The first album I ever fell in love with was the Eagle’s 1977 Hotel California. I must have spun that old vinyl 33 a thousand times on my brand new Ward’s Airline Stereo. Pretty cool stuff for a kid. New stereo, new music. new ideas. I just found out last night, that I’ve never actually heard the song.

I’ve never been a hardcore music fan. My college roommate, ran UCLA’s radio station in the mid 80s, and probably owned a bazillion albums. I had maybe 20. So I’m not really the ultimate customer for an IPOD. I like music, but couldn’t see my way to spending 300 bucks on an MP3 player, or a thousand dollars to fill it up. I’m fine with my car stereo and an occasional tune on the stereo system in my office. So I got picked, as the closest thing to a civilian here in our studios, to evaluate and test what’s new in MP3 players and portable music devices.

So let me tell you right off the bat, bang for the buck, the New SANSA Shaker will rock your world. This 30 dollar MP3 player has a purity and clarity of sound that is just amazing. I loaded up a digitally mastered recording of Hotel California, put in the earbuds, gave it a shake and heard the opening 12 string guitar like i’ve never heard it before. The stereo separation is so perfect, you can feel the marracas shaking on your left, the guitar in the center of your soul, the drummer in front and the audience to your right. Stellar, beautiful, clear, rich, rounded sound. Its almost enough to make you understand why people get addicted to their IPOD. I always wondered what stereo was good for. With the Shaker I understand. The first question I had was: Do all little earbud MP3 players sound this good? I loaded up the song on a $90 dollar VIBE from PNY, popped in my earbuds and heard plain old transister radio quality sound. So, no. Great sound is not a done deal, but the Sansa guys got it right. And this is their bottom of the line unit.

Nevertheless, even though I’m inclined to keep the Shaker myself, I’m not the real target demographic. It says right on the packaging: Ages 8 and UP. Thus, before I had a chance to discover great new sound, my two preteen sons have been marching around for the last week constantly rocking to the beat of their own shakers. My 12 year old has been asking for an IPOD for months, and was thrilled when I tossed him the Shaker. Ergonomically, its no IPOD look alike, so its cool to be the only kid in class carrying one. The Shaker is shaped like a little salt shaker, with a twist band top and bottom to control sound and navigation. Just give it a little wrist flick shake and it’ll randomly pick a new song to play.

He tells me its simple to load songs. (even his mom could do it). Plug in the scsi cable to the bottom of the shaker. Then open an explorer window to the list of songs on his PC, open another to the SANSA (because its built around a removable SD card - just like your digital camera- it shows up as just another removable harddrive on your PC) and drag the files you want from one to the other.

The Shaker is a really well designed little package with intuitive controls and nice extra features. Since the music is stored on a removable SD card (Sandisk’s core product) you can easily expand capacity, and in theory have an unlimited supply of songs available to your shaker.
Even better, you can grab a few low capacity SD cards for 10 bucks a piece and use one for each kid, or even one for you to store that new audio book you just downloaded. Best of all for a rugged little player aimed at kids, the Shaker is easy to share. It comes with an external speaker - so everyone can hear it, has enough power to drive a bigger pair of speakers or feed a stereo system, and even comes with Two headset jacks so the kids can listen together and Mom and Dad can still have some peace and quiet.

All in all, at the price, i would call it a sure fire gift for all of family holiday gift exchanges. The only guys who won’t love the shaker are the Zune product managers over at Microsoft. I don’t see how they are ever gonna be number two with Sansa in their way.

Check out SanDisk’s Product page here to learn more.

A few years ago I began telling relatives that I would not give them technical advice if they didn’t bother to have basic antivirus software or sent me chain mail, jokes or any “look at this” email that didn’t explain in a sentence where I’d be sent, with a link. Any story, no matter how tear-jerking, if it didn’t have a link to its source, would be ignored.

I would even change political parties if my most loathed candidate from the other party would grant me the license to deny Internet access to anyone who sent out 3 debunkable hoaxes that could be found in a 4-word Google search where “Snopes” is one of the words, as in “Snopes microsoft cash”

But what’s getting my goat is just how gullible most well-meaning folks are and how clueless they are about their habits. Bruce Schneier discusses social phishing, and how it is more who sends you an email than its contents that determine whether you’ll go to where it directs you, no matter how dangerous.

Phishing Studies

Two studies. The first one looks at social phishing:

Test subjects received an e-mail with headers spoofed so that it appeared to originate from a member of the subject’s social network. The message body was comprised of the phrase “hey, check this out!” along with a link to a site ostensibly at Indiana University. The link, however, would direct browsers to www.whuffo.com, where they were asked to enter their Indiana username and password. Control subjects were sent the same message originating from a fictitious individual at the university.

The results were striking: apparently, if the friends of a typical college student are jumping off a cliff, the student would too. Even though the spoofed link directed browsers to an unfamiliar .com address, having it sent by a familiar name sent the success rate up from 16 percent in controls to over 70 percent in the experimental group. The response was quick, with the majority of successful phishes coming within the first 12 hours. Victims were also persistent; all responses received a busy server message, but many individuals continued to visit and supply credentials for hours (one individual made 80 attempts).

Females were about 10 percent more likely to be victims in the study, but male students were suckers for their female friends, being 15 percent more likely to respond to phishes from women than men. Education majors had the smallest disparity between experimental and control members, but that’s in part because those majors fell for the control phish half the time. Science majors had the largest disparity–there were no control victims, but the phish had an 80 percent success rate in the experimental group.

Okay, so no surprise there. But this is interesting research into how who we trust can be exploited. If the phisher knows a little bit about you, he can more effectively target your friends.

And we all know that some men are suckers for what women tell them.

Another study looked at the practice of using the last four digits of a credit-card number as an authenticator. Seems that people also trust those who know the first four digits of their credit-card number:

Jakobsson also found a problem related to the practice of credit card companies identifying users by the last four digits of their account numbers, which are random. From his research, it turns out people are willing to respond to fraudulent e-mails if the attacker correctly identifies the first four digits of their account numbers, even though the first four are not random and are based on who issued the card.

“People think [the phrase] ’starting with’ is just as good as ‘ending with,’ which of course is remarkable insight,” he said.

Another attack comes to mind. You can write a phishing e-mail that simply guesses the last four digits of someone’s credit-card number. You’ll only be right one in ten thousand times, but if you send enough e-mails that might be enough.

A virus that compromises my friends’ email address book compromises me. I want to take all email I get from my family and friends seriously, but if they’re sloppy and lax and add me to their To: and cc: lines in their email headers to spread around jokes and stories I last thought were funny in 1998, not only do they put me at risk, but everyone they know now has my legit email address.

Don’t be sloppy with the email addresses of your friends, relatives and business contacts.

Discover and learn to love your email’s BCC.

I really don’t want to have to say these words under oath… “And that’s when I started pummeling them with my cluebat, your honor…”

Whoops.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the U.S. global warming propaganda machine could be huge.

When the epicenter of spam in Nigeria meets the charitable intentions of One Laptop Per Child and the nature of children to explore where they ought not comes:

Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops

Thu 19 Jul 2007, 15:34 GMT

ABUJA, July 19 (Reuters Life!) - Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organisation have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported on Thursday.

NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children’s laptops.

“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials,” NAN said.

A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.

Maybe “one laptop per child” got translated into “one lapdance per child”?

We should also have OLPC consider the wisdom of giving the world’s spam capital more tools to perpetuate their scams.

Security Park confirms something I suspected a couple of weeks ago:

A new form of spam disguised as an Adobe Picture Document Format (PDF) attachment has been reported. The spam takes on the appearance of a legitimate business email containing an attached PDF file.

The PDF features the file name ‘username_report.pdf’ - the username in the file name is the same as the email recipient’s name (taken from their email address). The personalisation of the attachment file name makes it appear more legitimate.

The new spam technique was first used in a recent pump ‘n dump spam outbreak that promoted a German company’s stock. According to the Marshal TRACE team, we can now expect to see ongoing use of PDF attachments to communicate spam messages.

“Spammers are struggling to find ways to fool spam filters and get their messages into people’s inboxes,” said Bradley Anstis, Director of Product Management, Marshal. “Using a PDF file as the vehicle for the spam message is an attempt to do just that, as spammers believe that many anti-spam solutions largely ignore PDF files.

“As we recently reported, pump ‘n dump spam has declined dramatically and part of the reason for this is overuse of this method. Users are more savvy and can more readily identify a financial scam. With the recent PDF spam outbreak, the spammers have attempted to add credibility and legitimacy to their messages in an attempt to fool users,” said Anstis.

“The fact that the message contains a PDF attachment, which is a very common business-related file format, is designed to lower the recipient’s suspicions that the message might be spam. We are expecting to see a lot more of PDF spam. The recent pump ‘n dump spam case promoting the German company’s stocks marks the beginning.”

According to Anstis, in the past, spammers avoided this kind of spamming method because attaching file types like PDFs greatly increased the size of the message. Historically spammers used their own servers to send out spam and were inclined to keep the spam size small, enabling them to send out more messages.

Now with the widespread use of zombie networks and spambots, the spammers are less concerned with the size of the message. The spammers have tens of thousands of infected PCs at their command and are able to move large volumes of spam of this type.

At least it’s not a virus, though with PDFs, it’s easy enough to embed a URL that’ll go to a virus-laden site.

OK, this is a very funny angle. Douglas Karr blogs Is the next President of the United States running Linux?. Read the whole piece, with pie charts.

Here’s a summary:

Site Operating System and Server by Candidate

• Joe Biden (Democrat) - Linux, Zope by Interlix
• Hillary Clinton (Democrat) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Paul Holcomb
• Christopher Dodd (Democrat) - FreeBSD, Apache by pair Networks
• John Edwards (Democrat) - Linux, Apache by Plus Three
• Mike Gravel (Democrat) - Linux, Apache by Voxel Dot Net, Inc.
• Dennis Kucinich (Democrat) - Linux, Apache by New Age Consulting
• Barack Obama (Democrat) - FreeBSD, Apache by pair Networks
• Bill Richardson (Democrat) - Linux, Zope by Interlix
• Wesley Clark (Democrat) - Linux, Apache by Voxel Dot Net, Inc.
• Al Gore (Democrat) - Linux, Apache by Rackspace
• Sam Brownback (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by RackForce Hosting, Inc.
• Jim Gilmore (Republican) - Linux, Apache by 1&1 Internet, Inc.
• Rudy Giuliani (Republican) - Linux, Apache by RackSpace
• Mike Huckabee (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by LNH Inc.
• Duncun Hunter (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Individual
• John McCain (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Smartech Corporation
• Ron Paul (Republican) - Linux, Apache by Rackspace
• Mitt Romney (Republican) - Linux, Apache by Rackspace
• Tom Tancredo (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Interland
• Fred Thompson (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by LNH Inc.
• Tommy Thompson (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Time Warner Telecom, Inc.
• Chuck Hagel (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Individual
• Newt Gingrich (Republican) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Smartech Corporation

So the executive producer of TechTalk sends me this link from Fox News and asks me what I think.

Oy… more blog fodder. So I emailed him:

Do you want me to take a half hour to write something about this?

That the Linux folk are meeting at Google does not portend well for the consumer. There are fewer and fewer potential competitors for Google, and their Google’s dominance combined with their ability to profile users based on click/search activity is an enormous privacy threat.

Ultimately, operating systems and interfaces should become very portable, and almost invisible. In theory, if one had a 5GB thumb drive loaded with browser settings, passwords, etc, someone should be able to “jack in” to a thin client at a Starbucks or library which has a 21″ screen and a USB port and a broadband connection.

No, I do NOT want to use iGoogle or My MSN or other web-based bookmark aggregators designed to enable their owners to send advertising my way and profile my search and click behavior. Nor do I want to keep my addressbooks and business files online so that a disgruntled employee or outsourced foreign programmer too remote for extradition can compromise my privacy.

If you like Vista, fine. If you like OS X, fine. If you like Linux, fine. If you’re still plugging away on an Amiga, more power to you. Just as a vehicle can run on Shell, Exxon or ARCO gas, a thin client terminal will reduce the number of breakable parts to almost none. Let the user be preoccupied with his experience and tweak his thumbdrive from home.

I hate operating systems. I hate the attitudes of OS developers even more. I hate how the press portrays Microsoft as the ultimate technical evil while ignoring Google’s greater dangers to our personal liberties. Yes, Microsoft is evil, but its evils are limited to monopolistic avarice, and that’s hardly the worst evil. Google really wants to control you.

People may portray Microsoft as Gulliver and Linux as poor vulnerable Lilliputians. But most people never read ALL of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and have never heard of Brobdingnag, which I liken to Google, or at least what Google aspires to be compared to Microsoft (Gulliver) at its greatest.

I think we’ll look back on a day, as we do at the Ma Bell phones, and lament how we bashed Microsoft into history in favor of telling Google our most private thoughts. Yeah, Microsoft is bad, but it’s not the worst bad.

Howard said “post what you just emailed me”.

Howard is kinda sneaky. He gets me to blog stuff even when I don’t want to work and just want to cantankerously vent.

Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and Representative Dianne Watson will be getting a call from me.

I’m a Pandora addict. I’m tired of the repetitive playlists of the local broadcast stations. After about 3 months, I’ve “trained” Pandora to mix about 30 “stations” into the kind of music sampling that keeps me happy all day while I slave over my keyboard.

A Day of Silence

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

I’m sorry to say that today Pandora, along with most Internet radio sites, is going off the air in observance of a Day Of Silence. We are doing this to bring to your attention a disastrous turn of events that threatens the existence of Pandora and all of internet radio. We need your help.

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream songs. Pandora’s fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the “Internet Radio Equality Act” has already been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet radio–and Pandora–from obliteration.

I’d like to ask you to call your Congressional representatives today and ask them to become co-sponsors of the bill. It will only take a few minutes and you can find your Congresspersons and their phone numbers by entering your zip code here.

Your opinion matters to your representatives - so please take just a minute to call.

Visit www.savenetradio.org to continue following the fight to Save Internet Radio.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

Thanks, Tim. I’ll get right on it!

No more “digital Visine”, software to eliminate red eyes from photos!

Kodak camera sensor may eliminate flash

NEW YORK (Reuters) — Eastman Kodak said Thursday it has developed digital camera technology that nearly eliminates the need for flash photography, part of the company’s effort to make money from its deep patent portfolio.

The world’s biggest maker of photographic film says its proprietary sensor technology significantly increases sensitivity to light. Image sensors act as a digital camera’s eyes by converting light into an electric charge to begin the capture process.

Kodak, which is in the last year of a lengthy and expensive transformation into a digital photography company as its film business shrinks, intends to lean on its wealth of intellectual property to boost its bottom line, expecting up to $250 million this year alone in royalties and related revenues.
…
Kodak said the new technology advances an existing Kodak standard in digital imaging. Today, the design of almost all color image sensors is based on the “Bayer Pattern,” an arrangement of red, green and blue pixels first developed by Kodak scientist Bryce Bayer in 1976.

In this design, half of the pixels on the sensor are used to collect green light, with the remaining pixels split evenly between sensitivity to red and blue light.

After exposure, software reconstructs a full-color signal for each pixel in the final image. Kodak’s new proprietary technology adds “clear” pixels to the red, green and blue elements that form the image sensor array, collecting a higher proportion of the light striking the sensor.

Manufacturing customers interested in the design will likely get a chance to sample it in early 2008, but Kodak’s McNiffe was unsure when devices using the technology would be in stores. The technology could be used at first in consumer gadgets such as cell phones and eventually in products made for industrial and scientific imaging.

Long before Bill Nye had his Science Guy show on Disney and Nye Labs and Ms. Frizzle led the Magic School Bus, there was Mr. Wizard.

The Mr. Wizard website reports:

It is with deep sadness that we regret to announce the passing of Don Herbert - the one and only “Mr. Wizard”. Don lost his battle with cancer today, June 12, 2007, at 9 AM Pacific Daylight Time - slightly more than one month shy of his 90th birthday. He was lovingly surrounded by his family, who are at once, saddened by his passing, and relieved that he is no longer suffering.

We all feel extremely lucky to have had him in our lives and to have known and worked with Don over the years. We have also been tremendously honored to carry on his legacy as an original and truly legendary figure in the worlds of both Television and Science Education. He has been inspirational and influential in so many ways and on so many lives and we are comforted in the fact that his ground breaking work and legacy will continue to inspire many more people for years to come.

Thank you so much to all of you for your support and sympathy.

Sincerely, The Family

The Los Angeles Times Obit:

Don Herbert, who explained the wonderful world of science to millions of young baby boomers on television in the 1950s and ’60s as “Mr. Wizard” and did the same for another generation of youngsters on the Nickelodeon cable TV channel in the 1980s, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Herbert died at his home in Bell Canyon after a long battle with multiple myeloma, said Tom Nikosey, Herbert’s son-in-law.

A low-key, avuncular presence who wore a tie and white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Herbert launched his weekly half-hour science show for children on NBC in 1951.

Broadcast live from Chicago on Saturdays the first few years and then from New York City, “Watch Mr. Wizard” ran for 14 years.

Herbert used basic experiments to teach scientific principles to his TV audience via an in-studio guest boy or girl who assisted in the experiments.

“I was a grade school kid in the ’50s and watched ‘Mr. Wizard’ Saturday mornings and was just glued to the television,” said Nikosey, president of Mr. Wizard Studios, which sells Herbert’s science books and TV shows on DVD.

“The show just heightened my curiosity about science and the way things worked,” Nikosey said. “I learned an awful lot from him, as did millions of other kids.”

By 1955, there were about 5,000 Mr. Wizard Science Clubs nationwide, with more than 100,000 members.

And as Mr. Wizard, Herbert was a true TV star, featured in an array of magazines, including TV Guide, Life, Time, Newsweek, Science Digest, Boy’s Life and even Glamour.

Herbert was taken aback by the show’s success.

“What really did it for us was the inclusion of a child,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2004. “When we started out, it was just me up there alone. That was too much like having a professor give a lecture. We cast a boy and girl to come in and talk with me about science. That’s when it took off.

“The children watching could identify with someone like them.”

In explaining how he brought a sense of wonder to elementary scientific experiments, Herbert told the New York Times in 2004 that he “would perform the trick, as it were, to hook the kids, and then explain the science later.

“We thought we needed it to seem like magic to hook the audience, but then we realized that viewers would be engaged with just a simple scientific question, like, why do birds fly and not humans? A lot of scientists criticized us for using the words ‘magic’ and ‘mystery’ in the show’s subtitle, but they came around eventually.”

“Watch Mr. Wizard” garnered numerous honors, including a Peabody Award, four Ohio State awards and the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Award for “Best Science TV Program for Youth.”

And Herbert had a lasting effect.

“Over the years, Don has been personally responsible for more people going into the sciences than any other single person in this country,” George Tressel, a National Science Foundation official, said in 1989.

“I fully realize the number is virtually endless when I talk to scientists,” he said. “They all say that Mr. Wizard taught them to think.”

Herbert’s experiments on the show typically used household items.

As a 1951 Time magazine story noted: “Herbert’s object is to show his audience what goes on in the world — why the wind blows, what makes a cake rise, how water comes out of a kitchen tap.

“To explain rain, he boils water in a coffee pot, compares the steam to clouds, and shows how ‘rain’ will condense on the sides of a glass held over the spout.”

Not every Mr. Wizard experiment went according to plan.

In “Saturday Morning TV,” a 1981 book by Gary H. Grossman, Herbert recalled pouring two colorless solutions into one glass and then announced that the solution would turn black before he counted to nine.

“I got up to 20 and decided I’d better stop,” he recalled. “I explained that apparently other factors like temperature and acidity had interfered with the experiment.”

But as he finished his explanation, the liquid changed color.

“It was embarrassing, certainly, but I discovered the answer,” he said. “We hadn’t used a fresh solution, so the reaction was slower than expected.”

After “Watch Mr. Wizard” ended its 14-year-run in 1965, Herbert showed up frequently on talk shows, including “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night With David Letterman.”

“Watch Mr. Wizard” was revived in 1971 for a season, and “Mr. Wizard’s World” ran on Nickelodeon from 1983 to 1990.

Born July 10, 1917, in Waconia, Minn., Herbert later moved to Minneapolis and then La Crosse, Wis. He graduated from LaCrosse State Teachers College in 1940 and could have taught English or general science — his majors — but he recalled later that he was more interested in the theater.

He worked as an actor and stagehand in a Minnesota theater group before moving to New York City in 1941.

A year later, he volunteered for the Army Air Forces. As a B-24 bomber pilot, he flew 56 missions over Italy, Germany and Yugoslavia and received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak-leaf clusters.

Herbert wrote several books, including “Mr. Wizard’s Supermarket Science” and “Mr. Wizard’s Experiments for Young Scientists.”

In recent years, he helped set up his website, http://www.mrwizardstudios.com .

He is survived by his wife of 34 years, Norma; his two sons and a daughter from his first marriage, Jay and Jeffrey and Jill Rogers; his stepdaughters Kendra Jeffcoat and Kris Nikosey; his stepson, Kim Kasell; and 13 grandchildren.

The family plans to hold a private memorial service.