and select ‘Run as Administrator’. The upgrade should then complete successfully: Gingerbread, finally.

Tags: Android, Galaxy S, Gingerbread, Samsung, update, upgrade

Verb: The practice of adding as many hashtags to a tweet as possible.

Possibly more.

Tags: definition, pebblehashing, twitter

In a recent Computer Shopper feature (in issue 278, but sadly not online) I investigated a few computer facts and fictions. One that came under the spotlight was the myth that it took multiple passes to overwrite a hard disk so that it couldn’t be read.

In response to a brief Twitter discussion today, here’s the gist of it.

The myth appears to stem from the misunderstanding of a 1996 paper by University of Auckland computer scientist Peter Gutmann, in which he examined the potential for data to be recovered from an overwritten drive with the use of a magnetic force microscope (MFM). While he did propose a 35-stage overwrite process (typically available as ‘Gutmann’ in overwriting utilities), he added that for disks of the time, “a good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected.”

Researching the feature I spoke to Dave Kleiman, a computer forensic examiner and co-author of ‘Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy‘. He underlined that today’s disks are very different from those that Gutmann studied, particularly in relation to data density, and stressed: “What we’re talking about is meaningful data.”

“Sure, it is possible to recover a bit or a byte here and there across the hard drive, where possibly the head was mis-aligned [during the overwrite]. But that’s useless in this day and age: what [file] do you even know that’s less than 10kB big?”

Kleiman also pointed out that Gutmann himself had later written: “With the ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it’s unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive”.

For Kleiman’s paper, he and his fellow researchers calculated that even where data had not actually been overwritten, the probability of using an MFM to recover even a single 8-letter word from a Word document was 0.0002%.

When we spoke, Kleiman – a state and federal witness in computer forensics – wasn’t aware of a single case where data had been successfully recovered from an overwritten hard disk and used in evidence.

Tags: Computer Shopper, data security, David Kleiman, Gutmann, hard disk, overwriting, twitter

So Comic Relief raised £74 million, which is more than a quid from everyone in the UK. It’s also, as some miserable bugger’s already pointed out, about one per cent of the get out of jail free card we apparently gave Vodafone.

There seemed to be loads of #rednoseday about this year. Doubtless Twitter played a part in generating the impressive total, but one particular strand of giving seemed more self-serving than anything else: the odious “I’ll give £X for every RT/new follower” tweet.

Perhaps I’m a miserablist, but charity donations aren’t a way to buy attention. They’re a way to help the disadvantaged. If you give a shit, and it’s your money already, just donate it and shut the fuck up.

Tags: charity, Red Nose Day, self-promotion, twitter

Just reading the sad news of John Barry’s death, and notice at the end of the BBC Online article that they’ve finally updated the way their comments work:

Not sure if it’s a permanent change or they’re just experimenting. I’m yet to see ‘Ouf of Africa’, but the Editors’ Picks should make it a little less spEak You’re bRanes, at least.

I didn’t used to get worried about privacy on social media sites. I don’t tell them much about me, so they don’t have a lot to reveal/sell/give to third-party developers or whatever. But they’re getting weirder.

I’ve never, for example, told Facebook where I live, although it obviously knew when I joined the city’s group. I left the group a while back, but I recently realised Facebook had taken it on itself to complete the relevant fields in my – previously blank – address.

But it’s Linked in that’s really freaking me out.

For various reasons my girfriend and I aren’t connected on any social sites. We come from different groups of friends and, to date, have none in common on any online services. To put it another way, there’s nothing obvious that could connect us from Linked in’s perspective: no mutual friends, no address information, no common employer. Nothing.

So why does Linked in keep telling me I may know her? It’s right, of course, but how the hell does it know?

I got in touch with them a while back to ask if they’d kept my login details for Hotmail after I let the site search my contacts. They said not, and I’m pretty sure I believe them: I’ve changed the password since then anyway. The only other possibilities I could think of are that one or both of us has searched for the other’s profile and it’s picked up on this, or that they’ve noticed that we both access the site from the same IP address.

Whatever it is, it keeps suggesting us to each other, and today it went one further and began recommending my friends to Elaine.

It started with my ex-girlfriend, which was nice.

Tags: Facebook, Linked in, personal, privacy, suggestions