Gadgetopia

Man’s ‘pants’ password is changed: While this is funny, the important takeaway is that Lloyds apparently stores customer passwords in clear text, which is scary.

A man who chose “Lloyds is pants” as his telephone banking password said he found it had been changed by a member of staff to “no it’s not”.

Reports: Laptop infected with virus on space station: And this is why you don’t use Bonzi Buddy as your auto-pilot.

A laptop on the International Space Station is infected with a virus, according to SpaceRef, a website that covers the space program.

NASA confirmed the report to Wired. A spokesman describes the virus — SpaceRef says it’s W32.Gammima.AG — as a “nuisance” that won’t infect mission-critical computers.

New Media Douchebags Explained: [Sigh]

How to blog, Twitter, podcast, poke, write on Facebook walls and become a new media douchebag.

Pandora can’t make money, may pull the plug: This is too bad. Thank goodness for Slacker, though who knows — that may be slowly going under too.

Buckling under the weight of the Internet radio royalty hike that SoundExchange pushed through last July, Pandora may pull its own plug soon.

We’ve been fans of Pandora since the beginning.

Cyberspace Barrage Preceded Russian Invasion of Georgia: Apparently the actual war in Georgia was preceded by an online war against their network infrastructure.

[…] the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple D.D.O.S. attacks. The researchers said the command and control server that directed the attack, which was based in the United States, had come online several weeks before it began the assault.

Perhaps this is why the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs started blogging from Blogspot sometime yesterday.

Knol: a unit of knowledge: We talked about Knol last year. Everything I’ve read has the same spin — Google was sick of sending traffic to Wikipedia and is trying to take them on directly.

However, there’s some difference. While Wikipedia is pure reference, some items in Knol are instructional (How to Backpack), and all of them let you brand the article as being written by yourself (by Ryan Moulton).

San Francisco’s Mayor Gets Back Keys to the Network: The rogue sysadmin from San Francisco got a meeting with the mayor and finally turned over the passwords to the network.

On Monday afternoon, he handed the passwords over to Mayor Newsom, who was “the only person he felt he could trust,” […]

Childs’ attorney has asked the judge to reduce Childs US$5 million bail bond, describing her client as a man who felt himself surrounded by incompetents and supervised by a manager who he felt was undermining his work.

Craigslist phone verification system: Craigslist has implemented perhaps the absolute killer app in terms of anti-spam solutions:

[…] Craigs*list has implemented a phone verification system in certain categories to reduce SPAM content. When you attempt to make a post, it asks for you to verify yourself by typing in a viable phone number. It automatically calls it and repeats a verification code which you must then enter for your post to go live. If your post gets flagged, the phone number you verified with will be blacklisted.

So while email address are cheap and disposable, phone numbers are not, and every spam post is bound to blacklist a phone number.

The link goes to a forum newsgroup thread where a bunch of spammers talk about it and conclude that they’re more-or-less screwed. There’s a lot of talk about getting cheap VOIP numbers, but the closest workable idea they found was to go to public places and use pay phones.

This presumably has the added benefit of binding a set of spam postings to the same phone number. So, if one of them gets flagged as spam, you could find everything else verified from that number and pull them down at the same time.

Via Reddit

Google learns to crawl Flash: This is something of a big deal. We’ll now have no excuse when a client wants a crappy Flash site. Damn.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

Search And Give: While this is cool and I applaud Microsoft for it, it still appears as though they’ve simply been reduced to having to pay you not to use Google.

Whether it’s your local school or an effort to find a cure, Search and Give will donate a penny each time you use this page to search the Web.

[…] Select from over 900,000 charities or schools.

Game Over. Hulu Wins. They Have The Daily Show. And Colbert.: This should bolster Hulu quite a bit.

Because Hulu is now streaming full episodes of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, from Comedy Central. No more Tivo. No more dealing with BitTorrent. I can just log in and watch the show in 480p, and that makes me very, very happy.

I love Hulu, I really do. And I desperately hope that the business model is working for them, because it’s working for me — the amount of ads is tiny compared to TV. I can live with it, so if NBC can too, then this is the beginning of a great relationship.

Ars Technica did a survey piece a couple weeks ago, and crowned Hulu the winner of the four major video offerings on the Web.

[…] the overall experience at Hulu is fantastic in comparison to the other network sites. Hulu employs the least amount of advertising and the largest actual area for video, but its true full screen and pop-out options really won us over.

School-of-Thought: I’m unsubscribing from this blog today, but not because I don’t like it. I love it, in fact, but not for the content, which is the problem.

This is a blog by Fred Deutsch, a school board member in Watertown, South Dakota. Corey turned me on to it, and it’s one of the best education blogs I’ve seen. I don’t seek these types of blogs out, but I’m really impressed in the depth of it, the technical prowess, and the guy’s obvious devotion to the craft of education.

However, the fact remains that this guy is way more into education than I am, and I’m quickly out of my depth. I’m unsubscribing because, more often than not, Fred is talking about things I don’t understand and have only a tangential relationship to.

So why post about a blog I’m unsubscribing to? Because I want a blog like this to succeed. It’s good, and we need more like it. So, if you’re an educator, or if you know one, please send them this link and encourage them to take a look.

SearchMonkey - YDN: Yahoo is taking a big step with this. They’re letting people write apps that other people choose to install that directly change how search results are formatted.

The SearchMonkey developer tool enables you to create small, sharable applications that enhance search results. A SearchMonkey application pulls in structured data from multiple sources and uses PHP to display that data according to your specifications. For example, you could develop an application that triggers on sites for various music bands, enhancing the search results to display cover art, lyrics and mp3 samples. Or you could write an application to rewrite all Wikipedia search results in l33t-speak.

Here’s another example:

Let’s say I’m a recruiter who often searches for candidates by searching the web. I log in to Yahoo and add the “Resume” application. From now on, whenever I search, each search result that is a page at LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, or Monster.com, is presented in a new layout which immediately highlights the skills and latest experience of each person right on the Yahoo research page. Super cool.

And again, anyone can write this Resume application. The code is hosted by Yahoo, so there is zero operational cost to the developer.

Google Maps now integrates with Wikipedia and Panaramio. You can see related Wikipedia articles and images from any spot on the map by clicking the “More…” tab.

Now, I realize that Hulu got lot of crap for being a YouTube ripoff, and I know NBC got a lot of crap for pulling all its stuff off every video sharing site in the world, but…

Hulu is awesome. Seriously. I don’t know how I ended up there today, but I think I’m in love.

Here are all the things I watched today:

• Saturday Night Live clips, including this one with Steve Martin that could solve the American financial crisis if everyone just put it into practice.

• An episode of 30 Rock that I missed.

• An episode of Miami Vice. They have the first two seasons — the first two seasons!! (True story — if Isabella had been a boy, he was gonna be named “Sonny.” I’m not kidding.)

• The pilot episode of Stacked, a sitcom with Pamela Anderson that really shouldn’t have been canceled — it was genuinely funny.

In exchange for this, my show stopped every 10 minutes or so for a commercial that lasted all of about 20 seconds. The timeline on the Flash Player even has little dots on it that let you know when it’s going to break. (You can’t skip them — the controls disappear during the ad, and an ad plays if you move the scrub bar past a dot.)

Picture quality was good, ad intrusion was acceptable, content selection was good and — I’m assuming — just going to get better.

As much as I want to join the “Let’s Bash Big Media” party on this one, I’m still looking for a downside.