Poisoning the Phish
Posted: Sat 31 January, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »Is it just me who takes a certain amount of dark amusement from going through to these Phishing emails for bank details, and filling them in with utter rubbish?
Obviously the data I put in is nowhere even vaguely close to the true details (and I normally do it for banks/services I don’t even deal with anyway) but I firmly believe that the more you can poison the lists these spammers/Phishers work from (and thus sell on) the less valuable they are.
And that’s something that works for me. Maybe we should encourage more filling in of fake details, rather than saying “Don’t do anything”. Well, so long as you don’t install anything from those sites, of course.
XKCD = Genius
Posted: Wed 14 January, 2009 Filed under: Geeky 1 Comment »Absolute genius in a cartoon strip.
Changing Passwords
Posted: Tue 13 January, 2009 Filed under: Charm School, Geeky, Sweary 2 Comments »When faced with passwords that needs to be changed on a regular basis, one thing I always seem to forget is the relevance of timing.
After all, you don’t have to change it as soon as the stupid little dialogue box comes up to tell you to change it. At that point, you’ve still got (usually) a week or two to change it before everything goes tits-up.
So I need to remember that whatever else happens, don’t change it on a bloody Friday. Because then I bugger off for the weekend, and come Monday morning I don’t have a single bloody clue what I changed the frigging thing to. It usually takes about ten attempts to remember what the hell it was. Sometimes it also depends on what my mood was like when I changed it, which can have a knock-on effect in whether the password is sweary (which results in passwords like ‘cuntflaps’) or not.(resulting in words like ‘prestidigitate’) Both of those have been passwords in the past, by the way – but they’re not the current ones. (obviously)
I did remember it in the end (for once it was a non-sweary one) but it’s something I really need to learn to remember…
Reducing DRM
Posted: Wed 7 January, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Music 2 Comments »While I’m nowhere even close to being an Apple® fanboy, I do use iTunes for a significant portion of downloading. (particularly when I also use eMusic, which I believe is now owned by iTunes) As such, I’m pleased to see that they’ve announced that iTunes is going to be DRM-free, with 8 million of its 10 million tracks now available without any DRM, and the rest over the next few months.
DRM is (basically) copy protection – it’s the media industry’s way of saying “You can buy our stuff, but we’ll still tell you how you can – and can’t – use it”. It’s horrifically flawed, and something I’m fairly passionately anti at the best of times.
As a perfect example of this, we’ve both recently bought new Sony MP3 players and wanted to put music bought on iTunes onto them. Only because of DRM, you can’t. Well, you can if you burn an audio CD of the downloaded files, re-import them into [Music player of choice] as MP3s, and then put them on the player, but that’s circumvention of the DRM, and thus naughty. You’re using a file you’ve bought and paid for, but in a way that the music industry doesn’t like. They want you to buy it on iTunes and use it through that, but if you want it to go on another MP3 player, you should buy another copy of the same file that’s authorised for use on your MP3 player. Oh, and you shouldn’t be buying the album on CD and then ripping it to MP3 so you can listen to it on your player either.
It’s the same with other download services (and things like BBC iPlayer etc. too) which have historically been only available through Internet Explorer, so that they can use the Windows Media Player DRM – which is also why so many MP3 players etc. insist on using WMP 11, which has the latest/’greatest’ DRM modules on it.
So to me it’s a sign that perhaps the music studios and media producers are finally beginning to see some sense if they’ll allow iTunes to finally sell music without DRM on it.