MaxRedline

Tweaker Cam

The owner of an auto repair shop in North Everett, Washington is fed up. Not content with putting "Welcome to Tweakerville" on the sign outside his business, he's set up a number of cameras and streams the footage. They're aimed at a homeless camp across the street, and although the material's generally mundane, the stream's occasionally caught views of addicts shooting up drugs over there.

He's also planning to set up a drone program, along with microphones so he can stream audio.

The mission, he says, is pretty simple: a safe place to live, a safe place for his employees to work, and a safe place for his customers to do business. None of which exist when homeless drug addicts are camped across the street from the shop he's run for 25 years.

 

Up Your Passwords

Security people note that a typical eight-character password can be broken in half an hour or less, but a 13-character password can take upwards of two days to break. For travelers using the free Wi-Fi in airports and hotels, which are increasingly being monitored by hackers using inexpensive pineapple devices, that distinction can be important, so it's worthwhile to up your game a bit.

If you have a home network, make sure your router's using WAP security - but up your game anyway.

 

Spacey Ringtones

NASA is now offering a range of free ringtones for your smartphone. Don't know if you want to have the sound of a rocket blastoff whenever somebody calls, but it's available.

Interesting to me, as my wife worked on the STS-26 mission.

I don't think I'll use the liftoff as a ringtone, but they have a lot of other audio in there.

 

 

Fact-Checking The "Fact-Checkers"

It looks like the left-leaning Snopes.com "fact-checking" site's on its last legs in the wake of a bitter divorce of the co-owners and a subsequent lawsuit by investors that's soon to get underway.

Fact-checking website Snopes is on the verge of financial collapse after its owner was accused of embezzling company funds to pay for his contentious divorce battle and lavish overseas trips with his new wife, a former Las Vegas escort and porn actress.

The company's financial woes have gotten so bad that Snopes' owner David Mikkelson started a crowd-funding website pleading for donations this week, which raised over $500,000 from generous readers in its first day.

Snopes readers tend to be True Believers. And Leftist. During the course of divorce proceedings, it emerged that Davey was accused of embezzling $100,000 in company funds, which he diverted to personal expenses and prostitutes.

Now an advertising and internet services company called Proper Media is making similar accusations against Mikkelson in a lawsuit filed in May in California which is scheduled for a court hearing next month.

It doesn't really matter whether or not Dirty Davey prevails in court (and he likely won't), when all you're peddling is credibility and you don't have it anymore, it's over.

 

Related articles

Snopes seeks crowdfunding in ownership battle

You Can't Believe Anything

Researchers at UW have been able to take videos of Obama doing his speechifying thing and make it appear that he's saying something entirely different.

Using this technique, it's possible to make "Photoshopped videos". And relatively easily. Even Orwell would be impressed.

Freedom Of Speech? Not Necessarily.

Since many internet sites are privately-owned, you need to abide by their terms of service or risk finding yourself banned from the platform. Most of us understand that, but some don't; they get taken out. If you want freedom of speech on the web, where you can say anything you want to - no matter how outrageous - you have to build your own site. And pay for it.

The First Amendment is not universal.

Rural Broadband

Microsoft President Brad Smith says in a blog post that he plans to unveil details about the initiative at a Tuesday event in Washington, D.C.

Smith says the strategy would use TV white spaces, which are unlicensed and unused airwaves. He says the powerful bandwidth will allow wireless signals to travel over hills and through buildings and trees.

The company has no plans to become an ISP itself, but will partner with service providers in 12 states, assuming FCC approval. That's far from a given, as broadcast television stations have been raising concerns about bandwidth bleed that might interfere with their transmissions. That concern seems unfounded, as stations have gone to digital narrowcasting, but you never know what a lifer bureaucrat's going to decide.

If approved and deployed, this would bring broadband capability to at least 2 million additional people with the reliability of current Wi-Fi setups but with considerably lower power requirements. Microsoft is working on a white space receiver/transmitter that they hope to bring to market for under $200.

Related articles

FCC Aims to Maximize Unlicensed Use of TV Spectrum Post Auction - Telecompetitor

Who's Going To Pick Your Lettuce?

Or your grapes, or...? Well, one answer is coming from the town of Pendleton, in eastern Oregon. The site of an Unmanned Aircraft Systems test range, one of the guys working on UAS came up with an idea for something entirely different: Digital Harvest.

Digital Harvest CEO Young Kim has found a way to mesh virtual reality with robotics to delicately pick the fruit. Kim wants to address the dire labor shortage viticulturists and the apple and cherry industries face at harvest time.

As has been mentioned here on a number of occasions, illegal aliens are not needed to harvest fruits and vegetables; farms will become more automated. Already there are autonomous robots capable of detecting whether, say, strawberries are ripe and selectively harvesting them. Similar robots can work in lettuce fields.

One problem with that approach is that autonomous robots are expensive. Kim's idea is much less so; it basically involves a modified golf cart equipped with the daVinci ARM, which has been used for several years in minor surgical procedures. By tagging the cart and ARM into a virtual reality network, there is no need to have actual people on the site to do the picking - it can be done from anywhere, and could easily provide work for wounded war veterans without the need for them to leave their homes, for example.

Pendleton stands to overtake Portland Metropolitan Area as a center for tech innovation. And the robotics don't need Porta-Potties.

Neighborhood Spoofing

Finally, the FCC is getting around to doing something - like enforcing our law.

The agency on Thursday proposed a $120 million fine against Adrian Abramovich of Miami, Fla., alleging his operation, doing business as Marketing Strategy Leaders, made 96 million spoofed robocalls during the period in which the FCC investigated. Of those calls, about 90% were made to wireless phones, with 10% to landline phones. The calls used "neighborhood spoofing" technology to include local area codes and the first three numbers of the recipient's own phone number to encourage people to answer the calls.

There's been a marked uptick in this sort of thing from jerks like Abramovich, who use VOIP to hide where they're coming from. Let it go to voicemail; if it's a real call, they'll leave a message. Robocallers never do.

 

Related articles

9 Ways to Deal With Robocalls

FTC and Florida take action against robocall ring that pitched worthless credit card rate-reduction programs (CL&P Blog)

Tech Humor

Dad's a big Cubs fan, so my brother got him a subscription to MLB, then thought a big flat-screen TV would be a great addition. I sent him some cash, he got the TV, and trundled it over to install it yesterday. Dad was really happy, but today, he couldn't get a picture on the screen. I suggested to brother that Dad had probably hit the source key on the remote and thereby disconnected the HDMI input. He tried walking Dad by phone through fixing that.

This is why I'm glad that we live 3000 miles apart. Well, brother mentioned that he might as well be telling Dad how to build a nuclear reactor. Yes, that sort of happens.

I told my brother to tell Dad to be sure that the cable from the hypersonic overthruster was firmly seated in the slot on the lower-left back side of the panel. He got a good laugh out of that one.