Archive for January, 2010

The debate rages, for a few weeks now, after the attempted bombing of the Amsterdam-Detroit flight in which a terrorist tried to ignite an explosive device hidden in his underpants. Shouldn’t we install this wonder technology that allows to strip naked search the passengers and to see anything they transport under their clothes? “Long live the body scanners!” shoot the industry, “This is the end of privacy in transports” reply the freedom rights partisans (and I will not even quote those worried about bringing up uniformed voyeurism).

But shouldn’t the first question be: “Does it work?”

A German TV channel decided to ask the question and invited a leading company in this field for a demonstration of such a machine in a TV studio under the surveillance of their best expert while submitting a “would-be terrorist” to a body scan.

You don’t need to speak German to understand what happened: All goes down the drain when the machine sees the wireless microphone box at the belt of the “guinea pig”, but -most important- does not detect the presence of several components of chemical products that will be used to manufacture a powerful explosive (very similar to what happened on last Christmas, wouldn’t you say?)

Technology failed here.

You really want to install those expensive gizmos in airports for the sake of theatrical security?

And don’t make me believe that this was unfair: No airport can hope to keep the manufacturer expert in front of the machine to analyze the images… The reality would be much worse. The fact that the “victim” did his best to hide the chemical products was just representative of what a determined terrorist would be trying with a real bomb.

Suppose you’re a crocodile and you want to cross a river. What would be better than avoiding water altogether by walking on the back of hippos? Nothing, except that hippos are not zebras. Click on the picture to see the whole story.

Copyright (C) Vaclav Silha/Barcroft

After all, there is no surprise when you know that, in Africa, the hippo is the worst wildlife killer of men.

Photograph: Vaclav Silha/Barcroft, for Guardian.co.uk.

The document scanner has long been a tool of the most usual appearance and scanning a digital copy of a document is now of such ease that anybody can do it. Nevertheless, there is a large gap between a pro scan of a full book and the slightly better than average Xerox-like copy that we all do.

Most of it comes from the use of masterful algorithms of cleaning, cropping, re-cropping, aligniment, correction, optimisation that are usually included in some very complex and very expensive pro software scanning tools. Thanks to Scan Tailor, this is no longer the cas. It is open source and it does it all like the pros.

Scan Tailor

This week has seen a pretty exhilarating story develop in front of our Internet eyes. Started as a muddy conflict between Google and the People’s Republic of China, it turned into a Firefox marketing victory. Let me summarize it a bit.

In the beginning was Google which installed its servers in China in 2006. The “do no evil” company accepted the conditions of the government of the PRC and included heavy filtering and censoring of its search results (looking for Tienanmen will produce wildly different results in and out of China). But in January 2009, Google discovered that some hackers obtained some detailed information out of its own servers at this was targeting both American companies and Chinese political opponents or partisans of free speech in China. Subsequently, Google announced its intention of both lifting the censorship and leaving China.

What is still very unclear:

• Is Google really serious about these two options?
• Is the main reason for its ire, the political chase or the technological spying? (the US government including Hilary Clinton pushed hard with Google)

What is clear:

• The breach of information seems limited (only email subject lines have been breached, not contents).
• The hackers were affiliated to Chinese official bodies and did not only target Google.
• The hackers used some social engineering and security issues present in Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF, which were probably known but not closed by Microsoft and Adobe.

So, when such information appears in wide open channels of the world press, what happens? Most experts started commenting on the security loopholes in Internet Explorer 6 (and about Adobe PDF reader, too). Many people observed that Internet Explorer 6 is rather old and it is unfortunate that so many people still use it despite the known fact that it is a security liability when browsing the Internet. With such a rush, some very official people also asked for replacement of Internet Explorer (mainly v6) to be replaced with more modern browsers. Even representatives of the German, French and Australian governments asked their countries to replace Internet Explorer with something else.

3x Firefox

The competition has seen this as a godsend since it created a rush for the other available browsers. For example (see the graph on the side), Firefox saw a brutal explosion of its downloads in Germany (nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in four days): about three times more than usual. It has been true in other countries even if it was not measured as precisely, and it has been observed by the other browsers Opera, Safari, Chrome (currently profiting from heavy advertising in some European countries like France).

This was definitely a good thing since it was bringing better browsers to many computers. It could have stayed there but there were several reaction and parallel events happening at the same time. The first one was that Firefox was preparing a major upgrade to the successful browser (in many parts of the world Firefox is now used by more Internet users than Internet Explorer). Named v3.6, this new version is bigger than what could have been expected from its small number increase (from 3.5 to 3.6 should have been a minor upgrade). This major event accelerated the rush, with people looking for features like:

• Built-in skins, to make it more personalized
• Faster, more stable
• More security conscious with the addition of user-level messages about risks, including reminders about what plug-ins are outdated and must be upgraded.
• Visual tab previews, which show you the tabs when you press Ctrl-Tab
• Aptitude to browse without leaving too many footsteps and traces in your PC (good for clean browsing like when you visit Adult sites)

This version is also appreciated by developers who will find a bunch of little improvements (like CSS gradients).

This is not only a great story to read. This is a great browser and you should consider downloading Firefox 3.6 now!

If you are not completely convinced, you should also consider downloading the newest Opera browser. Opera v10.10 has been available for a few months now and it also offering these advantages, plus some neat features like:

• Opera Unite: to easily share information between Opera users and browsers, without using a web site or a share folder on some social network.
• Opera Turbo: to adapt Opera to very slow Internet connections.
• Speed dial: to get a faster access to some web sites you choose (bookmarks on steroids).
• Mouse moves for faster commands.
• Opera link: to share bookmarks, speed dial configurations between several machines where you use Opera.

Opera is clearly my preferred browsing solution (even if I need to test my web sites on everything I can find, Opera is the central hub of my Internet browsing). Go and download Opera v10.10 now.

And, if you are not sure yet, I can also offer the small and fast browser from Google: Chrome. Since it all started around Google and China, it was worth mentioning, of course.

All this has been going so fast that Microsoft needed to do something. Of course, they have a newer version of Internet Explorer (IE8 is included in Windows 7 and can be downloaded freely. But this was not enough, too many people were starting to complain that Microsoft may wait about a month before updating IE6 in the normal update cycle. Even worse, some experts started telling the world that Microsoft actually was aware of this flaw in IE6 for many months. In such conditions, not doing anything usually turns out to produce a public relations nightmare and prepares for bad wind.

So, Microsoft rushed an out-of-band update to IE6 and Windows Update is now offering the correction to all Windows users still using IE6 (of course, you still have to use Windows Update and it is well known that too many people do not have this configured or do not accept the proposed updates – this is wrong and one the reasons so many PCs are infected with Trojan horses, virus and adwares). Now, if you did not move to a later Windows version and if you did not take advantage of the much better IE7 or IE8, it’s time to upgrade your old hag.

We can expect to see a few more updates to this story in the future, but there is a lesson to be learned (by Google, and most Internet users):

Always keep your browser up-to-date and refrain from clicking on any link in a mail message you did not expect.

Additionally, there is a lesson for Microsoft:

Sorry! but even the older software has to be kept alive when you are or have been the near-monopoly on this technology. This comes with responsibilities.

The Cygnus name will certainly remind you of something ig you are interested into GNU/Linux, but maybe not more. Actually, this is a software package which has been designed to provide a lot of the “basic” Linux commands to be used from inside a Command-Line box of Windows.

Version 1.7 of Cygnus is now available that supports Windows 7 (but drops support for Windows 95, 98 & Me).

As if this was not enough, this version also has the capability to configure IPv6 (if you are already attracted by this solution) or supports multiple installations.

Cygnus v1.7-1.1 new release.

A great classic piece of music from Rossini, Duetto buffo di due gatti is interpreted here by two young singers whose countenance is all the more appreciated for their honorable clothes and the Korean public that appreciated a lot the unexpected performance.

An enormous aquarium in Japan (Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium).

Think about it: Some divers dream of meeting a Whale Sharks. Here, you can meet four of them!

All phones are not born equal. Some people seem to believe that the iPhone has a marvelous touch panel. But is this pure marketing BS? Is it Apple fans going overboard? MOTO, a small company supporting the development of high-tech gadgets and products, has created a (rather simple) test to check the precision and comfort of touch panels. It’s very easy: The tester will just draw simple lines on the screen and the software will display what the phone has recognized. Long lines drawn at an angle on the screen should display as such: Long lines.

Then, you apply that to a set of high-end phones: iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One (the most prominent product on this mobile market). Of course, there is a difference if you press very lightly or if you push significantly on the screen with your finger.

Light finger touch

Light pressure

Medium pressure

Medium pressure

All in all, it seems quite obvious that the iPhone has a strong advance in terms of sensitivity (light touch) while the HTC and Nexus One (HTC apparently designed this phone for Google) are quite good if you accept to press a little more.

So, Apple is not only marketing the iPhone through the roof; They also have a very good product and this explains (in part, at least) that the customers are so happy with the man-machine interface.
(more…)

If you’re like most people, you’d like to have pretty wallpaper on your desktop background. You can always go to wallpaper web sites but most of them are choke-full of ads and they always provide the same usual set. How about getting new ones?

Use Google.

Now, Google is able to search images by size. Just enter your screen size and you will be treated to a galore of images. If you also search for the word “wallpaper”, you are sure to find exactly what you need.

For my own 24″ screen, I could find brightly colored pictures or elegant designs. All designed to be wallpapers, even when no wide-audience web site had found it yet.

Free wallpapers on Google

did I mention that it also works for dual-screen wallpapers? And did I mention that it’s free? (for a commercial use, this would not be an acceptable practice)

It looks a little like advertising a DVD, but I had some real fun listening to these:

Go to the web site for more: Old jews telling jokes.

Beards, they are amazing, full of surprises, flowering with novelty. Do you want some evidence?

You can join the competition for the beard holding the largest number of wooden toothpicks:

2222 toothpicks in a single beard!

If you feel a pinch, don’t accuse the beard!

In order to stay on the competition field, there was this beard contest in Alaska in May 2009. The new champion: David Traver.
(more…)