Teknovis

I read an article during the week about a letter of support for Net Neutrality from some of the biggest, and most well-known, Internet based companies in the world. The article is Big names support net neutrality, and it lists the following supporters:

The letter, signed by the chief executives of Google, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Amazon and Sony Electronics among others, says that maintaining data neutrality helps businesses to compete on the basis of content alone.

And…

Other signatories included community websites Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn and Craigslist.

This list of companies does not really surprise me, as they probably have the most to gain from Net Neutrality. Conversely, it is probably the telcos who have the most to loose!

Tags: Amazon, Craigslist, Digg, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Google, LinkedIn, Net Neutrality, Skype, Sony

I read today that Manchester Airport has installed full body scanners to determine if users are carrying prohibited items. These scanners are developed by Rapiscan Systems, and the idea of them is that they will provide greater security for passengers, as well as improving their travelling experiences.

For more information about these scanners read Airport scanner shows ‘naked’ images or watch the video in ‘Naked’ scanner in airport trial.

Clearly such scanners will raise security concerns. Therefore, certain measures will be taken to protest users privacy:

• The operators will be in separate locations
• The operators will not be able to see the passengers’ faces
• The operators cannot use personal devices to capture images
• The images cannot be stored by the system

These measures are admirable, but I am not sure if they are really that useful.

Personally, I would not mind somebody seeing these images of my body, especially if it improves my airport experience!

However, I wonder will these scanners be used in other locations in the future, without knowledge or consent of the people being scanned. For example, such a scanner could be used at the entrance of a nightclub. Would this be a valid privacy concern?

Tags: Rapiscan Systems, UK

New Unit of Reviewed Code Quality

Very funny :D

I got my first Bank of Ireland phishing email last week, and I have got about three per day since! A typical one looks like this:

Subject: 365 Banking: You are required to confirm your email address
Date: Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:50:23 +0200
From: Bank of Ireland <accounts@boi.ie>
To: xxx@xxx.xxx

http://www.sp-ad.com/.www.365online.ie/

The url looks really convincing, and I found it quite difficult to explain how to extract the domain name to some non-technical friends.

The page looks really convincing also! I did not visit it myself, but I used an online service to capture a screenshot of it:

Bank of Ireland Phishing Screenshot

The real page can be viewed at https://www.365online.com/.

Tags: Bank of Ireland, Phishing

There were two interesting conferences on in Dublin this week.

• BizCamp Dublin in The Digital Hub
• The Global Irish Economic Forum in Farmleigh (I am sceptical about the number and quality of the Irish politicians involved in this conference!)

Unfortunately, I did not have time to attend either conference :( (Even if I did have time, I would not have been invited to one of them :D )

Tags: BizCamp, Ireland

I had to validate some web pages today that are optimised for mobile devices. I found ready.mobi very useful!

The web pages that I checked got a score of 5. I do not know what the maximum score is though!

Tags: ready.mobi

I learned today that DCU is to outsource all of its email to Google. I estimate that DCU must have tens of thousands of email accounts. So I would have thought that it would be more cost effective to provide this service in-house.

For more detail about this see Information Systems and Services.

Tags: DCU, Google

A friend recently sent me this interesting article – Super-safe Web browsing.

I read about the latest PDA from HTC today – my favourite PDA manufacturer :o Its latest offering is the HTC Hero. Probably the best review that I read was HTC Hero review.

HTC Hero

This PDA appears to be very nice, although its “chin” (the bent piece at the bottom) seems strange!

I have not actually handled an Android based PDA yet, so I am not sure that I would be happy to move away from Windows Mobile!

Tags: HTC

I just finished a conversation with a relation who lives abroad. I used Skype on my computer, and the she used her new RTX DUALphone 3088. I bought this phone for her, and it is actually the third RTX DUALphone 3088 that I have bought in the last few weeks for relations abroad :o

RTX DUALphone 3088

The relations that I bought these phones for are all competent Internet users. For example, they would know how to find, download, install, and use Skype, but they would not know how to configure a home broadband router. All three of them with able to use their new phones within a few minutes of opening the boxes!

All three relations are absolutely delighted with the phones to date, and two of them are now using Skype for calls to landlines also!

Perhaps the biggest advantage of these phones is that they plug straight into a broadband router, and that they do not require either a computer or a WiFi connection.

My only complaint with the phone is that it does not support Skype chats. However, the phone automatically updates its firmware, so hopefully this functionality will appear soon!

I found the RTX Skype Dualphone 3088 review – part I review very useful when I was deciding to purchase this phone.

Tags: RTX DUALphone 3088, Skype