Downtime

A website offering detailed sex information to teenagers has one mid-west lawmakers turning red.
According to Planned Parenthood — which started the site on the grounds that “adults can’t afford to be naive” — many young people are going to have sex. And they need access to comprehensive information to protect themselves while they do it.
But one Republican doesn’t see things quite so clearly. “It’s enough to make an old person blush,’’ said Republican Lee Terry. “If that was in a printed magazine, it would be wrapped in brown paper and put behind a counter.”
Or perhaps the Republican sees things all too clearly.

New Scientist has rounded up some of the best April Fools on tech websites this year, including the fantastic invention of Gmail Custom Time, which allows you to send email back in time - without the intervention of The Doctor, or a flux capacitor.

One of the crueller punishments of the 21st century is to deny a person internet access, but prison wardens in New Zealand don’t seem nearly committed enough.
Twenty prisons in New Zealand are to receive computer training suites to help rehabilitate prisoners. About 200 computers, all refurbished second-hand machines, will be installed by the end of June and the Corrections Department is looking at options to roll out extra machines next year, reports the website stuff.co.nz.
Wardens were initially unhappy with the licensing agreements on software, so the prison’s in-house consulting division on D-Wing was on hand to negotiate with the local account exec. Who hasn’t been seen since Tuesday.

How do you promote something you can’t see, touch or hear? While the prospect might daunt even the most committed marketing executive, BT has stumbled upon a novel approach to promoting its Wi-Fi network called FON.
Enlisting the help of footballer Peter Crouch, the telco has created a tutorial on how to do the perfect mexican wave. Crouchie shows the flick, snap and hip motion needed to put your friends to shame.
The wave reportedly symbolises the importance of community and BT FON hopes to create a Wi-Fi community so big that one day you could get access to broadband on every street. Given the rate 3G USB dongles are selling, it won’t be long until Wi-Fi joins the tumbleweed billowing across desolate streets.

So Google Docs, now it works offline, could be a viable alternative to Microsoft's office applications for some businesses. How will Microsoft respond? Not like this, we hope...

[PS. For more great comics like this, see Office OFFLine: A web comic by David Salaguinto]

The wolf whistles of Britain's builders could soon be a thing of the past if computer scientists from Tel Aviv get their way. Boffins claim they have managed to successfully "teach" a computer how to spot an attractive woman – the qualities of which can now be reduced to a few hundred lines of Cobol code rather than the more traditional "You look fine, dear. Honest. I never loved your sister."

The breakthrough heralds a marriage of computer programming and psychology to get a computer to make an aesthetic judgement, according to the lead boffin Amit Kagian. "Until now, computers have been taught how to identify basic facial characteristics. But our software lets a computer make an aesthetic judgment."

The researchers fed features such as face symmetry, skin smoothness and hair colour into the computer to conduct the analysis. What the computer made of the chiselled features of the programming team is not yet known.

Millions of American taxpayers could get a “special rebate” on their annual tax returns after it was revealed that the IRS’s internal systems were especially vulnerable to hackers.

A report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration identified weaknesses in the internal security of the federal Internal Revenue Service.

“We are very concerned that authorisation and authentication controls are weak on devices as sensitive as routers and switches… A disgruntled employee, contractor or hacker could reconfigure routers or switches to disrupt computer operations and steal taxpayer information in a number of ways," the report said.

Still, although America may be an economic and military superpower, it is nice to see that incidents such as the HMRC's lost discs are helping the UK to lead the world in this particular field.

An all-Azerbaijani computer science olympiad might sound like the set-up to a particularly poor joke, but rest assured, it is authentic. Details from the Azerbaijan Business Centre website are sketchy, but apparently this is the second time the contest is being held.

“The Ministry of Communications & Information Technologies of Azerbaijan informed that 33 teams from 14 educational institutions (including four teams from regions) took part in the first round. Thirteen teams got in the second round. In the first round they gathered 30% possible points. The final round will be held on May 3, 2008 in the Institute if Information Technologies,” said the site.

Plans to host a torch run through the streets of the capital apparently passed uncontested, which is in contrast to the Blue Peter-bashing run that took place last week in our own fair capital. British thugs: best in the world!

Reader Michael J. Forbes, who should not be confused with Hollywood superstar Michael J. Fox, wrote in to congratulate Computer Weekly on its "national spare room database" April Fool story. But he warned that sometimes, life can imitate art.

“You may be interested to learn that this did happen in the 1930s. Our family, including our grandmother, rented a house in Manchester, and despite our mother having two very young children (one being myself), they were obliged to take in a lady refugee from Europe. There was no choice in this matter - it was mandatory. The compensation did not cover the additional heating, lighting and cooking costs. Please do not give the present bunch of blighters any ideas.”

If the company of strange European ladies is price the UK has to pay for sharing its rooms, then who is Downtime to stand in the way of progress?

Apple and Sony will settle a lawsuit stemming from the whole exploding laptop battery incident a few years back. But given the bargain basement settlement figure, Downtime feels we could have provided better legal counsel. The electronic giants are together paying a Japanese couple a total of about 1.3 million yen (that’s £5,000) for damages to their home and for burns the man sustained while trying to remove his flaming Apple computer from the house. The couple argued this fire was caused by a defective Sony lithium-ion battery.
Despite agreeing to pay its share of the settlement, Sony still maintains there was no link between the fire and the battery but has to date has recalled 9.6 million of these “occasionally unstable” batteries.

Managers are falling prey to a new type of phishing scam, that may reveal more about their character then they’d like. ABC news reports that tripwired emails purporting to contain court summons are proving successful in lulling victims to download attachments. Victims of the crime are taken to a phony web site where they are told they need to install software to view the court documents.
Given that most spam can be discounted without a second thought, Downtime wonders what these “captains of industry” have to be worried about that would warrant opening e-mails in the first place? If you suspect your manager of dumping more than CRT monitors in the company skip late at night, or taking more than a box of biros home, Downtime wants to know.

Information security officers, beware. Whatever security measures you've put in place to protect your network, it could take as little as a bite of the sweet stuff to get your staff to fling the gates wide open. New reserach conducted on behalf of InfoSec has revealed that 1 in 5 people will give up their password in return for a chocolate bar, with women even more likely to do so than men. A case of have a Kit-Kat, have a breach?

Police arrested an IT contractor from Wales who found the time to set up and run a pirate software business while claiming to be working from home for his main employer. The IT contractor, 36, was able to provide key project support and programming expertise to his employer from home, while simultaneously exploiting the company’s lax software ordering process to fence copies of the latest software at bargain basement prices - which PC World would find impossible to do a price match.
At his post arrest interview, the suspect allegedly claimed that the steady diet of daytime television and inane support calls from people who would “find difficulty even dressing themselves in the morning” drove him to it.

London mayoral candidate Ken Livingston’s protests that someone hacked the council’s e-mail system to expose crony Lee Jasper’s lurid correspondence with a married woman made entertaining reading. The truth is less interesting but more instructive.

Andrew Hosken’s new biography, Ken: The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone, reveals that a temp found Mr Jasper’s password written on a Post-It note. This allowed the temp to log in and print off the salacious e-mails that eventually won former BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan a Journalist of the Year Award.

Downtime expects Ken to have already ordered a two-factor authentication scheme to protect those afflicted with short-term memory difficulties, banned 3M’s best-selling product and instructed HR to re-do the background checks to weed out anyone with a malicious sense of humour.

Reader Alan Thompson wrote in to say that he recently received spectacularly bad service from his local computer shop. “He [the repairman] was smelling of alcohol and tried to repair the headphone jack on my laptop with a hammer. My wife’s sense of propriety kept her quiet when “Joel” arrived reeking of booze and cigarettes, and she did not speak up when he started wielding a hammer to install parts that wouldn’t fit onto the motherboard. Joel ended up cracking the case and putting nail holes through the wrist pad. When he left, my wife called the store to complain and asked for a new tech. Who did the store dispatch? Joel!”

The phrase “give us sixty seconds and we’ll give you the world” is not just used by over eager grooms on their wedding night, it is also the slogan of news channel CNN.
However, visitors to the CNN website this month had to wait considerably more than sixty seconds for pages to load after the news channel fell victim to a denial of service attack. Allegedly, hacker groups in China launched attacks against the CNN Web site on Saturday over the network's coverage of unrest in Tibet.
Without a hint of irony the CNN website reported, “Angry Chinese bloggers have accused CNN and several other Western news organisations of being unfair in covering recent pro-independence protests in Tibet, which is controlled by China.”

A stripper who was arrested for dressing as a policeman missed a court appearance because of a computer bungle, reports the Daily Record newspaper. The 25-year-old stripper was due to appear in court but missed his appearance because he was not sent the correct date, which the court later blamed on a computer system error.
The man was charged after two plain-clothes cops spotted him in a police uniform, complete with baton and fake CS spray, in an Aberdeen bar.
He was later cleared at the city's sheriff court when it was ruled the baton and spray were “props” in his routine.

A security weakness in Barack Obama's website has been exploited to redirect visitors to Hillary Clinton's website. Visitors who viewed the Community Blogs section of the site were instead presented with Clinton's website as a result of a cross-site scripting vulnerability.
A YouTube clip shows a user clicking on the Community Blogs section of the Barack Obama site, which subsequently causes the browser to redirect to hillaryclinton.com.
Perhaps both democrat candidates should have a word with Al Gore to settle the in-fighting. After all, he did invent the internet.

Boffins at Stanford University in Silicon Valley are studying a unique course that blends the fuddy duddy world of psychology with an excuse to spend all day on Facebook under the legitimate guise of research.
The Psychology of Facebook is the brainchild of B J Fogg, a ‘persuasion psychologist’ who founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.
After selling magic beans within five minutes of meeting the BBC reporter who interviewed him, he said, "When Facebook came along, what struck me was how there was this new form of persuasion. Where on earth could you get a million customers in a week? That was when I said 'I want to learn more about this' and I thought the best way was to teach a class and look at how persuasion happens."
Presumably the first lecture will revolve around persuading students to part with tuition fees.

From the Adobe Updater: “The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"

Almost Zen-like in its simplicity, this error message has a certain amount of aeshetic appeal. But it's not much good at helping you uncover what's gone wrong. This message is from one of the internal legacy systems Downtime has to deal with on a weekly basis...

A new contest running at the Nerdcon hacker event this year has caused a great deal of controversy. Hackers have had the gauntlet thrown down to them by being challenged to design malware that cannot be detected by Symantec or McAfee software.
The contest is dubbed Race to Zero, which presumably refers to zero-day exploits, and not the number of friends that hackers typically have.
The contest has been criticised by anti-virus suppliers for encouraging hackers to thwart their products and teaching virus writers new tricks. Which is a little odd, frankly, given the value of the anti-malware upgrade market.