Pop-Up Extortion

Several years ago I had a teenage relative come stay with us for a week or so. Forgetting how very horny the average teenage boy is (am I really that old??), I neglected to turn on the parental controls for internet access that came with my internet program. Oops.

Part-way through his visit, I discovered some very interesting pictures on the computer. When I approached him about this, he at first denied he had downloaded them from porn sites, but eventually confessed. He promised not to continue doing that, as long as I didn't report it to his mom, but before I could figure out the parental controls, he did it again. He was barred from further unauthorized computer use, and yes, his mom heard about it.

Once he left, I figured that was the end of it. Oh, no. That was just the beginning. Next came the phone bill. It turns out he had visited porn sites that charged for every download. More than $200, in total! You'd better believe we made his mom pay the bill.

But even that wasn't the end. The real nightmare came when we realized viruses and Trojan horses had been downloaded to our computer with the images. We discovered the problem when we found our computer dialing onto the internet on its own, without us even opening the dial-up window! Turns out it had done so many, many times, because the next phone bill came with even more charges. Lucky for us, my lovely wife was able to talk the phone company into dropping the charges and blocking those phone numbers from our phone system. We invested in some heavy-duty firewall and antivirus programs, and the nightmare finally came to an end.

It left me wondering how many others have these problems and are too embarrassed to raise a fuss about it, unwilling to admit that they've been shaking hands with Mr. Johnson to the pervy sort of stuff on those sites.

Well, with pornography still the number one business on the internet, and given the sleazy nature of that business, it shouldn't surprise anyone that a new form of online extortion is being used by those sites.

As reported today on PhysOrg.com (HERE), one porn site (which will remain unnamed) is now offering a free, three-day membership to anyone that wants it. After pressing an approval button and not reading the fine print, the customer does indeed get three free days to "tit"-ilate their senses by viewing women's bits and pieces, but when the three days is up, streams of pop-up windows invade their computer, regardless of whether they are online or offline. The pop-ups won't stay minimized, and remain on top of any other windows. The website then tells the customer – get this! – that they can remove those annoying pop-ups if they pay $80 for a 90-day membership. If they pay, they then can remove the pop-ups with a special file. If they don't pay . . . well, I guess they'd better start liking pop-up windows. I hope their sticky little three-day thrill was worth it.

Oh, how cleverly legal and evil of that porn site! I imagine other sites are already catching on. The victims agreed to this deal when the approved. One can argue that they got what they deserved. But I guess I still feel a tiny bit of pity for them and their lusty libidos. After all, men are horny little devils who can barely control themselves (I should know, being a man). Men are such pigs!

But even if they manage to control their slippery little urges, who knows? Maybe they had a teenage relative come visit and they forgot to engage those parental controls on the computer.

It's been known to happen.


Image taken from HERE.

Save Your Data On Bacteria

I worry about stupid things, sometimes. Not practical things, like how I’m going to potty train my toddlers or where I can buy an affordable steam cleaner, but about the big, giant things I could probably never do anything about. Those “oh my god” sorts of problems that most people shake their heads about but don’t think on any further because they’re sensible enough to know they couldn’t possible do anything about it, like forging peace in the Middle East, controlling AIDS in central Africa, and stopping the polar ice caps from melting. You know, the “little things.”

For instance, I worry about what’s going to happen to all the monumental loads of data and information the world generates every day. Is it safe? Where does it all go? How can we insure it never gets lost or corrupted? I absolutely loathe the idea that someone would spend valuable time collecting information and recording it, only to lose it. I guess that’s what makes me a good lab rat. And, yes, I have multiple backups for all my data, right down to a spreadsheet for my VCR and DVD movies at home. What? You don’t have such a spreadsheet? How else am I to remember that I have a VCR tape copy of Highlander? (“There can be only one!”)

Previously I posted about how a state official in Alaska had accidentally deleted 800,000 refund payment files, then accidentally deleted the backup disc. A second backup had been corrupted. This is exactly the sort of thing that worries me. Luckily they had the original paper documents, and after months of overtime by employees they re-entered all the data.

Once upon a time all we had was papyrus and velum, then we invented paper. There are still a few of these ancient documents around, preserved by desert conditions and now tucked away in museums, but think of all the documents that were lost over thousands of years! Where would civilization be, now, if they had been safeguarded better? Essentially, most of our modern information is still on paper, paper that for the most part is made with cheaper and less durable ingredients, I might add. Now we have digitized storage media, but the accident in Alaska shows how unreliable that is, even in the short term. Hundreds of years from now, do you think we’ll be able to retrieve that information? Do you think we’ll even have the same technology lying around to do it?

Well, now some Japanese researchers may have found a way to help alleviate my worry. They have found a reliable method to store data on the DNA code of living bacteria, which could protect that data for hundreds or even thousands of years!

Story: http://www.physorg.com/news98542190.html

Scholarly article: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/bipret/2007/23/i02/pdf/bp060261y.pdf

That’s right, save data in the DNA of living bacteria in a manner similar to storing data on computer discs. And you thought bacteria was only good for making beer and cheese!

For you non-science types, DNA is made up of four components, called nucleotides, which pair up in specific combinations, or genes, to code for the production of all the proteins that make up cells, organs, and, eventually, YOU, and every other living thing on earth. For decades, molecular biologists have found increasingly clever ways of identifying those codes, manipulating them, synthesizing them, and inserting them into DNA sequences. Left alone, these genetic sequences take thousands, or even millions, of years to change due to random mutations as they are inherited from generation to generation.

Dr. Masaru Tomita and his colleagues have found a way to store data by synthesizing their own genetic sequences. Each combination of the nucleotides in these sequences corresponds to specific binary codes. These binary codes can then be matched with specific letters or numbers. Those sequences were then inserted into the DNA of living bacteria (of the species Bacillus subtilis).

They successfully inserted, then later retrieved, the codes for the phrase "E=mc^2 1905!", referring to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and the year he published his Nobel-prize-winning theorem. Because they inserted the code in four different locations in the DNA, mutation in one copy can be corrected by the other three copies. Computer simulations, based on the predicted rate of mutation, suggest the code is secure for hundreds to thousands of years.

Though the amount that can be stored in the bacteria is limited by the genome size, and the person who eventually reads the data would need to know the code that deciphers the nucleotide combinations and matches them with numbers and letters, Tomita’s technique essentially safeguards the information far, far into the unseen future. According to the CNN story: "Many people never even thought about storing data for thousands of years," Tomita said. "This may sound like a dream. But we're thinking hundreds of millions of years."

Now THAT would solve my insane worries. All we have to do is figure out how to make a "bacterial disc drive" to store my data for the next thousand years. Then where would I store it? The fridge? -- “Wait, Honey! Don’t throw out that rancid milk! Those bacteria have my movie database saved on them!”

Lost Data

This morning I lost an electronic folder of data. That data took about a day's worth to collect, fighting all the while against hardware problems. This was followed by almost a day of fighting software glitches to analyze the data. There was a lot of moving around of files during the process of de-bugging those glitches, and somewhere along the way the entire file got moved or deleted.

I panicked a little. But, being the paranoid sort, I had a couple of temporary backups on other computers that I had not yet deleted. Whew! I restored a copy of the original files back where they belonged, with only a half hour of time lost.

Then around noon today I read on CNN how another technician had made a similar screw-up – and lost nine month's worth of data from about 800,000 files for the State of Alaska Department of Revenue:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/20/lost.data.ap/index.html

Yes, this technician, who remains unnamed, was doing some routine reformatting of government hard drives last July. Unfortunately, this person erased all the information on the drive that determined oil revenue money going to all Alaskans, one of Alaska's biggest perks to its citizens. Then the tech accidentally deleted the backup hard drive. Oops. But wait, they had a second backup! But when they went to that one, the files had somehow been corrupted and rendered unreadable! Data retrieval attempts by Microsoft and Dell failed.

Now, I would love to get a peek into this technician's brain at that point, just for the sake of morbid curiosity, as they stood there wide-eyed and mouth open staring down at the corrupted hard drive and the two erased hard drives which HAD contained data for $38 BILLION worth of revenue allotments. Yes, BILLION with a capital B! Can we say, "Oh, f*ck!" Somehow I don't think they were thinking about the next episode of "Lost!". More likely they were wondering if they would be allowed enough time to grab their office plants before they were escorted out of the building.

What followed was about four months of manic data-re-entry from the original paperwork, stored in 300 cardboard boxes. Half a dozen seasonal workers were re-hired for the purpose, and 70 employees worked weekends and overtime, at a cost of $220,000. Much to their credit, nearly all refunds went out on time. Interestingly, no one was fired over the incident, and there apparently hasn't been any public finger-pointing, but I doubt one particular technician will be getting their bonus this year.

This brings me to a somewhat related topic. Isn't it interesting that, for sheer reliability, you just can't replace paper with electronic files? I mean, in two thousand years, when the next "Dead Sea Scrolls" are pulled out of some office filing cabinet, do you think they'll be on a computer disk, or on reams of paper? I'd put my vote on paper. Hell, I can't read the disks I saved 10 years ago with my Mac Classic, and the fools up in Alaska couldn't read a backup drive that wasn't even a year old. Paper deteriorates, too, but even cheap newsprint is still around from hundreds of years ago. Even if we invent some super-hardy storage device, what are the chances the computer hardware and software will still be accessible to read it? With paper, all you need is your eyes.

Well, back to analyzing my data. Hmm. Now where did I save my restored copy, again?….

Giving Laptops To The Young Makes Me Feel Old

If you're my age or older, you can remember a childhood without a personal computer of any kind whatsoever. I know, it's difficult to remember through the fog of your developing Alzheimer's, but give it an effort. You actually had to use a pencil and blank piece of ruled paper to write your reports, or at least a typewriter (do you remember when you made a mistake you had to go back and either type over the letters with eraser ribbon or X them out? –shiver-), since a "word processor" was just a fancy typewriter, not a type of computer program. Good luck finding typewriters these days! If you needed to look up some sort of odd information, there was no internet, you had to go to a library and hope their encyclopedia was up-to-date, or check out and read a book which was also likely out of date. And you had to rely on a phone to contact your friends when you weren't near each other, instead of texting or MySpace. Ah, how primitive!

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Yeah, but it can't hurt kids these days to learn how to use a library and actually write with decent penmanship!" This just means you're turning into your grandparents. Don't tell your kids about those days or they're likely to realize how old you really are then text their friends about you while you think they're doing their homework.

I was actually on the cuff of the computing revolution; at age 12 I got a TRS-80 personal computer with a whopping 16K of useable memory. Wow! If I wanted to do anything with it, I had to program it myself with about a zillion lines of BASIC (- another shiver -).

Well, many children in developing countries are no better off, computing-wise, than we were 30 years ago or more. Now an organization called One Laptop Per Child has decided to do something about that. They basically redesigned the computer and the way it is used, with a goal toward helping elementary school children in developing countries learn computing and be able to use that ability in creative and constructive ways:

Their website: http://www.laptop.org/
An article on them from CNN.com: LINK
An article from Popular Mechanics: LINK

Instead of a battery, their laptop has some sort of hand-crank mechanism. It has a redesigned screen that can operate in color or black-and-white (for use outdoors). It has a swivel screen, a built-in camera, and nifty neon-green accents. And they've done all this for a cost of only about $100 per computer. Countries will purchase them and distribute them to schools. It is completely free for the children.

By July, One Laptop expects to distribute millions of these machines to children in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, Thailand and the Palestinian territory.

The kicker is that it has a whole new operating system. Instead of Windows, it operates on low-cost and low-memory open source programming similar to Linux. On start-up, the child sees a stick figure (them) linked to each of the open programs. There are also icons linking them to all the other students near them with a computer (through a wireless network). The idea is that it is supposed to be intuitive – just click on what you want to do – and that they can interact with their classmates in unique ways to build upon each other's work. One commentor (from Geekcorps) says about the operating system, "It doesn't feel like Linux. It doesn't feel like Windows. It doesn't feel like Apple. I'm just impressed they built a new (user interface) that is different and hopefully better than anything we have today." But then he added, "Granted, I'm not a child. I don't know if it's going to be intuitive to children."

One Laptop's got a good thing going. The world is shrinking, and teaching kids to do what us old fogies couldn't at their age can only give them a hand up in this increasingly technical world of ours.

But, being an Angry Lab Rat, I of course have to find something to grouse about, so here it is: the operating system is unique and vastly different from existing systems. While that represents a nifty, and perhaps improved, programming and engineering achievement, I have to question rather it is the right choice. Put it this way: hundreds of thousands of school kids will learn computing on a system which is not likely to be present in their workspaces as adults. Like it or not, Microsoft has the market, worldwide, though Linux is growing. Are these kids really being prepared?

And here's another thing (and now I'm really being negative): $100 goes a long way in some of those countries. Will little Mahmoud in Palestine, upon receiving his sleek neon-green computer, look at it and wonder why they spent money on that instead of rebuilding his war-torn house and feeding his family for a month?

But don't get me wrong, I think One Laptop is a worthy enterprise, and it's certainly a better start than what I had at elementary age (nothing!).

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to dig out my typewriter from storage and turn it into something useful, like a flower pot.