Smack destiny in the face

If you are a Saturday Night Live fan you are likely familiar with Andy Samberg. This summer Andy stars in Hot Rod, the story of a self-proclaimed stuntman Rod Kimble (Samberg) and his quest to raise $50,000 for his ailing, but abusive, step-father's life saving heart surgery. Without giving too much away, Rod's half-brother Kevin helps in the cause by filming Rod and creating a web site to drum up stunt business. The website as it turns out is part of the viral marketing efforts to promote the movie, visit www.stuntmanforever.com to see the site that Kevin Powell (Jorma Taccone) creates, during the movie, to help Rod raise the money for their dad, Frank (Ian McShane).

Rod Kimble's 7 Dangerous Sins!

Sony reveals new social networking camera

Sony Canada has announced that it "is responding to the rise of user-generated content on the Internet with a new, pocket-sized Net-sharing CAM, designed for social networkers and video bloggers who frequently upload video and images to the web." Weighing in at about 5 oz. the NCS-GC1 is said to "seamlessly uploads short video clips to the web, and snaps print-quality, 5-megapixel digital still photos." Movie quality ranges from QVGA/15 frames per second to VGA/30 frames per second, and a 2GB media card will store about 5 hours of video, depending on the format chosen. The Net-sharing CAM comes with PMB software that Sony says is "the ultimate in ease of upload, the PMB Portable pre-loaded software has pre-programmed menu buttons for direct publishing to web sharing sites, such as Crackle™. The built-in software can also be programmed for the web sites of choice or even for a personal blog or “vlog.”" and the device allows for on board tagging of videos and still pictures. The camera will be available in September for an anticipated retail price of $299.00 CA. It certainly is a sleek looking little device!

Sony Canada News Release.

Facebook's big challenge

Three former Harvard school mates of Mark Zuckerberg are alleging, in court, that Zuckerberg stole their ideas and created Facebook before they were able to launch their own competing site, ConnectU. Zuckerberg is being accused of fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. The 3 ConnectU founders claim that they asked Zuckerberg to create code for their site and that he promised to be working on the code when in fact he was creating Facebook. The lawsuit seeks to shut down the rival site, claiming that Facebook was able to be first to market and gain the advantage. Facebook lawyers say ConnectU has no evidence for "broad-brush allegations" against Zuckerberg. Globe and Mail story here.

This e-mail message will self destruct in 10, 9, 8,...

ars technica has an interesting post about BigString an e-mail service that allows you to send self-destructing e-mail messages. This could be the answer for those unfortunate souls who send e-mails at 4:00 am after the bars have closed or who forgot to spell check before they hit send to that job prospect! Maybe Conrad Black is the behind this little operation... or should have been aware of it! Anyway, I've not yet tried it but according to the site, "BigString allows a user to easily send, recall, erase, self-destruct and modify an email after it has been sent." Further they describe the service as "Our unique “Edit Sent Mail” feature allows you to recall, erase, add or delete attachments and self-destruct your emails after they have been sent." ars technica says that it works by basically storing an image of the e-mail, on BigString's servers, that the receiver gets a link to and the sender can at a preset interval or on a whim have the e-mail recalled, edited and resent, or self-destructed. The service apparently also allows you to track the e-mail as it is opened and forwarded elsewhere. Interesting concept, I'll give it a try and chime back later on what I think.

iPhone's use of Safari makes browser target

Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) of Baltimore has published an iPhone hack that targets the Safari web browser and would allow hackers to take over control of the handset via a Wi-Fi connection. The explanation giving in this article by the CBC sounds a little far reaching but not beyond the realm of possibility. According to the article "the hacker would have to create a network with the same name and encryption method as one the handset already uses", I guess it becomes more likely if the user is accustomed to surfing public Wi-Fis, which we can assume many users will. What makes this interesting is that the Safari browser has gone largely unnoticed by hackers and virus writers as has most Apple devices, now with the hype surrounding the iPhone I suspect we'll hear more of these stories. At least in this case it was researches who discovered the potential exploit and this will hopefully allow Apple to respond before any real damage is done.

Toronto dethrowned as Facebook's top community

We Canadians often joke that Toronto believes it's the center of the Universe and until last week Toronto ruled Facebook's Universe as the largest geographic network on the social networking site, but London has taken over with more than 810,000 users compared to Toronto's 705,000. Facebook officials are not sure why London leaped past Toronto which, they say, is growing at the same rate as the site's worldwide user base. Interestingly enough, Canadian users make up over 10% of the site's user population with more than 11 million logins in June of '07. The Globe and Mail has more.

What's in Red Bull anyway?

July's issue of Wired examines Red Bull and gives us a glimpse into what goes into the trendy little can of pick me up! Personally, I prefer Hype, Full Throttle, or dare I say it, Bawls (spare me the off hand remarks). Regardless of what your choice is, it's interesting the science that goes into the can. I'm interested in finding out a little more about inositol, which according to the article "is turning out to be a wonder drug that significantly reduces depression, panic attacks, agoraphobia, and obsessive- compulsive disorder".

Phishing for answers

Researchers at Indiana University are employing some questionable tactics in an attempt to understand how scammers succeed at duping people out of their personal information and why people are fooled by such scams. The experiment involves phishing for information from random unwilling participants and has raised the eyebrows of others who say the researchers are no better than the scammers themselves. The debate is an interesting one, can you actually get good results from such experiments if the subjects knew they were going to be phished or is there a better, more controlled way of conducting such experiment without duping people into participating? This Globe and Mail article has more.

online domains still a hot property market

The industry has been around since the bubble days of the late 90's and it's heating up again. Domain names are being bought up and auctioned at a pace that is reminiscent of those glory days, only this time around it's the generic names that have caught all the attention. Back in the wild west days of the world wide web, before companies protected their property online, enterprising entrepreneurs bought up names and held them for ransom until the law got involved and cyber-squating was squashed. Now it's the generic names that are hot, domainers as they are known take advantage of the fact that many people type generic words into their browsers, put a ".com" on the end and hope the results will turn up what they are looking for. The owners fill their pages with context sensitive ads and hope to get paid by the click through or hope the domain gathers enough interest that it can later be sold or auctioned off. This Globe and Mail story discusses the concept in more detail and the numbers can be huge if you own the right property!

Webkinz stolen identities

The NY Times Bits blog is reporting that theft of the popular Webkinz plush toy's identity tags is becoming a real problem for the company who makes the toys and retailers alike. It is such a problem that some retailers are resorting to displaying the toys behind the cashiers in more secure locations. Let's make this clear, the thieves are not taking the stuffed animals, but just the uniquely numbered little paper tags that allow the purchasers access to the Webkinz website where they can play with a virtual replica of their toy. It seems that the online version is perhaps more popular than the toy itself, or at least a lot easier to pilfer.