Most people who use e-mail now know enough to be on guard against "phishing" messages that pretend to be from a bank or business but are actually attempts to steal passwords and other personal information. But there is evidence that among global cybercriminals, phishing may already be passé.
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Labels: Computer security, Security

This experiment shows the really mysterious behavior of quantam particles. Electrons behaving like waves and then like marbles? Mind blowingly cool.
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I really bloody hate Internet Explorer. I've done a little redesign of the site adding background elements and altering the colour of the text.

The most crucial change is to alter the banner at the top, I was never happy with the way the text electricinca.com looked as it was part of the image and looked muddy. So I've replaced the image with one without text and now I'm overlaying the text electricinca.com over the top of the cleaner image.

The trouble is positioning the bloody thing relative positioning works perfectly well in Firefox because I can set the height to 0 but in IE it leaves a gap at the top of the page where the text should go before it is moved in relation to that former position. So I've had to settle for absolute positioning with respect to the browser window and so the text will be positioned differently dependent on how large the browser window is on the user's computer.

Boring boring load of bollocks that I just can't think through at gone 3am in the morning. I have to go to fucking work tomorrow as well. Fuck.

I really don't want to create some javascript code or something to sort out the positioning but I might have to.

Back in the good old days of the Spectrum 48k cheating at computer games involved the BASIC command POKE to set a key value in memory to a different number in order to get infinite lives or some such thing.

Well POKE is back in the form of free to download program. It really is the ultimate gaming utility and I have just the perfect use in mind for it at work. But like the girl from Hoboken in the limerick be careful of Pokin' as you might cause your game to become broken.

There was a young girl from Hoboken
Who claimed that her hymen was broken
From riding her bike
On a cobblestone pike
But it really was broken from pokin'!!!

The top spot of the Pinball high score table will be mine. Oh yes it will be mine.

Labels: Games

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Here we are again delving through our postbag in our weekly answering of enquiries sent into the Dr. Inca Science and Math show.

Dear Dr. Inca it is becoming harder for me to verify mathematical proofs, what should I do?
Jerzy Rugby, California.

Well Mr. Rugby I'd recommend you get yourself a quantum computer and turn it off this should help solve your problematical mathematical proof verification.
Dr. Inca

According to Michael and Evo's Slice of SciFi DVD Sales haved pushed Serenity over the top and into the black.

All DVD reports up to January 31st are in and it looks like over 2 million DVD's have been sold and VideoBusiness.com, an organization that tracks video rental information, announced that Serenity has made $9 million in DVD rentals alone.

It hasn't even been released on DVD worldwide yet, it gets released in the UK in a few days and I for one shall be buying a copy. So this makes up for the poor box-office that it received but I wouldn't count my chickens just yet.

The fact that Serenity has taken Universal out of the red and into the black is great news, but don't cheer too early. According to Universal execs it still may not be enough for them to wager on a costly sequel, even though Whedon brought this one in at $1 million under its original projected cost of $40 million.

Like practically every other Firefly fan on the planet I just can't get enough of the crew of Serenity and would welcome further adventures but what I really would like is another season of the television series.

Failing that then perhaps I can settle for a set of Lego Serenity crew members.

Almost as good as actually attending Berkeley...?

I wholeheartedly approve of programmes like this bringing the best education in the world albeit in a reduced form to those that cannot afford it.

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You scored as atheism. You are... an atheist, though you probably already knew this. Also, you probably have several people praying daily for your soul. Instead of simply being "nonreligious," atheists strongly believe in the lack of existence of a higher being, or God. Satanism 79% agnosticism 79% atheism 79% Buddhism 71% Paganism 63% Christianity 42% Judaism 29% Islam 29% Hinduism 13% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

This site contains one billion mazes in high-quality printable PDF format. You may view, print and solve these mazes... and yes, there are exactly one billion mazes!

That's one hell of a lot of mazes and so they must surely be dynamically created as clearly even if they were computer generated it would require massive storage on a webserver. Talking about Terabytes of data.

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Congratulations to the 'Gay Shepherd' movie and to the new Fellow of the British Academy David Puttnam. I agree that the movie-making business is enjoying a resurgence in terms of quality and that it has been proved that movies can be both entertaining and informing, we had great examples of both of those qualities being in abundance amongst the five nominations for Best Picture. But it was Brokeback Mountain that took it.

I stumbled across the website Storycode yesterday and it may prove to be an excellent source of recommendations for my future reading.

StoryCode.co.uk is a unique source of inspiring book recommendations and a great way to find the next book to read. And its power comes from the collaborative passion of readers.

Users of the site are asked to code the books by answering several questions using a sliding scale system i.e. is this book humorous or serious or somewhere in between. Then a profile of the book is built and can be compared to thers in the database to find similar books.

So by looking at The Confusion by Neal Stephenson I saw that the book Some Danger Involved by Will Thomas was similar and liked what I read about it.

Modeled after the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but with a verve all its own, this debut mystery introduces a likable pair of sleuths and explores the Jewish quarter of Victorian London.

And promptly purchased it from Amazon.co.uk

We'll have to see how this works out once I've read the novel, but I'm intrigued by the idea of Storycode.

Cubefield feels very much like the kind of videogames that you might have played in the 80s. Graphically very simply, very easy to understand how to play but also very addictive.

Old school gaming at it's best.

Talking of old school, Cuban Boy's Old Skool for Scoundrels is simply fantastic.

Labels: Games

Amongst his many talents comedian Dave Gorman, namesake of Dave Gorman the Site Director of Modblog, can balance rocks as demonstrated by his photos at Flickr.com.

I love discovering people I know use Flickr and discovering that people I don't know but know of and have seen on the telly use Flickr is almost as exciting. So I imagine that if my excitement level went up to eleven like Nigel Tufnel's amp it would probably have gone from about a 4 to a fraction under 5 when I found Dave Gorman's Flickr photostream.

The BBC news website has a good piece of analysis of the glorificatrion of terror law by Nick Assinder titled The politics of terror laws.

The obvious fact that Blair is playing politics with such an important issue just sickens me. Sickens me more that it has me siding with the Conservative party on the issue.

BBC News: MPs back ban on glorifying terror

MPs voted 315 to 277 to reinstate the plan for a new law to stop the glorifying of terrorism into the Terror Bill after last month in which the House of Lords voted to remove the measure form the bill.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said

Weakening our law on terrorism at this time from what is proposed will send the wrong signal out to the outside world and will do no service to those people in our police and law enforcement who are anxious to get on with the job of prosecuting people.

Since when has it been the role of government to send signals when creating legislation? Also in what way is not putting the glorifying terrorism measure into a bill weakening our law on terrorism? Maybe I'm just arguing semantics on this point but until the bill is made law the law on terrorism is unaffected by whatever happens to the bill in it's passage through parliament.

Mr Blair earlier said the new law was "vital" to defend the UK against people like jailed cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.

Okay so again Abu Hamza is mentioned by the Prime Minister even though he was convicted under existing laws.

We don't need new laws we need better facility for prosecuting people under the existing laws. Allowing phone tap evidence to be used in court would be an excellent start. Perhaps now Abu Hamza has been imprisoned there will be less fodder for such knee-jerk reactions by the government to tabloid newspaper hysteria.

Interesting problem over at Kottke.org with a massive amount of comments discussing it and arguing the case for each side.

Here's the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: "A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?"

Like Jason I initially thought that of course the plane couldn't take off but then by rereading the problem I understood what is actually happening and realised that the plane would of course take off.

It's almost a trick question as it seems to imply that the airplane is caused to remain stationary in respect to the ground and the air by the conveyor belt. If that were the case then it could never take off as it is the negative air pressure above the wing generated by the forward motion through the air that causes the lift.

But in fact the airplane would move forward as the conveyor belt only acts to move the wheels of the plane which are only connected to the plane by an axle which allows them to spin freely. They are nearly frictionless and so only a negligible amount of backward motion is actually transmitted to the plane. So no matter how fast the conveyor belt moves only a fraction of that motion is transmitted to the plane and so there is a net forward motion and as the plane moves forward it will pass through the air and gain lift as usual.

A voluntary scheme is to start operation in Yeovil soon that will seen drinkers submit themselves to fingerprint scans and having their photos taken by pubs and clubs.

Avon and Somerset police have joined forces with the local licensees in an effort to make Yeovil a far safer place to drink.

"The aim is to make the town safer on a night out – violent crime has dropped by 16 per cent in the last year but we aim to reduce this further.

If this were any place but Yeovil I'd think this was an unnecessay step in the fight against anti-social behaviour and alcohol related violence.

As seems to be the case with every biometric based system they have chosen to build a database of innocent individuals in order to keep out the troublemakers. It would be just as effective and less of a security concern if they just stored the data of known troublemakers and scanned everyone who entered but only to check against the blacklist of offenders so that innocent revellers could remain anonymous.

Building a database of everyone is just going to increase the chances of false positives and misidentifying someone as a violent troublemaker when they are not. Plus any database that contains biometric data of thousands of people is going to be a target of identity thieves.

Labels: Security

Prime minister Tony Blair says it beggars belief that members of his party would be considering to rebel against the government in the parliamentary vote on anti-terror legislation.

The Guardian: Anti-terror rebels 'beggar belief', says Blair

Tony Blair today used the Labour party's conference platform to attack rebel MPs who plan to derail the government's anti-terrorism legislation ahead of a raft of key votes due to take place in parliament next week.

Mr Blair attacked dissenters in the party, saying that it "beggars belief" that "some of our own" would try and remove references to glorification of terrorism in the parliamentary bill now making its way through parliament.

"It simply beggars belief that we send such a signal at such a time," he told delegates. "And I profoundly disagree with the view of those who want to water down the laws against terrorism that these laws infringe our civil liberties. Yes, freedom of speech is an ancient British liberty. But it should be exercised with responsibility because if it isn't, another ancient liberty - the right to life - is put at risk."

I wrote briefly about the issue of the opposition to the anti-terror legislation when writing about the jailing of Abu Hamza. Frankly I think it 'beggars belief' that a Labour government would be pushing to introduce even more draconian laws than we currently have and infringing people's civil liberties all in their 'war on terror'.

This is the role of parliament isn't it to debate proposed legislation and weigh the benefits against the costs. Is new legislation really necessary? Are we at far greater risk than we were during the height of the IRA's campaigns of violence?

JG Ballard was right in the future car crashes will be the new porn.

The Islamist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has been jailed for seven years after he was found guilty of preaching murder as a religious duty.

But oddly the Government saw this as a vindication of their belief that new laws are needed.

Gordon Brown said the sentence showed there would be no tolerance for "preachers of hate". But he added: "It shows why we need laws against the glorifying of terrorism and why we need to stop extremist Muslim clerics trying to enter the country."

Now I'm not opposed in principle to the introduction of laws against the glorifying of terrorism but to use a case where someone was convicted under existing laws seems like political opportunism.

The terrorism bill failed not just because the opposition were just trying to defeat the government but because the clauses dealing with glorification of terrorism were ambiguous and badly constructed.

I had the most bizarre dream. What dream isn't bizarre but this one felt very real.

For some reason my cinema had decided to organise a cinematic event in some country house hotel somewhere. I can't remember quite where but presumably fairly local to Bath. Although it wasn't me that agreed to do this event it was me that was tasked with organising it and so a few of the staff and I turned up at this hotel with a projector and portable screen and we'd managed to sell 72 tickets for the event in advance at the cinema. I discover that the room it is to be screened in is the TV room and is not especially large and it has several sofas in it but no way is there enough room for all the expected ticket holders. But I wasn't fazed by this and imagined that somehow we'd manage to fit everyone in.

I was more concerned with the fact that I needed to piss and was looking around for a toilet I was told by one of the hotel staff that there was a toilet located off the room through the door they were pointing at. So I proceeded in that direction to discover the Al Gore room. Why it was named after the former Vice President of the US I have no fucking clue and in my dream it seemed very odd to me. The Al Gore room itself was basically a very large conservatory which extended around three of the walls at the back of the hotel. In fact it was shaped like the letter E with the middle prong extending into the main building of the hotel with the other two prongs extending around the sides of the hotel building in a kind of interlocking manner.

The Al Gore room was quite large and I walked through it up one prong as it were not finding hide nor hair of the spoken of toilet until I reached the back of the hotel and could look out the large glass windows onto the gardens and the pond which had frozen over and there was a light dusting of snow on the grass of the garden. Investigating thje room further I discover along one side of the middle prong was a stage on which a band was playing but still no toilet. Onwards and around the corner to the final prong of this large E shaped room and I found a cafeteria here like you might find in a motorway service area, A Little Chef or something similar. But still no fucking toilet and now I'm pissed off and my bladder is bursting.

So I walk quickly all the way back the way I had come to find the door I had entered into the Al Gore room via and back into the main area of this hotel. No sign of the staff member either so I walk along the corridor to the TV room and notice a sign which says Staff Toilet not for hotel guests. Well fuck the rules I'm using this as I'm not going to be able to hold it in much longer. Through the door I discover the weirdest public toilet I've ever seen. Firstly there is a bath in the far corner and the urinals in a row on the wall are shaped like basins rather than the usual shape and they are all full to the brim with blue water. I have no choice but to piss into one of these and risk making the water spill on the floor. But full as it is it doesn't overflow when I piss into it.

With the toilet business now dealt with I can return to my bedroom which the hotel has decided to give me and the rest of the staff complimentary for putting on the show. That's pretty much all I can remember of it.

Although it probably took many days to complete construction of this awesome Difference Engine made from Lego.



This Difference Engine was constructed by Andrew Carol and is apparently capable of computing 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits. Charles Babbage's design for Difference Engine No.2, which was finally constructed by the Science Museum in 1991 as Nineteenth century machining wasn't quite up to the task, could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy.

Even so Andrew Carol has managed an astounding feat I believe. If only I had the time and blocks to construct one of my very own.

goes to Swamp Thing.

Amazingly the Earth Elemental himself is down with technology, next thing you know he'll have started podcasting also.

until St. Valentine's day and many a young man is wondering what they should be getting their sweetheart.

Well I think this an appropriate gift for that blonde buddhist Yorkshire lass in one's life.

With thanks to Spiderlegs for the link.

But on closer inspection the story isn't as ridiculous as it might first appear.

Richardson County District Judge Daniel Bryan, in sentencing Matthew Koso, 23, of Falls City, Nebraska, said the criminal law in the case was "very plain and direct."

Koso's wife Crystal is only 15 years of age and though the marriage was legal in Kansas with her mother's consent Nebraska law forbids sexual relations between adults 19 and older and children under 16. The chief piece of evidence was the couple's daughter.

I'm troubled by this especially considering that they started their relationship when she was allegedly only 12 years old and clearly a child in comparison to his age which at that time would have been 20.

He crossed a line that he shouldn't have but when her mother gave consent for the marriage then his transgression was ratified by the family and subsequently by Kansas law. Even so I have to wonder if anything is served by imprisoning him, perhaps only as an example for others. What the outcome of this should be is changes to Kansas law to make it clear that such relationships are wrong.

Labels: Sex

Man arrested for shoving ice cream into mailbox

A man who shoved ice cream into a mailbox here has been arrested for violating the Mail Law, police said Saturday.

Yoshiaki Kobayashi, 42, admitted to the allegations. "I was frustrated because my job was not going well. I wanted to vent my anger," he was quoted as telling investigators.

This is just too bizarre. The stress of being a salaryman must have really gotten to this poor fellow.

Cthulego Rises!
The Monsters of the Cthulego Mythos are accidentally awoken by Lord Sinister. This is the best use of Lego I've seen in a long time. It's a remarkably detailed model.

The nominees for the 2006 Academy Awards have been announced.

As you would expect some films received the nominations they were expecting but there were a few surprises.

The Constant Gardener was pretty much overlooked with only the screenplay and Rachel Weisz receiving nominations.

George Clooney has received multiple nominations both as an actor in Syriana and as the director and writer of Good Night Good Luck.

Biggest surprise to me was the nomination of William Hurt as Best Supporting Actor for A History of Violence. I didn't believe this when I first heard it because for me the one thing about the movie that made it less than perfect was his performance. I thought he was awful in that role.

Thanks to Murky.org for the following quote

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
Winston Churchill, Nov 21, 1943

And for reminding me that Pledgebank has another pledge for people who wish to resist the introduction of Identity Cards but cannot directly refuse to register because of professional or family responsibilities.