Incredible Shrinking Technology

I have always been fascinated by the fact that, in most areas of technology, physical size is constantly shrinking. The one exception being LCD displays, of course, which seem to get bigger every year. So I was excited by two pieces of news to cross my desk this week, the arrival of a 100Gb 1.8 inch hard drive and the first of the AMD 65nm processors.

The end of YouTube?

A UK company has launched what it claims to be the first search engine that lets you not only search for specific moments within a video, but click on and interact with moving objects during online playback. Coull.tv has adopted a community approach, which we thoroughly approve of here at DaniWeb, that brings true user-generated interactivity to video footage.

OK, so video search itself is nothing new, the likes of Blinkx and Google Video have long since offered video searching, not to mention YouTube of course. The difference being that these engines find the complete video clip containing your search term, coull.tv takes you straight to the relevant segment of that video to playback just the footage you were looking for.

Who needs a Second LIfe?

If you believe the results of a study by those chaps over at the USC-Annenberg School Centre for the Digital Future, the answer to the question posed in this blog posting title is 43% of Americans. That is the number of people who took part in the survey, were already a member of a virtual community and who said that the virtual world is just as important as the real one.

The fact that the 2007 Digital Future Project reveals that 20.3% of virtual community members take actions offline at least once per year that are related to that online community, and that such online participation leads directly to social activism. Indeed, the survey suggests that 64.9% of those participating in social causes online are involved in causes that were new to them before that online participation started, with 43.7% participating more since they joined an online community. Some of the other statistics are, perhaps, less surprising: 56.6% login every day, 70.4% interact with other members while logged in (would be a pretty dull online community if they didn’t, although the figures also suggest that 29.6% must be confirmed lurkers of course.)

Bagel is back, again!

According to my Finnish friends, F-Secure, Bagle looks like it might be back in business. Not that it has ever really gone away of course, as it is one of the most prevalent of worm families.

F-Secure have noticed new activity during the last couple of days, which sees a number of old Bagle update URLs activated again. This time they are making a new executable available, which can be downloaded and executed by those machines already infected by previous variant. Of course, one thing never really changes and that is the payload, so expect to see spams containing infected attachments, this time with filenames that refer to price lists as an inducement to open them. Handily, the spam also comes complete with an image that illustrates the password required to decode the attached Zip archives.