News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
As the world comes closer to running out of IP addresses, we’re going to hear more about IPv6 which has more than 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible addresses (versus the piddly 4.3 billion currently allowed by IPv4). TechRepublic explains 10 things you might not know about IPv6 addressing, including just what ::1 means.
In Obion County, Tennessee, residents must pay a $75 yearly fee to receive firefighting services from the city of South Fulton. Homeowner Gene Cranick decided not to make the payment, and then his house caught on fire. The firefighters refused to respond until the fire began to threaten a neighboring house where the owner had paid the fee. Even then, they did nothing in regards to Cranick’s house and let it burn down. Cranick offered to cover whatever it would cost to put out the fire, but the officials refused.
There’s been quite a bit of outrage over this, but I’ve come down on the side of the the city officials. What do you think?
Link: http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/…
(via The Daily Caller)
In this age of Twitter and its 140-character limit on tweets, the most important aspect of URL shorteners is how many characters they use up. But don’t forget to take into account the likelihood of the site staying in business. Libya is the home of the .ly top-level domain, and is the parent of the highly-popular bit.ly URL shortener and others. These domains, however, fall under Libyan law which is based on Islamic law and is more restrictive than the United States concerning what’s objectionable. Take the case of vb.ly, an adult-friendly shortening service shut down by Libyan authorities because its home page included a picture of co-founder Violet Blue, scantily-clad and holding a bottle in her hand. The linked article has more details.
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we always go with tinyurl.com because it’s a fairly safe bet.
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)
Claudia Friedlander is a classically-trained voice teacher who’s had almost zero exposure to heavy metal music. With this in mind she was asked to rate the singing abilities of five male heavy-metal vocalists, including Ronnie James Dio and Ozzy Osbourne. Much to my surprise, she gave high marks to most of them. These guys actually have talent.
Link: http://www.invisibleoranges.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Wi-fi networks have an identifier, known as the SSID. The default setting for many routers is to broadcast the SSID—thus making it easier to find and connect to the network, but most wireless security tutorials recommend disabling the SSID broadcast. Lifehacker, however, suggests this may be more trouble than it’s worth. Any hacker with a minimum amount of knowledge can easily determine the SSID, regardless of whether or not it’s being broadcast.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s latest entry in the mobile device operating system arena, and it’s a “dramatic departure” from their previous offerings. They hope to be competitive against Android phones, iPhones, and Blackberries. The linked article is fairly optimistic about this being the case, but TechRepublic’s Justin James has a completely different opinion.
Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)
This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on September 30th. Once again it was a fairly weak field, but here are some of the better ones (see the linked article for the full list):
Link: http://improbable.com/…
(via Slashdot)
While money can’t buy happiness, lack of money can definitely cause unhappiness. Researchers Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman have determined that the cutoff point above which more money doesn’t matter for day-to-day happiness is a salary of $75,000 per year.
Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
You don’t have to be a hard-core geek to know how some websites use cookies to identify your computer and track your internet browsing habits. But it’s just too easy to disable and/or delete browser cookies, so the organizations involved have been looking for better methods. The goal is to save information across page visits and browser sessions, and there are quite a few ways to accomplish this. Flash cookies use the local storage capabilities of the Adobe Flash Player. These have given rise to zombie cookies, where a deleted browser cookie is recreated from the Flash cookie. HTML 5 has a client-side database storage capability that makes me wonder just what they were thinking when they developed the standard. And finally there’s the Evercookie, which uses every trick in the book and is quite hard to remove. My favorite is how it encodes the cookie data as an image file, which is stored in the browser’s cache to be later read back and decoded.
Update: Ars Technica tells us that it’s technically possible to kill the Evercookie.
Modern-day BIOS, the computer code allowing low-level access to your PC’s hardware, is architecturally quite similar to the original BIOS created 25 years ago for the first IBM Personal Computer. But 25 years is a long time in the technology world, and the inadequacies of BIOS are becoming significant enough that it’s time for a replacement. The heir apparent is Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With the exception of a faster boot time, most of the benefits are technical in nature and should be invisible to the standard user. In fact, you may already have a UEFI system and not know it. Another advantage is that system administrators will find it easier to remotely manage large computer networks. I think the real benefit, however, will come in the future when new interfaces (think USB) or hardware types become available and PC designers won’t have to jump through hoops to get them to work.
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)
Knee Defenders are rubber grips that attach to the arms of an airplane tray table and prevent the person in front of you from reclining the seat, thus giving you more space to breath and move. Especially useful for big or tall people.
Link: http://www.gadgetduck.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
Ars Technica reviews the Internet Explorer 9 beta in the linked article. Major changes include a streamlined interface that’s highly reminiscent of Google Chrome. The new tab page also borrows from Chrome, displaying thumbnails of your most visited pages. Microsoft has added a download manager and some HTML5 support, and has increased the security, reliability, performance, and standards compliance. All in all, IE9 looks to be a contender. One real problem, however, is that it requires Windows Vista or later. Windows XP users are out of luck.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
