Almost a year ago, Kevin Poulsen wrote an article at SecurityFocus.com describing the tactics that DirecTV was using to home in on satellite TV pirates. Problem is that detecting who is receiving a satellite signal is very hard (though the dish on the side of the house might be a giveaway in many cases). So DTV resorted to chasing the people selling the equipment that could be used to hack their system receivers and smartcards.

Problem there is that electronics enthusiasts, and even some potential entrepreneurs such as the doctor mentioned in the story above, have perfectly legitimate uses for this equipment. DTV is not the only company using smart card technology, nor do they have any right to restrict who uses the technology. Sure, DTV has a right to prevent people stealing their signal, but as many seem to be forgetting in this country, people are innocent until proven guilty.

Yesterday, SecurityFocus published a new story from Kevin Poulsen about one John Fisher, a former employee of DTV who was tasked with getting settlements from people who had bought this type of equipment, many of whom had simply had an interest in smartcard technology. John Fisher is now filing suit against DTV for asking him to do unethical, and perhaps even illegal, things as part of his job, thereby forcing him to resign. Don’t know how I feel about that as a case in itself, but his filing makes for interesting reading about the tactics DTV was allegedly using. The account on page 10 of the filing, where DTV was allegedly trying to get a $3500 settlement from a person who bought a leather pouch is especially good, as is the case on page 30 where the accused points out that he was regularly paying for his DirecTV service at the time, but was still told he had to pay the settlement for purchasing an illegal programming device.

Last night we went to see Mamma Mia! at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco. It is a hilariously funny show and, of course, packed full of feel-good ABBA music.

Amazingly, it is almost exactly thirty years since ABBA burst onto the scene as winners of the Eurovision Song Contest in the seaside town of Brighton in the south-east of England on April 6, 1974. That song, Waterloo, is not part of the show itself, but was part of the closing sequence with the audience all standing and dancing along. Many of their best known songs are in the score though: Dancing Queen, Super Trouper, S.O.S., Thank You For The Music and The Winner Takes It All to name a few of the 22 songs listed in the programme.

The story is set on a small Greek island. Sophie is about to get married and is trying to work out which of three men (a travel writer, a banker and an architect) is her father. Her mother is not sure, and hasn’t seen any of them in years. Sophie has invited all three to her wedding, but sent the invitations in her mother’s name.

If you get a chance to see this one, go for it! One of the best musicals I have ever seen for sure.

Trust Me, a short story by Frederick Waterman was in the December 2003 copy of United Airlines Hemispheres Magazine. I started reading it only after I’d read everything else in the magazine, and just one page in I was hooked. Unfortunately, the Hemispheres website seems to be down so I cannot tell if they have the full text online.

The link above though is to the Row22.com website, and the story is one of a number that have been collated in a new book Row 22, Seats A&B, available from that webpage. None of the other online bookstores I searched had copies (and only Barnes & Noble and Campus I even knew about it).

I haven’t posted anything about this before on the grounds that I didn’t really have anything to add to what appears to be one of the biggest scams of all time. Then, while tidying up, I read an article in SD Magazine that had a new angle on the whole episode.

The article is available online, but you will need to register (free). The part of the article that caught my eye was a bullet list following a quote from the Salt Lake City SEC office boss, Kenneth Israel, that was first published in a Forbes article by William P. Barrett. That quote was simple: “There is a lot of fraud here per capita.”

The list can be summarised as follows:

• David Boies’ law firm joins a partnership in which they received $1M & 400,000 SCO shares. They make the most if the stock rises and the parties settle (though it seems highly unlikely that IBM will settle at the moment).
• Before the lawsuit SCO stock was hovering around the $1 mark; since then it has been as high as $22 (though it is only $8.71 at the time of writing), and they’ve issued 300,000 new shares at a par value of $0.0001 (yes, 1/10 of a cent).
• Several SCO officers have sold large quantities of stock, and also received new options to buy the stock at that $0.0001 price. Could this whole lawsuit simply be a new take on the classic “pump & dump” scheme?
• Finally, SCO used some of the new stock to buy another company, Vultus. So what? Well, Vultus was founded by the Canopy Group who also founded Caldera, the company that became SCO. They share a board member too: SCO Group Chairman Ralph J. Yarro III was a board member at Vultus. Conveniently, they were also located in the same office building as SCO before the acquisition.

The blueDonkey.org Executive Ratings for SCOX doesn’t have many votes at the moment, but they are all negative!

Checking the logs for blueDonkey.org yesterday I noticed a bot/crawler that I hadn’t seen before (though it may well have been there before since I don’t normally look in the agents list): the TurnitinBot. Unlike most bots though, this one was polite enough to leave not just its name, but also the URL to the page that explains what it is, who owns it and how to stop it scanning your site if you want. Top marks to the folks at Turnitin for netiquette!

What is Turnitin though? Well, it is a fully featured school assignment management system as far as I can see, including a feature that scans student papers for plagiarism. That is where the bot comes in: it scans the internet and builds up a database of information on the internet that it can compare with submitted papers to look for possible plagiarism. Check out the sample report from their website (and also notice the use of Apple’s Safari browser in the screen shot).

Times have changed it seems since I was writing essays. Now there are websites that contain large numbers of essays available for a few dollars. They’re not hiding their purpose either using names like Evil House of Cheat. I’m not going to provide any URLs (if you’re going to cheat, at least show enough initiative to find the sites on your own). That said, it still seems to be a very low number that are really abusing these services and just submitting papers they buy online directly – check out the pie chart on Turnitin’s site that shows less than 1% of students handing in papers from the internet unchanged.

Well, it has been a couple of months now that I’ve had my new Nokia 6100 cell phone on the T-Mobile network, so I thought I’d provide a quick update on how I am getting on with it:

Coverage: For the most part OK. Somewhat annoyingly though my apartment in Alameda is a dead spot (except for when I place the handset on my pillow and use the hands free cord!). Other parts of the bay area have been great for the most part (we have had calls dropped on hospital curve where AT&T was dropping calls every time, but mostly it works flawlessly). The Chandler area in Arizona was not a problem either – it worked perfectly everywhere I tried from the Phoenix airport to Chandler. Tahoe was a little hit and miss though; in the cabin we rented there was almost no signal (though that seemed to be true for all networks we had represented).

Phone: The phone has been great. It is small, light-weight and contains almost all the features I’d like. The one missing thing is the camera, which I wanted to play with more than use seriously so I didn’t mind dropping it from my list when we went shopping in favour of the small size handset. Now though I have discovered a headset + camera accessory for the 6100, so I am going to try to get one and check it out.

Customer Support: Excellent. What more can I say. My 6100 is not a T-Mobile supported/branded phone so it did not come set up with all the GPRS settings for the internet and multi-media message services. I sent them an email last night through their support website, and this morning (Sunday morning!) I had a response with all the information needed to set up both services on my phone.

According to this article in The Register a man with my name has been providing advice to the US president about national security in cyberspace and Wi-Fi networks. Seems he also had some problems getting his wireless network setup in its secure mode.

This reminded me about Googlism – the site where you can enter your name and find out who you really are. My results do include my national security advising alter-ego, but only towards the bottom of the list.

I know I said no more toilets, but this has to be seen to be believed. Check out “Kisses – the sexy urinal.”

They are still in the prototype stage, and no idea of the price is given, but they are aiming for a production run of 500 in May of this year.

Bathroom Mania, the company behind this design, also has some other designs:

• Good Morning Sunshine – a flower pot design
• Handy the towel rack
• Splish Splash – a hammock inspired bathtub
• Summertime – a beach-cabin shower design.

Got home late last night after Evelyn’s farewell party, and as I pulled into the apartment complex I was met by four raccoons. They quickly scurried up a nearby tree, but were still there when I came back from parking the car with my camera ready. One was just about low enough in the tree to take some photos with my little digital. Only just though, as a result the photos are somewhat grainy.

As always, click on the thumbnail for a larger version of the photo.

I have completely given up on Yahoo’s real estate service. Here in the bay area they use ZipRealty as a provider for the service, but since I signed up (you need to register to even browse the listings) I have had my account repeatedly deactivated preventing me from searching. Since my time for searching is usually very late at night, the number they provide to re-activate the account is not useful and there’s no online way to re-activate the account.

So, I have switched to a service that provides all the same access to the listings, and does so without the need for registration: Realtor.com. If you do register (free of charge, of course, but you’ll need to give them an email address etc), then you can save properties that you are interested in and even the search terms (useful if you go to town on the all the options).

All in all, I have been very impressed by their service, at least as good, if not better, than the ZipRealty service, and without the annoying spam email from an agent who wanted to pressure me into buying and then de-activates my account because I haven’t found a place I want to look at that is also in my price range. Not a good way to get sales if you ask me…