iGeneration

November 26th, 2009

Microsoft: To spam or not to spam

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 11:18 pm

Categories: Cloud computing, Discussion, Microsoft, Research, Security, Web 2.0, Weird and wonderful, Windows Live

Tags: Microsoft Corp., E-mail, Cyberthreats, Spam, Online Communications, Security, Spam And Phishing, Zack Whittaker

It’s not often that I get spam through to my university email account, mostly on the part that I am careful with who I subscribe to using the email address given to me. No doubt through subscribing to certain services through a single email account would determine which subscription providers were selling on addresses to spammers.

So as you would expect, I was surprised when I got this strangely outdated-looking email from Microsoft, stating that my subscription to Hotmail Plus (more space, no advertisements and a few other features) was due to expire. But every bone in my body screamed out to me that I should take this email with a pinch of salt even though I have a Hotmail Plus subscription.

Here’s what I saw, and with your knowledge of spam which you have received, come to your own conclusions.

So, out of interest and by using a totally democratic process through a voting system, let’s see what the vast majority of you think, and then you can draw your own conclusions from the answer.

 Loading ...

Afterwards, you can find the answer here.

November 23rd, 2009

Chrome OS: More questions than answers?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:48 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Google, Hardware, Major breakthroughs, Mobile computing, Next-generation technology, Open source, Productivity

Tags: Desktop, Google Inc., Operating System, Google Chrome, Hardware, Operating Systems, Software, Zack Whittaker

Hearing the news of Google’s Chrome OS at the end of last week left me with an uneasy feeling about the future of operating systems and computer use.

The general idea behind Chrome OS is that the operating system as you see it will be nothing more than a web browser with a few things plugged into it, and a massively slimmed down operating system which will load in a fraction of the average time taken with existing products.

But even as a man who looks towards the next generation, this doesn’t sit too well with me. Not only did the announcements and the coverage seem to ask more questions than give answers, but Chrome OS also seems to exclude a very important market - students.

Students won’t be able to take their laptops everywhere as they can now without access to the web. Students can’t live entirely in the cloud, which I’ve already proved once before, even though many university campuses are blanketed with a cloud of wireless signals. And even then, not all students should be able to anyway with applications which are absolutely necessary to run on desktop computers.

To start off, take a spare ten minutes and watch the videos that Jason Perlow added to his blog just before the weekend which will brief you on the latest.

Bandwidth issues

Everything is stored in the cloud is accessed through the web. Even the “applications” such as the calculator and the calendar - simple desktop applications for Windows and Mac OS X - but not for Chrome.

If you have no Internet, I have no idea how Chrome OS would even turn on. Perhaps it’s like the Chrome browser, which works offline with Google Gears enabled sites. But that’s hardly optimal. Will the Chrome OS work where the is no Internet access on the road, on a plane or train (at least in the United Kingdom anyway) or even sitting out in a park in the city. Sure you could use a wireless 3G card or your phone modem but this will cost a lot to run an entire operating system.

And what if the damned broadband goes down? This is something I seem to face quite a bit and frankly, without access to the Internet, the Chrome-specific device just becomes a very expensive paperweight.

Read the rest of this entry »

November 23rd, 2009

Let's get rid of usernames and passwords for good

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 5:00 am

Categories: Discussion, Major breakthroughs, Next-generation technology, Research, Security, Web development

Tags: Password, Facebook Connect, OpenID, Zack Whittaker

Usernames and passwords annoy me. Expert advice says to have a different username and password for various services, but the amount of subscriptions, email accounts, social networks and other sites we subscribe to can run into the dozens, if not hundreds.

Password managers help, and single sign-on solutions for an array of sites are useful, and devices like smart cards and biometric devices save us remembering a whole array of combinations. But what if you’re away from your primary computer? You still need to remember all of the sequences and mishmashes of letters and numbers whether you like it or not.

Facebook Connect has helped me out greatly. On my home computer, I never sign out because there’s just no point as nobody else lives with me (thank God), and on my office computer, I always lock my screen so again, no need to log out. With this, it means I can not only sign in straight away to supporting services but it means I can cut down on the number of user names and passwords I need.

Perhaps it is time we worked on a new system. No longer should be need to push the “forgot your password?” link, or have to look up a long list of passwords in the filing cabinet, or even have to rely on a browser to take the workload for us. There needs to be a solution.

OpenID has the right idea, but it works in a similar way to university federation services and doesn’t really share any unique factor. Even CBS Interactive sites like ZDNet, TechRepublic, and BNET have a good idea by sharing the same login details across sites so you don’t need to re-register. But again, this isn’t enough.

I’d like something to change but simply don’t see a system being implemented which wouldn’t cost about a zillion dollars. For now, this thirty-year solution may have to stick with the byline of “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. Then again, Google thought e-mail was broken when it brought out Wave…

How would you fix it?

November 18th, 2009

Office 2010 Beta 2: More than just a bunch of pretty icons

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 3:40 am

Categories: Breaking news, Downloads, Microsoft, Office 14, Productivity, Windows Live, e-Learning

Tags: Beta, Office 2010, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office, Groupware, Office Suites, Software, Enterprise Software, Zack Whittaker

Office 2010 is more than just a bunch of pretty icons. I’ve only been playing with the Beta 2 of Office 2010 for a few hours now, but considering that my academic life pretty much takes absolute precedence over anything else, using Office for a short time feels (and practically is) like a lifetime already.

Outlook is without doubt the killer application. I’ve only recently dived head first into Outlook after a long, painful struggle with my email management, but am glad to have done so. Windows Live Mail is great and has done me well, but after my hard drive fried, it was just too much of a pain to set up again.

Gallery
To see a selection of changes in Outlook 2010 and other common student-based Office 2010 Beta 2 applications, head over to the screenshot gallery for a peek.

Upgrading from previous versions is just a dream. I haven’t had to change a single setting after migrating from Outlook 2007 to 2010 (but I did check, just to be sure). But there are three new features which you need to take note of:

• The Ribbon is finally here. We knew this long ago when I broke the story initially of Outlook being first seen in the wild, thanks to my leaky plumber friend at Microsoft.

• The social connector keeps you in check with the people you communicate with. If you’re running on an Exchange server, pictures and details can be shared with one another allowing you to see presence, instant message one another, see previous correspondance and check their calendars.

• Conversation views allow you to track what was said and to whom, and when. It reads email to you like a story; starting off at the bottom and working its way through, adding each reply to the very top to keep your conversations to-and-fro organised and seamless. No longer will you have to depend on replies including the original message, even though some strongly disagree.

Of course I could easily go on and on, but it’s nearly 5am where I am and my all-nighter was meant to be spent doing university work. However, I’ll be using Office 2010 not because I like to play with things before they hit the shelves, but because the improvements to the entire suite has left a positive feeling in my cold, dark, hating and stoney heart.

Have you played with it yet? Any thoughts so far?

November 17th, 2009

The weirdest Easter egg ever seen on Facebook

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 4:58 pm

Categories: Social networking, University fun, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Facebook, Arrow, Easter Egg, Keyboards, E-mail, Web Browsers, Hardware, Peripherals, Online Communications, Internet

I am truly stunned and baffled. How many times do you get emails or messages which say something along the lines of, “if you press Alt+F4 then you get a secret menu”, or similar?

This was exactly the case when I saw a friend’s status message on Facebook. I’m still struggling to cope with this as the sheer surprise of it actually working has taken my breath away. But what’s more peculiar is to why it is even there in the first place.

Here’s what you do.

1. Go to any Facebook page and click once in a white area just to get a blank timeline to do this with.
2. Press up arrow, up arrow, down arrow, down arrow, left arrow, right arrow, left arrow, right arrow, B, A, then the Return key.

For those who are confused, the key layout is below:

If you left-click or right-click, scroll or push any keyboard key after that, a strange shining set of circular rings will appear on your screen. To get rid of it, simply refresh the page or failing that, close the browser and start again.

Why? I have no idea. How this was even found? Perhaps this is the stranger mystery.

Digg this post. Tweet this post. Comment on this post?

November 15th, 2009

How could Twitter help in a terrorist attack?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 11:33 am

Categories: Discussion, Events, Major breakthroughs, Mobile computing, Security, Social networking

Tags: Network, Mumbai, Twitter Inc., London, Terrorist Attack, Corporate Insurance, Homeland Security, Business Security, Telecom & Utilities, Networking

On 7th July 2005, fifty two people were killed when four suicide bombers detonated home made explosives on the London Underground. During this time, there was panic, confusion, miscommunication and a number of issues relating to where to go and what was going on. Even law enforcement suffered making the situation even more fragile.

With experience of hindsight, with a number of events which social networking from ordinary members of the public (”citizen journalism”) from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the Hudson river plane crash and the death of Michael Jackson; Twitter especially has been a key point of communication.

Mumbai was a perfect example of how Twitter dominated the intelligence gathering process, using real people and human intelligence but through an unconventional, insecure medium. Photos were being uploaded to Flickr and Twitpic, and tweets were dominating the blogosphere, and being used as part of commercial news channels as their own journalists simply couldn’t be spread thinly enough.

However in the case of Mumbai, public and very widespread intelligence could have been used to the terrorists’ advantages, also. Not so much the case of the London bombers, though.

How could it have helped London?

Read the rest of this entry »

November 13th, 2009

Windows 7's first 100 days: So how were yours?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:35 am

Categories: Discussion, Downloads, Next-generation technology, Productivity, University, Windows 7, e-Learning

Tags: Memory Usage, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Zack Whittaker

It has been 100 days since the release-to-manufacturing copy of Windows 7 was available for download on MSDN and TechNet. I’ll put this very simply: I have never used an operating system which works so well, is as stable as it is, is aesthetically pleasing, and is a pleasure to use still even after three and a bit months.

There is nothing within Windows 7 which is particularly aimed at students or me specifically. The whole kit and kaboodle focuses on making it an all-inclusive “experience”, but after using it for so long now the experience fades into the background, like a sickly cough in a lecture theatre.

At the end of the day, all you want to do is check your emails or whop out a quick essay. You don’t particularly care about the experience and most of the time you don’t notice the surroundings. Even with Windows 7, this hasn’t changed.

Besides my computer going well and truly kaput, the way I noticed my positive experience so far is through the lack of negative experiences. I’m lucky in that I took advantage of pre-release builds and have seen Windows 7 grow from a small, insignificant Vista rip-off, into a mature, upstanding member of the technology community.

There is only one nit-picky thing that I still struggle to shrug off. The memory usage is far better than Vista but has a long way to go until it reaches levels that XP coped with. Even with a base level of applications open: Outlook 2007, Messenger, Skype and DisplayFusion to maximise my taskbar space, but it still looks like it uses more than it should. On a 4GB RAM system (in 32-bit mode, so only 3.5GB is really recognised), I’m still using 1.10GB on a dual screen system.

I understand why, as I have two screens and the Aero theme takes up quite a lot of memory usage, and doubled it naturally doubles (ish) the memory usage. But I like to keep my memory usage down as much as possible; at least that way I don’t hear my tower whirring away and going nuts.

The feedback I have had from other people, friends and colleagues, may seem somewhat cliched. But all have had a positive attitude towards it when mentioning it in passing. “Oh, Zack, by the way, Windows 7; I like”, for example. Seeing it running on my friend’s computer in a 24-inch crystal clear LCD screen combined with his justified semi-smugness about being one of the few, even still, to have the operating system on his computer, being another.

All in all, I’m extremely happy with everything as it is and how it works, what it does and when it does it. But what I say isn’t too important. How were your first 100 days?

More Windows 7 coverage:

November 12th, 2009

Cloud storage: Impossible to fill?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 3:00 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Discussion, Google, Multimedia, Productivity, Virtualisation, Windows Live

Tags: Storage, Hardware, Zack Whittaker

There are vast numbers of online storage solutions, services and products at the moment. More often than not they’re free, being paid for through advertisements, and most offer a number of gigabytes; some into double figures.

But taking a look at a random selection, some including email services like Gmail and Hotmail (which offer very much the same thing in a different format), are they giving us too much storage? Are the cloud storage providers giving us infinite capacity?

Side note: semantics and technicality could shoot me in the foot here. When I mean “infinite”, I do not mean a never ending supply of data storage, rather the storage we currently have in the cloud will never be filled by us as individuals.

Take SkyDrive as a perfect example. Even though you have 25GB at your disposal, you can only upload 50MB at a time. There seems no logical reasoning to this, with the possible exception of not being able to abuse the storage for uploading of illegally downloadable films and videos. However, this restricts you somewhat.

If it were to be fully open, you could literally drag and drop an entire system image into your cloud and take it anywhere with you. Then again, you can create a restore image and use WinRAR or HJSplit to cut them into tiny 50MB sized pieces and upload manually.

I don’t think every user truly has 25GB space, though. It would make logical sense for the “drive” you have to be a dynamically expanding (virtual) hard drive. If every user used their 25GB today, the datacenters would be overfilled by tenfold no doubt.

The point is, as most online cloud services offer these vast storage quantities, you are restricted in how much you can upload in one go; this makes it ideal for documents and music files, but not for massive files like movies and large videos.

The same applies to Gmail, of which emailing something to yourself acts as pretty much the same concept. The 25MB limit is purely coincidental, but limits the user once again.

Using this time calculator, my own connection, a stopwatch on my phone and a bit of graphics editing, I’ve concluded to fill up a 25GB drive such as SkyDrive, it would take you:

… and that’s continually, without sleep, walking the dog or even going for a pee. Although, I guess maybe you could pee during the upload, but you get my point.

Still, you could always bypass the whole system and map your cloud storage to your other local computer and drag and drop that way.

Has cloud storage become unfillable?

November 10th, 2009

Size zero devices: How thin is too thin?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 12:42 pm

Categories: Hardware, Mobile computing, Next-generation technology, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Phone, Device, Laptop Computer, Notebooks, Telecom & Utilities, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Zack Whittaker

I don’t have the thinnest laptop in the world. If anything it’s quite chunky and quite sturdy, with the exception of the 180° rotating screen, but even then it’s a hearty bit of kit. My BlackBerry is wide and deep in size, fitting my hand quite nicely and the keys are big enough to tap away on quite comfortably.

But I only really noticed this today in comparison with other devices. The fashion at the moment seems to be “the thinner, the better”, as if we would starve our technology in vain effort to slim them down. It’s like this crazed fashion stint we have at the moment is focusing on “size zero technology”.

Why?!

Take the Motorola Razr. The phone is incredibly thin which seemed to be the “killer feature”, besides the simplicity yet expandability of the features within the operating software. The name, stemming from the phone having a similar look to a cutthroat razor. Thin, stylish and incredibly popular with over 100 million being sold.

But for some, strange reason, if I was to be given one, the first thing I would do is stress test it: I’d flip open the phone and push the screen back and see how far I could stress it before it snaps. Perhaps it’s a standard “want” to do; if something seems flimsy or so thin it could break easily, I’d be tempted to give it a go.

Ultra-thin devices like these do seem to be a trend that is spiraling forward and sees no sign of subsiding. But if you were to look at other progressions in technology:

• Mobile phones started out huge, then got smaller, then got slightly bigger and thicker - where they seem to have stayed.
• Televisions started out with small screens but huge in design, then the screens matched the size of the design, and now the bigger they are the better they are.
• Laptops were initially small but chunky, and now they’re thinner and wider.

Maybe through time, the “size zero” phase will wear off. There may be a time where consumers (and therefore manufacturers) will realise that devices need to fit quite a bit of stuff in there. With the MacBook Air, it lacked FireWire and an optical disk drive because they would have thickened out the laptop too much.

I’ve never seen anyone with a MacBook Air. Perhaps those considering buying one realised the importance of an internal optical drive.

My personal opinion? I’d say try and make devices proportionate, but don’t aim for a specific thin design. Fit everything else you can in there first, and then figure out if you can slim it down a bit.

I don’t like my partners to be stick thin. I like a bit of chunk on them, along with the vast majority of English men. Just as technology should be; you know,  something that you can actually feel in your pocket, excuse the innuendo.

So, how thin is too thin? Do you prefer skinny or chunky? Strange question, perhaps, but I hope it’s at least in context.

November 9th, 2009

Paperless students? Never going to happen

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 1:22 pm

Categories: Discussion, Environment, Gratuitous rant, Hardware, Mobile computing, Productivity, Skills development, University, e-Learning

Tags: Student, Netbook, Computer, Productivity, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Hardware, Zack Whittaker

We live in an age where technology is rife. We cannot escape from mobile phones, computers, netbooks, projectors, e-readers and the rest of it. But students simply couldn’t go paperless. The chances are it’ll never happen, or at least if it does, when I am long gone, dead and buried.

The argument for going paperless is stronger than ever, with learners wanting less paper and more technology, and teachers wanting less paper to manage and deal with.

But this is schoolchildren we are talking about, not university students. Students in higher education relish using paper; allowing them to spread their thoughts across multiple pages and across multiple work surfaces.

The incentives are there; every time I print something off at university, because I need to use my university username and password to print, it records when I do so. But every print-out leaves me with a pop-up guilt trip reminding me of how much of a tree I’m destroying in the process.

Forget computer science students because they are a minority at most institutions. Of course they will be using their netbooks, Androids, smartphones and iPhones to tap away at during a programming lecture. But the rest of the students on campus are more than happy with scraps of paper, Post-it notes and lined paper with scribbles on. The rest of the campus doesn’t engage with technology on an everyday basis so they are not missing out in the first place.

For this, when writing up the notes later into electronic format, we can have a sense of satisfaction about screwing up the paper and chucking it away.

How would you write notes onto a PDF file? Yes, you could use a touchscreen computer, but handwriting recognition isn’t an exact science yet and a pad of paper and a Biro pen are far cheaper.

Taking books out of the library aren’t always possible. Sure, we could grab our Kindle and download the book but why should we when we are spending thousands of our respective currencies on library provisions? Some books are only available for an hour at a time, so instead of scanning them into a computer for later analysis, photocopying is a more sensible solution. Those who remember will know that I have proven this one long ago.

In realistic terms, the only computers students want to use is the one computer that they are using to write their essays on. Besides that, technology has yet to really have a major impact on the main brunt of our degree courses - the discussion seminar - where all you need is your mind and your mouth.

Me? Personally? Many can testify to this. I would be far happier with a handful of notes, scribbles and scraps than a netbook. Would you rather go paperless?