Archive for October, 2006

OK! Minolta is out of the market, but it’s still a pretty good flash for Minolta, Konica-Minolta and Sony users. There are some available on the second-hand market and Sony new HVL-F56AM is virtually identical to the original Minolta issue.

Read the review from Imaging Resource. It tells you all about using this flash for wireless control of multi-flash (the speciality of Konica-Minolta/Sony and this specific model).

Wired senior editor, Kevin Poulsen, has done one thing that MySpace said was impossible: Finding a registered sex-offender on the social network web site.

Now, you would say that this is good news. I have a differing opinion. Let’s remember that he is now announcing the delivery of the tools that would allow anyone else to do it on their one. It could well be opening a hunt for sexual predators on MySpace and we should remember what happened when UK newspapers started to publish list of sexual offenders: It led to terrorising innocent people who happened to be mis-identified by the high-tech mob. This is not going to do anything positive for Justice.

Source: TwitchGuru.

I am not sure if this is linked to the recent attack of US satellites by Chinese blinding laser beams, but GW.Bush signed recently a policy that states that “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power” and that “the United States will preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space… and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests.”

It is not including explicit need for deployment of space weapons. This would be going directly against international space treaties.

Source: BBC.

The last figures have now been published: Sony finished counting the beans after several months of news of exploding laptop PC batteries and of worldwide product recalls. instead of 130 billion yens, they forecast to dive into a loss of about 50 billion yens.

It is left to be seen what impact it will have on a company for which bad news were piling up (last year’s fiasco of the digital rights managemetn software on Sony BMG music CDs, the delays/problems of the PlayStation 3, exploding batteries). But the worse may well be behind them now, and Sony strengths may shine again (PlayStation Portable - PSP, Vaio laptop PC line, digital photo, Bravia line of high-end television sets).

Sources: The Inquirer & Tom’s Hardware daily.

Windows Vista is not yet available (still in beta test under the name of RC2), but both major 3D graphic card technology providers announced the availability of their new drivers under the WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) certification.

• ATI, on the 26th September
• NVidia, on the 19th October

This announces that your graphic card, either old or new, should be usable under Windows Vista. However, you still have to remember that if you do not have a recent card, most of the graphic bells and whistles of Vista will not be accessible and if you want to look at HD video your card will have to be of the latest generation in order to be compatible with the HDMI specification (and it is the same for your display). Be prepared for a buying season when Vista is out.

My home LAN router is a Linksys BEFSX41 (v1.0) as you may remember from my previous information about Linksys BEFSX41 upgrades. A few days ago, I decided to come back to upgrading the router (in the faint hope of increasing its performance).

The latest firmware available for download is currently 1.52.10. However, my first move was to go and look around to see what kind of experience others would have about it. The most interesting part was opening the Linksys forums at DSLreport.

From my point of view, it’s clear that even if we have been waiting a couple of years to see a new stable version of the firmware it is not yet time to upgrade safely.

My advice is still to keep the old v1.45.3 (or possibly v1.45.7) obtained from their FTP site.

AllOfMp3.com, the MP3 music web site publishing from the territory of Russia is in real trouble. Probably really pissed of by the very low prices found there and because AllOfMp3 does not include Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the downloaded MP3 files (some of the copyright holders even tell that the sale is completely illegal in the absence of a direct contract between AllOfMp3 and them), some American companies apparently pressured Visa and MasterCard into denying the music site the means to collect online payments using the credit cards of these two major networks.

Of course, this is threatening directly the short-term viability of the company. They are currently thinking of both legal actions and offering completely free downloads that would be financed by advertisment.

Even if it may not really be linked to the Google buyout, YouTube announced that it had removed nearly 30000 videos from its web site after the request of Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) who detected infractions about the copyrights they manage.

You had to admit that a significant part of the YouTube success comes from the publication of some videos that should be protected by the copyright laws. Not many movies, but some TV shows, music video clips (music and young Internet users are repeated bedfellows). It will be interesting to follow the way this will evolve and how it will influence the success (or lack) of YouTube.

Source: Arstechnica.

After my previous posts about another supposedly Zurich-based financial company, I received another call from a company claiming to be Zurich-based and ready to offer financial services on the New York Stock Exchange: Hunter William Associates. They want me to consider investing in some companies. The first tip they provided is relating to a respected company trading on th NASDAQ and having announced a few hours before some news that could push the stock up (The person calling me, Mr Lindley, hinted at having some information that would help me have some time advantage while it appears that it’s only recent public news, but I may have misunderstood the exact words of Mr Lindley). The stock in question actually climbed significantly in the following days. On the third phone call, the sales pitch included an observation that the stock price was already climbing after his first good advice.

As always if you receive such a kind of financial proposal, I advise extreme caution (this is your money they will be playing with). After all, the reason why we are confident with leaving our money in a bank is because these establishments are strongly regulated and provide a very good security for our investment. It is a good idea to check first what this company is.

A preliminary step is to look for them in Google. They should probably appear quite prominently since they are supposed to be a 5-6 year-old company with a web site. They are not visible with the odd exception of one PDF page that proposes links to rate companies (but there is no rating here).

Lacking some information, I checked the domain name (hwilliamassociates.com) on www.SamSpade.org in order to know more about it. It has been created on the 12th of October 2006 (so exactly five days before the first phone call I received). This is the real surprise. It looks a lot like a scammer just registered a domain name, opened a web site and started placing phone calls.

To complement this first very bad impression, I decided to check whether this company physically existed. First, looking at the mail address (Hagenholzstrasse 20, 8050 Zurich). Using Google, I could confirm that it seems to be a large tower building hosting a number of companies. Apart from calling one after the other to know if they know about Hunter William Associates I didn’t see any way to confirm their existence.

Second, I have been trying to find the company in the Swiss Register of Commerce (contrary to what is the normal state in the US, all companies must register to the Handelsregisteramt before starting to operate). Fortunately, it is quite easy to get the information back by querying one of the following web sites:

• http://www.hra.zh.ch/internet/ji/hra/en/home.html for companies registered in Switzerland (you can choose the exact location).
• http://www.zefix.ch/ for brand names and business names.

Unfortunately for Hunter William Associates, they do not appear anywhere there (despite their telling me that they are a 5-6 year old company incoprorated in Zurich with a smaller office in London).

It doesn’t look very good. It starts looking more and more like we have a real scammer on our hands and not a traditional financial services outfit.

If you are in the same position as I am, it is probably time to ask for assistance from the financial regulation authorities in your country (for France, this is Autorité des Marchés Financier - AMF).

 

I’ll tell you more about this later (probably after some more phone calls from them).

Our friends from Australia also have their digital photo blog. It is not often updated, but the reviews are quite documented.

A quick security information newsbit about my prefered web browser (Opera): Security outfit iDefense just found a bug, that would have significant security implications, in the recent Opera versions 9.0 and 9.01.

Version 9.02 is immediately available on the site and corrects this.

VillageVoice has a long paper about what food is really aphrodisiac. Is it for real?