Published on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 .
University server in hackers’ hands for a year
I’m not quite sure how the fuck you let this happen, honestly. Basically for a full year, the University of Ohio had a server that had been compromised by hackers and they were stealing students’ personal data for a full year before someone noticed. Obviously their IT department could use a little revamping if they’re so ignorant as to let something like this happen. I wonder how many students in total were affected by this one. I’m sure it’s nothing compared to the 26.5 MILLION veterans whose personal data was compromised in a hacker attack recently. Still, though… it’s completely ridiculous that a college’s IT department could somehow overlook an intrusion for a whole year. Remind me never to go to the University of Ohio, eh?
It really seems like everytime I turn around I hear about somebody’s private data getting compromised. Last year it was credit cards from a couple of companies, now it’s Universities and veterans. Perhaps these companies should invest a little bit more money in security precautions, audits, checks, whatever. Either way, it’s become pretty obvious that security is a major problem these days and something most certainly needs to be done. All the more reason for the average consumer to check their credit report every few months to make sure nothing unexpected has shown up.
Technorati Tags: security, idiots, news, hacking
Published on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 .
Well, apparently Skype has decided to make phone calls to the US and Canada completely free. Previously, you were charged about $0.02 per call from the skype client to any of like 9 or 10 countries. Now calls to the US and Canada are completely free. Calls outside the US and Canada are still charged at the global skype rate (currently about $0.02/min), however. If you add on the “SkypeIN” service for about $36 a year, you basically have a phone line for a whopping $3 a month with unlimited incoming and outgoing calls to any number you might wish to call. Sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me! All you need is to download the Skype client and have a broadband internet connection and you’re set to go. The SkypeIN service isn’t mandatory but it IS kind of cool in that you can get a local phone number for people to call you free of charge. Even cooler, the phone number doesn’t have to be local to where you live. That means if you live in one city but you have a bunch of friends in another city you can get a phone number local to them so they don’t have to spend money on long distance in order to call you. Granted, most people have cellphones so they don’t have to worry about long distance charges, but very few people have unlimited daytime minutes so being able to make and recieve phone calls free of charge is kinda cool. Not only that, there are a few cordless phones coming out that will actually work with Skype so you don’t even have to be tied to your computer all the time just to make and receive phone calls. Not only that, some of the handsets being released will actually work on wi-fi so in theory you could use your skype account anywhere you can find a wi-fi hotspot, not just on your home wi-fi network. So at this point, why even bother with a landline? I’m sure between Vonage, Skype and the other VOIP providers the bells are getting pretty annoyed with their landline business being cannibalized. It was bad enough when cellphones became a cheap commodity, now VOIP service is making landlines even less attractive.
Technorati Tags: software, skype, free stuff, geek
Published on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 .
Ogrish.com - UK Man Dies After Failed Suicide Attempt
I couldn’t help but laugh at this article. “Man dies after failed suicide attempt”. If you die, it didn’t fail did it? I guess the argument could be made that since the initial attempt at suicide failed but he died shortly afterwards that it didn’t count as a successfuly suicide attempt…. but I’m of the opinion that if you try to kill yourself and you end up dying as a result of anything that happened therein, it’s a successful attempt… since after all you DID kill yourself. Say if you jump off a bridge onto the pavement below but you land and just severely incapacitate yourself and don’t actually die… but you try to get up and are squashed by a tractor-trailer. Is that a failed attempt? No, not really. You still died! Anyway, enough about that. I just found it horribly amusing. Read it anyway because his attempt at suicide is rather comical.
Technorati Tags: funny, weird, news
Published on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 .
Seriously, I think Sony just flat-out doesn’t get it. The PS3 is due out in November and is set to cost $499 for the base configuration with a 20GB hard drive and $599 for the premium configuration with a 60GB hard drive. Problem is, that’s not the only discrepancy between the two configs. The $499 configuration also lacks wifi, a card reader for memorystick/SD/compactflash and HDMI output. Now, I can do without the memory card reader for the most part and the wifi isn’t that important since it’s going to have gigabit ethernet. However, I don’t understand why/how Sony would dump the HDMI port. Sony’s supposedly using the PS3 to push the Blu-Ray spec as the successor to the current DVD format. The problem is, the average person isn’t going to blow $600 just to be able to watch movies. Even the $500 price tag is ridiculously high for anyone but the most bleeding-edge early adopters but the $500 system won’t play a good portion of Blu-Ray discs that require HDMI & HDCP in order to play in all their HD glory. Basically, many Blu-Ray discs are going to have copy protection that requires the presence of the HDMI port, which the cheaper of the two systems will lack. So that means Blu-Ray discs that will still play but not in their highest quality format available. Alas, having a $500-600 PS3 and Blu-Ray players clocking in at over a grand is going to make it tough for Blu-Ray to make any headway in the next-gen DVD wars. By comparison, Microsoft is going to be supporting the competing standard, HD-DVD and has already announced an HD-DVD player will be coming for the Xbox 360. I would venture a guess that the HD-DVD player addon will be about $100 on top of the Xbox 360 price, whatever it is at the time (most are predicting it won’t be $400 by then). All in all, I don’t see Sony winning the console wars this go-around like they did with the PS2. Hell, by the time the PS3 launches, provided it’s on time, the Xbox 360 will have sold over 10 million consoles.
Technorati Tags: gaming, consoles, sony, rants, opinions, ps3
Saturday took the cake. Point blank, no doubt about it… craziest night ever. Basically we decided to have a housewarming party on Saturday. I think we ended up with like 13 or so people over, which was just way too fucking many people in such a small space with so many neighbors close-by. So here’s the quick rundown of what went down… in no particular order, really…
Basically everyone ended up puking at some point, the “courtesy officer” ended up banging on our door and telling us to disband the party… then the cops showed up but didn’t arrest anyone. A chick named Kendra ended up passed out in the shower fully clothed with the water running while her friend was passed out in the floor. This other girl was in the bathroom throwing up for a good hour or so… I apparently threw up off the balcony despite me telling everyone else there NOT to do it. We ended up killing off a 1.75 liter bottle of Bacardi O and a 1 liter bottle of Barton’s vodka. Sam and Kendra ended up puking in the kitchen sink side-by-side (one in each sink). Kendra ended up with Corey’s shirt, my girlfriend’s jeans and this other girl Bethany’s shoes (which were 2 sizes too small). Matt ended up making out with both Ashley and Kendra (best friends) and hitting on my girlfriend’s best friend James who happens to be black and gay. Matt also decided to try to take liberties on Ashley while she was passed out in the bathroom, but luckily my girlfriend caught him and bitched him out. Two people ended up fucking in our walk-in closet. I’m sure there’s more that I’m leaving out but it was certainly insane.
Oh, and as far as it being a housewarming party, we got a microwave and some towels from Brandy… and Nay Nay brought us a blender and some towels as well. So we didn’t do half bad!
Technorati Tags: drunk, party, trouble, recap, weekend
Published on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 .
Hah yeah… we finally have internet access at home after having to go through some mild crap with Comcast to get it up and running as planned. Basically, our installer showed up on Saturday afternoon and brought the cable box and modem but didn’t really do any installing short of removing the terminator on the cable. Comcast doesn’t activate accounts on weekends anyway so all we had was basic cable for the weekend and no internet. Well, on Monday I hook up the modem (an RCA) and only only the “internet” light is lit up. The cable link and PC link made no acknowledgement of a connection to either despite both cables being connected. I tried everything I could think of and nothing worked. So just for fun I call their tech support and they of course tell me they can’t even see the modem connected. I call the installer back and tell him my modem is dead on arrival and he says he has no more modems and that I might as well go to the main office and swap it out. It was too late to do that Monday so I decided to go Tuesday afternoon and take care of that. I take the stuff in and they give me a brand new Motorola 5101 modem. I get it home and plug it in…. immediately it lights up and appears to be online, so I pull up my web browser, only to be greeted with Comcats’s “walled garden” page for unactivated modems with a link to download their account activation/setup software. I do so and run it to setup my account. Well, the stupid software isn’t even able to detect my ethernet connection to the modem! So at this point I just call Comcast and have them manually provision my account and activate everything. Poof, it’s up and running at a full 8mbps speed. More trouble than it should have been, but worth it in the end I guess. All in all, still better than the alternative (Bellsouth ADSL), which takes 1-2 weeks to setup and get running when you include provisioning the line… plus the fact that we would have to have a landline in order to use it, something we have no desire to have.
Published on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 .
But it’s worth it… seriously, it is. Luckily I didn’t have a whole lot of furniture to move but it was still a pain in the ass having to load up the truck with all the boxes and take the desk apart and put it back together…. and we won’t even get into how much of a pain in the ass a 6 foot love sac is to move. Still, though, it was worth all the trouble. I’m only 4 miles from work instead of 13 now and I actually live in a nice area of town in a nice 2-bedroom, 1150 sq ft apartment instead of in a run-down 2-bedroom house in a not-so-great part of town. The best part aside from the above is that we actually now have water pressure! Showers actually feel good instead of like a light rain shower! Oh yeah, and apparently apartments have those on-demand type water heaters that more or less never run out of hot water either. Hell, since our apartment has two full baths, we can both take showers at the same time without a problem! My friend was even able to take a shower with the dishwasher running, something just not possible in the house we used to live in. Hell, this place even has a garbage disposal, a fireplace and a balcony to boot! Plus it’s a 10 minute walk from my girlfriend’s work as well. So far there’s no real downside outside the higher rent to pay. $660 a month for the apartment plus our electricity ($80 or so a month) and cable tv and internet ($110 or so, I’d say). Then again, we have TWO incomes now so it’s not so bad. All in all, I’m not sure why I didn’t do this sooner…. oh, wait, I didn’t have the $910 required to move in before.
