news – Page 11

UserFriendly And VeriSign

Today’s UserFriendly cartoon strip plays on the issue highlighted by yesterday’s entry about VeriSign trying to take over the Internet. Really – the geeks are up in arms.

Still no word from BBC News, but the following other agencies have picked up on the story:

“VeriSign redirects error pages” from C|Net News

“VeriSign slammed for helping spammers” from ZDNet Australia

“ICANN up in arms over Verisign DNS hijacking” from The Inquirer, UK

And tongue-in-cheek technical debate on morons.org.

Told you this would kick up a fuss. You read it here first.

VeriSign Adds Wildcards To TLDs

I am outraged.

VeriSign, the company which manages the .COM and .NET domain names, has done the unthinkable. They’ve taken advantage of and abused their power by setting up a wildcard filter on the primary DNS, pointing to their own server – sitefinder.verisign.com.

Now for those of you who are less technically-inclined, this basically means that every mis-typed .COM or .NET domain name will now go to them, and they can do whatever they like with it. They’ve said that their goal is to provide a list of ‘did you mean?’ links, but it’s been demonstrated that their search engine is powered by a pay-per-click advertiser. In other words, if my company’s web site is at www.hardtospelldomain.com and somebody mis-types or mis-spells my domain name, VeriSign could well give a list of ‘who you might have meant’ with one of my competitors, who’s paying VeriSign for the priviledge, at the top of the list!

In addition, many existing types of anti-spam software, which check that the domain names that suspicious-looking e-mails come from, will fail (remember that now, technically, all .COM/.NET domain names act as if they were valid). We can all expect to get more spam as a result of this disgusting abuse of power.

Do not stand for this! The Internet must not be allowed to be so misruled!

See also SlashDot “Resolving Everything: VeriSign Adds Wildcards”. This news doesn’t seem to have made it around the globe yet, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing it on The Register by this afternoon and BBC News by the end of the week.

Quacks Do Echo, Thank You Very Much

At long last, I feel justified! As a long-time arguer (as much out of reason as playing devil’s advocate) that a duck’s quack should make an echo just like any other sound, recent research reported by the BBC demonstrates the fallacy of the widely-accepted myth!

In other news, it looks like my suggestion to Paul to go in to Burger King and meet the manager paid off – Paul now has a job:

About time I updated… I have a job. Sure, it’s only at Burger King (I start on Wednesday morning) but it’s still a job. They’re keen to work around my studies, so I get more hours now and in the holidays, but during term time I just work evenings and weekends…..

Having fun getting an Infra-Red transmitter to work under Windows 2000/XP (Microsoft removed the Virtual COM ports because they thought it would confuse users) but it works fine now…

Stan has done no work in the bathroom or on the living room since I last updated, although a set of stepladders has appeared, suggesting he intends to work sometime in the near future, though I won’t hold my breath

We all had Toad in the Hole last night. I was consulted for culinary expertise, although I don’t know why. I can’t really cook. While we’re on the topic, I nearly conned Claire into doing some cooking, but she twigged half way through chopping the potatoes and went into the living room for a lie down to recover….

I’ve sneaked a copy of DVD Maestro onto Dan’s PC so now I can master a DVD at home and bring it to D&Cs to burn. Convenient, as I can’t find a SCSI DVD-Writer anywhere….

That’s all

Timewasting

Look what I found while I was wasting time on the ‘net this morning.

A Vasectospectacular Mistake

So this Brazillian man with a ear infection goes in for surgery, and, as a result of his sore ear, mis-hears the name announced in the doctor’s waiting room, and accidentality gets a vasectomy.

What? Didn’t he think anything of it when the doctor applied a local anaesthetic to the area under his balls and produced a scalpel? Apparently, he thought that the doctor knew best and that the infection must have travelled down that far. And didn’t think to ask. It’s a weird world.

Those Commie Martians

This story about the European Space Agency by the BBC reads:

…The Mars Exploration Rovers will touch down in January next year, just after the Europeans arrive with their Marx Express mission in December…

Marx Express? I suppose we should have guessed that the so-called ‘red planet’ was communist.

Excellent Article On Music Piracy And CD Sales

A must-read! An excellently-written and concise article in dot.life about the falling sales of CDs being blamed on file-swappers, playing devil’s advocate. Go read it, people!

Now Where Did I Put My House?

Did anybody see the story about the American who had their house stolen this weekend? That’s a fantastic theft to pull off. Wish I’d thought of it first. Ah well.

Also this weekend, a man is killed in a collision between a car and a train. Not particularly noteworthy under normal circumstances, I know, but the train in question is a tourist attraction – a one-third scale steam train with a top speed of 15mph, and the car was a Ford Escort, probably about the same size as the steam engine and weighing about half as much. It takes a special kind of bad driver to get struck on a level crossing at which the trains go barely fast enough to outrun a sprinting child.

Enough newssurfing – back to work;

Science Graduates Earn More, Live Longer, Smoke Less

This report by the BBC, published yesterday, gives evidence that we science/engineering graduates live longer than our artsy opposite numbers. Made my day.

Safe Road Use Of Elephants

Aside from the main point of this article, I found it most amusing to find that state-run Indian elephants are fitted with reflectors ‘in an attempt to prevent road accidents’. What does it take to accidentally crash into an elephant?

AbNib

As this article from the BBC and this article on icWales states,Aberystwyth is getting a sex shop (you can confirm it for yourselves by checking the pink banner at the top of the official web site.

That’ll save me spending so much on mail order goods.

Silliest Thing I’ve Seen All Week

As this hilarious BBC news story tells it, an artist came home to his Liverpool house to find that:

(a) A criminal had broken in to his home.
(b) Mistaking a piece of his artwork as a human head in a jar, the criminal turned himself in to the police to tell them about it. He also confessed all of his crimes to his mother.
(c) The police broke down the door and raided the house, and found that the contents of the jar were merely formaldehyde and a mask made from rashers of bacon.

I laughed.

Now I’m going home. I’m not feeling top-form today.

Hunting For Bambi

This news article, entitled Hunting For Bambi, amused me for a few minutes.

Almost Passed This On The Way To Work

Another fantastic story from the BBC: this one took place yesterday, and so I missed it, as I didn’t come in to work. Apparently this lorry full of cheese caught fire on the A44, on my usual route to the office. The driver said: “I saw the fire starting but by the time I’d gone back to the cab to get the fire extinguisher the whole lot had started to go on fire.”

1. Cheese burns?
2. What route did he take back to the cab? Via Bow Street?
3. How does combusion occur in the hold of a moving lorry full of milk produce?

Sandplough

As this report by the BBC states, Danish soldiers in Iraq were surprised when their latest supplies shipment, instead of containing much-needed morphine and tent equipment, contained a snowplough and a supply of lawnmowers.

Now; okay – I understand that mistakes happen, and perhaps there was a mix-up between two supplies orders… but somebody must have signed-off this snowplough to Iraq… didn’t they think to question the order just once?

Defense Minister Svend Aage Jensby has told one Danish paper, Ekstra Bladet, of his displeasure over the mistakes and has promised to put them right.

That lit up my Thursday morning.