Stupid web business: number 38 in a series of millions

Like many people, I book our family holidays online these days. With young kids, we tend to stay within the confines of the UK and opt for a holiday cottage rental. Now there are numerous sites offering the ability to search for and book such a holiday cottage, covering the UK and beyond. They work by taking a fee from the owner of the cottage for each successful booking. They also seem to suffer from what I like to call the Tottenham Court Road effect whereby it used to be the case that you could not play one shop off of another in TCR when buying electrical goods because most of them were owned by the same people. So it is with the holiday cottage rental industry, the numerous differently branded services seem to come back to just one or two companies in the end. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we found our ideal little cottage snuggled deep in a forest in North Wales for the dates we needed and paid a deposit back in July 2007. believe me, to get the good ones you do need to book that early! The balance of the rental is due tomorrow, although Cottages4You do not seem that keen on taking my money.

Can avatars change your real world life?

The Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University is carrying out some truly intriguing research into whether the physical appearance of your avatar could actually have a direct impact upon the way you behave in the real world. The researchers ask, for example, if by having an avatar that is thinner and fitter than yourself, and then by watching that avatar perform exercise routines and get thinner before your eyes, this could act as a speeded up cause and effect trigger which makes people so exposed exercise more in the real world.

Spam swings from Viagra to Versace

Spam is annoying, resource consuming, malware driven and often offensive. It is also nothing if not responsive to market needs. This can be seen in the market driven swing from pharmaceutical and health related spam which has pretty much dominated the landscape during the last couple of years, to the product based stuff that pushes replica designer clothing and Rolex watches for example. New data released by email filtering specialists at the Marshall TRACE security team suggests that the two year long reign of health-related spam is over, and considering that this accounted for 75 percent of all spam in circulation during that period according to the Marshall statistics, it is quite some news.

Irony alert: South London teens use mobiles in project on tackling violent crime

Please forgive me for falling into the stereotype trap here, but in my defence I was born in South East London so feel I do have some right to pass judgement on the place. Anyway, the thing is I got this press release today which was bigging up (that’s me trying to be street, or something, and obviously failing) the use of mobile technology as part of a South London college project to tackle gun and knife crime. The LIFEWISE collaboration involves no less than 200 young people from South Thames College as well as six secondary schools across the London Borough of Wandsworth, who were given 200 Vodafone v1615 handsets with unlimited Internet mobile data access to help them work collaboratively on the project. Very commendable, but am I the only person wondering how many of them still have those handsets?

I played GTA IV without going postal in real life

If, like me, you are fed up of the seemingly continual string of easy headliner stories in the red top and serious press alike which blame video games for the increasing problems of violence, aggression and crime in society, then you will probably rather like this posting. You see one Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex has suggested that there is very little evidence that this is the case. His research, published in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry yesterday, actually found quite the opposite: that there is a real argument to be made for such games reducing real world violence.

MySpace wins hollow victory against Spam King

Sometimes you just have to laugh, even when you really do not want to. I found myself having a little titter missus, which turned into something of a ROFL before morphing naturally into red-faced spitting feathers anger last night. The cause of the kerfuffle being the widespread media reporting of the massive victory for MySpace which had just won a $234 million lawsuit against the Spam King himself, Sanford Wallace along with his partner in crime Walter Rines.

Half of all rootkits still not detected by AV software

Now that the media interest in rootkits seems to have all but evaporated, you might be forgiven for thinking that the problem has been solved, that the bad guys have moved on to another mode of attack, that the good guys have won. Forgiven, but wrong. According to the latest tests by those hardy chaps over at AV.Test who, funnily enough, spend pretty much their entire working lives being a thorn in the side of the AV industry by putting security products under the microscope and testing them until they burst, rootkits are still very much on the criminal radar.

The botnet stripped naked and exposed

Have you ever wondered exactly how a botnet works? A wotnet, you ask? A botnet, I say. You know, the thing that your computer might well be a part of, without your knowledge or approval, which is used to launch distributed denial of service attacks, send spam, distribute malware and above all else make the criminal gangs that control them lots and lots of money. Now are you ever so slightly curious as to how a botnet works, how it does the Borg thing and assimilates your computing resources, what damage it does, how much money it makes and how you can prevent yourself from being just another statistic? Thought so.

F1 racing drivers at risk from hard drive blackmail plot

According to security experts Sophos a man has been arrested after allegedly trying to sell a hard drive which had previously belonged to Formula One racing driver Adrian Sutil and contained personal and financial data.

What is the speed of encryption?

Not a question I ever thought I would find myself asking, nor to be fair finding myself intrigued by the answer. Not even if we got into the hypothetical territory of quantum encryption where those wearing the white coats and bemuse expressions will happily tell you that every possible encryption key can be tested simultaneously resulting in encryption, and of course decryption, before you can stifle the yawn. However, perhaps it is because it is a slow news day or I the fact that I need to get something geeky into my system following the mind-numbing experience that is shopping at Tesco, but a press release from Protegrity Corporation and Teradata managed to get me considering the speed of encryption question.

How big is the Second Life landscape?

When measured on a square mile basis, Second Life has already grown enough to be considered bigger than New York. Now that's not only quite impressive for a place that does not exist in the real world, but also when you take into consideration that according to Wikipedia, New York has been the largest city in the US since 1790 and its 8.2 million residents reside within a 332 square mile footprint. Second Life, on the other hand, was only launched in 2003 yet has a population of more than 13 million and covers an astonishing 462 square miles and that virtual land mass is growing at a rate of 5 percent month on month.

File under about bloody time

It has been a long while coming, but following the acquisition of Postini by Google last year the enterprise version of Google Apps is finally getting the security it deserves and its users demanded. The new Google Web Security for Enterprise is now available as a web service and incorporates real-time malware protection along with policy enforcement and URL filtering.

Jasper is just a stepping stone to Valhalla for Microsoft Xbox 360 gamers

News is breaking that Microsoft is preparing a 65nm GPU for the next Xbox 360, codename Jasper and due in August. The most recent updates to the ever popular games console, namely the Falcon revision, seem to have helped a lot with RRoD failure: also known as Red Ring of Death. This occurs when the system overheats, burns and crashes with a telltale three flashing red light rings to the front of the console. It has blighted the hardware since launch, and has yet to go away completely. Falcon improved the cooling capability and reduced the size of the CPU die to 65nm.

Is Google an open relay spammer?

A report entitled "Exploiting the Trust Hierarchy among Email Servers" published by Pablo Ximenes from the University of PR at Mayaguez, USA and Andre dos Santos at the State University of Ceara, Brazil suggests that Google Mail is flawed in such a way so as to turn it into massive spam machine.