Daily Archives: April 13, 2005

Phishing, pronounced the way it looks, is when a thief or scam artist tries to obtain your personal, sensitive information. For example, bank account numbers, credit cards, social security numbers, passwords, or anything else that only you are supposed to know. They have very clever ways of deceiving victims into thinking they are a legitimate source and therefore getting you to divulge your private statistics.

It can come in the form of an email saying they are your bank, typically requesting you resend your password and account numbers. Another technique is sending confirmation that your information is correct, including your ATM PIN and card number, or credit card numbers with the code that’s normally on the back, along with the expiration date and the full name on the card.
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Mobile phones are not a luxury anymore, they are a must in this digital world we live in. that’s why I’ve been reading about the Firefly mobile phone directed towards children. This phone has the parental approved limited dialing and big cute buttons to phone mom or dad or home.

Safety for children is the marketing strategy used for the promotions of this phone, but I’m smelling different motives here. How many 8 year olds will find themselves with a flat tire on the highway in need of a mobile phone? How many 8 year olds do anything besides school, soccer practice, and video games? Where does the mobile phone come into play here?

I say that the mobile phone companies are mimicking the tobacco companies and “hooking them while they’re young!” That’s right, I’m calling them on it (pun intended, please just a small chuckle)!

They are trying to hook our youth, but I also personally feel that if I were the youth, I’d be screaming “hook me –up!”

As a segway to my previous entry, “Old Skool,” I only believed in keeping that SONY Walkman of mine because I did not have another tape deck in the house. (That was a shot of reality as well, for my VCR is seeing its usefullness fading other than being a glorified digital clock.)

Here comes the PlusDeck2. www.plusdeck.com
It is a tape deck for your PC. But not only does it play your old worn out cassette tapes, it also can be used to create MP3’s of the old classics in your shoeboxes. It may not be the prettiest thing to be mounting into a drive slot on your PC tower, but its definately useful for people like myself that want to put my MC Hammer collection and one hit wonder cassettes onto my computer or Ipod.

The specs:

• Records sounds, MP3 files, and internet streaming audio from PC onto Tape
• Hi quality record/playback as Hi-Fi audio
• Convert cassette tapes to into MP3 files
• Full-logic controls
• Dub voice with mic on Tape.
• Tape Speed 4.75cm/sec
• Wow & Flutter 0.09%(WRMS)
• Frequency Response 30~18,000Hz
• Separation 40dB
• Signal-to-Noise Ratio 55dB
• Fits in open 5.25″ drive bay

My favorite pizza spot in San Francisco has a CCTV (closed circuit television) which I don’t mind. While I’m waiting for my pizza I look at the TV monitor which is facing right back down at me so I can watch myself wait. But, lots of people have issues with CCTV, especially when it’s monitoring public spaces. Often you are being watched and you don’t even know it. But, then there is iSee, a site which keeps dibs on all CCTV’s in urban areas and plans out a route for you to get to your destination unnoticed.

Overreaction, perhaps. Well, definitely. But what really interests me is that this information is on the web. Lets say I decide to restart the mafia. I can go online and mastermind a bank robbery without ever being seen, at least on the street. I doubt there is info on the web showing me how to avoid the CCTV’s in the bank. Oh well, scrawny geeks were never meant for crime anyways.

ChoicePoint won in the Big Brother contest. Now it turns out they might have some competition. Yesterday LexisNexis announced that the initial 30,000 identities that were stolen from their data base about a month ago was really something like 300,000. I guess that’s why U.C. Berkeley has just been designated the leader of the new cybersecurity Consortium. So the picture below won’t stop identity thieves from hacking into data-mining companies like ChoicePoint, but the moustache on the guy on this box was so great I had to use it as an image.

Corsair has introduced their new Corsair XMS Xpert CMXP512-3200XL memory and it can almost talk. The PC3200 DDR modules don’t shy away from a slight overclock, but that’s not their forte. These modules have LED displays that enable the user to program exactly what it is that they want to see on the memory chips. This wouldn’t be worth the time and money for someone like me who doesn’t have a window, or a 100% acrylic computer enclosure, to view the guts of my processing tower. But there are tons of people who do in fact have that window and could get a one-up on those with regular old boring DIMM slot no-LCD-having memory modules.

Trusted reviews gives out the nitty gritty on these programmable displays of memory. Maybe it’s time for me to dust off the dremel, purchase some fiberglass, and start making a window so I “Live Digitally” can be displayed on my two 512 sticks of Corsair XMS Xpert memory.