Is Microsoft censoring Tibet email addresses?

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

If you would like the country of “Tibet” to be part of your new Hotmail email account name, then you are out of luck.  The New York Times is reporting that anyone who tries to enter “Tibet” into a new email account application is told that they have entered a “word that is not allowed”.

Is Microsoft nervous about upsetting China with “[email protected]”?   Microsoft gave the New York Times a rather strange alternative and frankly unbelievable explanation about banning email addresses that could include partial names of financial institutions.    Got to stop those nasty phishers you know!    After all, allowing Tibet email addresses could lead to someone pretending to be from the TIB Bank!

As one commenter on the NY Times page said, “Good thing ‘Tiberius’ isn’t a popular name these days”


Air Traffic Control helps pilot to land a plane by SMS

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Now here’s a story I’m glad I didn’t hear about before I went on my holidays!  I think if I had, I would have ended up walking and swimming to the UK instead of flying!

Air Traffic Control at Cork in Ireland successfully helped a pilot to land his crippled plane by sending him SMS messages to his mobile phone.   They were left with no other option because the twin-engined Piper plane “lost all onboard electrical power, communications and weather radar”.

The plane was brought safely to the ground and I’m sure the movie rights have already been bought.   Nicolas Cage is probably already being contacted to play the role of the pilot (“there has to be explosives in each SMS message and the air traffic controller has to be a covert terrorist!”)

So there you go.  SMS messages are not just used for dumping boyfriends and girlfriends.  Or for unlocking public toilets in Finland.  They can be used for landing crippled aircraft too.

Via The Irish Times

Is ignorance a valid legal defense for file-sharing?

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

A 16 year old girl has successfully managed to have her fine for file sharing reduced after she argued she was too young to understand that her music downloading was unlawful.   Which raises the question – is ignorance a valid legal defense?

Whitney Harper will now only have to pay $200 per downloaded song instead of $750 which was the penalty demanded by the record labels.   $200 is still an outrageous amount for a single song, but I suppose most of it is a deterrent and a penalty for what she has done.

Her lawyer argued in court that “a person her age could not understand the illegality of her acts and could therefore not be capable of intentionally infringing the copyright in the music.”

Harper told the court in a statement that she had had “no knowledge or understanding of file trading, online distribution networks or copyright infringement”.   She went even further and said that she believed programs like KaZaA “to be similar to online radio stations”

The judge believed her.

I’m leaning towards the notion that the judge is a moron and that 16 year old Whitney has taken him for a ride.  Show me one 16 year old that doesn’t know what a file sharing network is?   Show me one 16 year old that doesn’t rip CD’s, that doesn’t have illegal MP3’s on their iPod’s and MP3 players?    Every 16 year old knows what a file sharing network is and what it does!  I bet if the judge has children, they’re probably at home right now downloading Season 3 of Prison Break.

Do you agree?   Or is ignorance really a valid Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card?   Can a person really be too young to know what they are doing in things like this?

Google Maps gets its Georgia’s mixed up

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

This will probably go down in journalism history as one of the classics and Google will never live this down.  Plus you’ve probably still got the crazies in Georgia, USA hiding in the bushes with their shotguns waiting for the Russian tanks to come rumbling past muttering to themselves “that Google map thingie said they were coming!  Gotta stay vigilant!”

Google Maps, when used in an Associated Press Report about the Georgia conflict (that’s the Georgia near Russia), got mixed up and decided to use Georgia in the United States instead.    Therefore, the story ended up looking like this :

General confusion reigned.   One USA Georgia resident got worked up and posted a question on Yahoo Answers asking where the tanks were.   Even today, if you put “Russians invade Georgia” into Google Maps, you’ll get this.

But Google shouldn’t be too embarrassed.   UK’s Sky News made exactly the same mistake.    Be sure to check out their disclaimer at the bottom :

So if you’re living in Georgia, you’d best pack and start heading for the border!    According to Google and Wikipedia, you’re about to be visited by the Russian Army!

DefCon Presentation on Subway Hacking Exposes Critical Weaknesses

By PatB
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

A gag order prevented three MIT students from presenting their findings to a Defcon audience on a penetration test at Boston’s Subway system. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority filed a lawsuit to stop the speech and a U.S. District Court granted the temporary injunction, which kept the vulnerabilities in the farecard systems and security violations discovered from becoming public.

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The Online World of CitySpace

Liveplace.com has recently released a clip presenting their yet-to-be-launched online world, CitySpace. Check it out in the following video:

What is really great about this online world is that the environment it features can be accessed via a conventional browser and is fully rendered server-side, allowing relatively weak devices such as phones and PDAs to load the game without problems. The video you saw above was streamed on Treo 700 at 240kbps.

Twitter Spam is a Growing Problem

By Jimmy Rogers
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

If you are a regular Twitter user, you might have noticed a surprising number of “hot babes” have started following you.  On top of this, your new follower has only have three tweets in her profile and one of them is a link to a rather shady site.  Yes, you sir have been the victim of “follow spam.”

Twitter has been working on a solution to this kind of problem and thus far they have begun two new practices.  First, they are shutting down accounts that are clearly spammy.  Second, they have implemented “follow limits” that restrict the number of people you can follow.  Remember, this does not affect the number of people that can follow you, just the number of people YOU can follow.  The current limit is 2000 accounts.

There has been some controversy over the limits being imposed.  First of all, by banning all of those users, the number of followers I have has been drastically reduced.  Ok, so that isn’t a legitimate greivance, but here are a few real ones:

  1. A number of accounts have reason to follow more than 2000 users: namely bots that serve some purpose and actively monitor all of your tweets.
  2. Some people just want to be able to follow anyone and everyone, especially those who have thousands of followers themselves.

According to Webmonkey’s monkey_bites blog, the limit is a little bit flexible.  Apparently if you already have more than 2000 followers, you are allowed the ability to follow more than the usual number.  This may help out some of the bots (but not all of them) because most of the connections are one-to-one.

[Image from hehe2.net]