Sneak seldom knows what might lie in next week’s diary, so is suitably impressed by BT futurologists Ian Nield and Ian Pearson, who have gone public with their technology forecasts for the next 46 years. Apart from proving that if you want to be a futurologist it helps to be called Ian, the two have demonstrated that, in the age-old tradition of fairground gypsies, it pays to deliver your predictions in as complicated a manner as possible if you want to seem impressive.
In place of a dark tent suffused with incense, a crystal ball, the flash of ringed fingers and swirl of taffeta scarves, BT has opted for a dark Flash animation with swirling coloured lines and a load of balls: little coloured circles that, when clicked, unfurl into a fortune-cookie-like forecast. Never mind that the complete tally of actual predictions could be written down quite succinctly on half a sheet of paper.
Oddly, given that the pair work for BT, their predictions stretch far into the future for topics like machine input/output (2049: “Brain downloads”), but for telecommunications the duo can see only as far as 2008: “HDTV over broadband”.
Either the pair expect BT to move out of telecoms and into brain-bottling, or they’re keeping their firm’s powder very dry indeed.

August 22, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Up to one in ten branded IT products sold worldwide could be counterfeit, according to auditor KPMG. And what’s more, it is not talking about ripped-off copies of Windows or Office. Apparently everything from counterfeit branded routers and switches to lookalike servers are being fed surreptitiously into the sales channel by unscrupulous traders, leaving IT buyers in the lurch when they call for vendor support. So next time someone says “Pssst” and offers to sell you a Louis Vuitton mid-span hub, Burberry packet-sniffer or DKNY patch cables, just say no.

August 22, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

On a recent business trip Adam Laurie, technical director of UK-based secure hosting firm The Bunker (whose name arose because it owns a bunker, naturally), apparently got bored and did what any other thumb-twiddling security consultant might do. He got out his laptop and hacked into the hotel TV. According to an account on Wired’s web site, Laurie used the infrared port on his notebook to pose as a remote control handset, and managed to gain what sounds like root access to the hotel TV system. And the result wasn’t simply all the free porn that his eyeballs could tolerate. Many hotels use the TV as a billing system and even as an internet access device, and Laurie reports that he was able to view his fellow guests’ potentially embarrassing TV choices – no-one likes to admit to watching Ross Kemp - as well as their emails and web site visits. Sneak is not entirely clear if hacking a TV is illegal – it sounds like it must be – but Sneak for one may well “accidentally” enable the IrDA port of his own laptop come the next business trip. For evaluating security, obviously, not for free porn.

August 8, 2005 Television | Permalink | Comments (0)

Having struggled to convince firms that the wonders of web conferencing will slash travel costs and improve productivity, Microsoft has resorted to the oldest marketing tactic of them all – bribery. And Sneak reckons there could be some unexpected corporate benefits from the company's decision to reward users of its Live Meeting web conferencing service with gifts such as air-miles. Suffer through enough sessions with jittery sound and an image more liable to break up than a boy band, and eventually you might earn enough miles to fly to a proper meeting where you can learn what was actually being said.

August 8, 2005 Business intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak has been watching with some bemusement the sheer amount of media coverage given to Apple's latest product. No, it isn't a new release of the world-beating Unix-based Mac OS X operating system, but…. a mouse. Yes, that's right a mouse. With more than one button.
Twenty years later than everyone else, Apple has finally discovered that a single-button mouse is a little bit limiting on your input options.
But strictly speaking, the Mighty Mouse doesn't have buttons, but sensors that detect which side of its upper surface you are pressing; "Capacitive sensors under Mighty Mouse's seamless top shell detect where your fingers are and predict your clicking intentions, so you don’t need two buttons - just two fingers."
By an amazing coincidence, this is precisely what Sneak will need the next time Apple wants to talk about its latest 'innovation'.

August 4, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (4)

A week or so ago we were reporting the spat between software giant Oracle and security firm Red Database Security, over what constitutes a serious bug. Oracle said that it prioritises bug fixing according to the severity of the flaw, but RDS charged that three flaws it rated as high risk had remained unfixed for three years.
It seems to Sneak that the root of this dispute lies in the lack of a common scale for measuring the magnitude of flaws. There is no Richter Scale for software errors, and clearly there should be.
Sneak feels that if any firm is to take the lead in defining the limits of error severity, it should be Microsoft, which clearly knows a thing or three about bugs. And the measure should be named the Wilson scale, in honour of Chris Wilson, lead program manager for Internet Explorer, and his ability to pin down bugs in terms that really matter. While explaining why the upcoming IE 7 won’t meet all W3C specs in his blog, he inadvertently defined the top end of the Wilson Scale: “I believe we are doing a much better service to web developers out there by fixing our known bang-your-head-on-the-desk bugs first.”

August 2, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is well aware of the debate about the right time to announce software flaws, given how hackers might exploit the information. Some say it is best to know if you’re vulnerable even if a patch is unavailable, so that you might pay extra attention to affected systems. Others say early disclosure of even the smallest flaw simply gives hackers a heads-up. But Sneak was not aware until recently that the timing debate affected entire planets. Apparently California-based astronomer Mike Brown was rushed into the recent announcement of a tenth planet orbiting the sun after hearing that hackers had sniffed over his data. Not yet certain of his facts but fearing that script kiddies might grab his limelight, Brown went public – only to learn that the supposed hackers had actually viewed only publicly available telescope logs.
Sadly the news will only galvanise a certain breed of geek - who believe that everything up there can be found out by looking in the right place down here - typified by 39-year-old Briton Gary McKinnon, who stands accused of hacking into 97 US government computers between February 2001 and March 2002. He allegedly undertook his attacks to prove that that the US military is covering up the existence of UFOs.

August 1, 2005 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)