Scott: “They just don’t care!”

BP photoshops fake photo of crisis command center, posts on main BP site

Why does the meta data show that the photo was actually taken on March 6, 2001? Or is BP next going to tell us that their professional photographer has never set the time and date stamp on his multi-thousand dollar camera? Because then all of his photos for all of his clients will be screwed up. Really?

Nic suggested that the fact that BP’s artist neglected to go so far as editing the meta data in the JPG shows ignorance. Scott’s opinion was that BP just doesn’t care, and that this is very clear evidence of that. Scott intimates that even if BP had been aware of the meta data issue, that they still would have brazenly tried to trick the public with the doctored image.

Scott: “Now that’s 500 million people who signed up, including the people who make 100s of fake accounts.”

Facebook Tops 500 Million Users

Each month, Facebook says, more than 30 billion photographs, links to Web sites and news articles are shared through the site, and its members spend roughly 700 billion minutes there.

Nic explained that Facebook became the largest single network of registered users in the world a number of months ago, but that this milestone of half a billion accounts was quite significant. Scott reminded us that although the number of rows in their database might be 500 million, that doesn’t mean those were each unique individuals who signed up. Many people sign up multiple accounts for a variety of reasons, and so the numbers are inflated to an extent we cannot estimate.

Nic: “News stories like this don’t surprise me all that much. It’s like that actor that you thought died three years ago. Really? He’s still alive? Wow.”

E-Books Sales Beat Paper Back Sales In June

Nic offers a statistic about E-Book’s that shows their market share has gotten stronger as more hardware devices have begun to support the format. Scott makes a random reference to a game show category called “Dead or Canadian?” Scott admits that making connections like this are a possible sign of senility.

Scott: “The crux of the story was not that someone would try to make a malicious add-on, but that they got it [onto the Mozilla approved add-ons list].”

Firefox security test add-on was backdoored

… using the Mozilla Sniffer add-on would have introduced an unexpected vulnerability in any application being tested — whenever a login form was submitted, the add-on secretly sent a copy of the URL, password and other details to an IP address presumably controlled by the malicious author.

Scott reads a story explaining how one developer who was using a Mozilla Firefox add-on to inspect the security of a friend’s web based game discovered that besides just sniffing, the add-on was actually sending username / password combinations to an unknown IP address whenever something resembling a login form was submitted.

Scott: “I can’t give up having my e-mail on a server that I control. My only option appears to be to setup an Exchange server.”

Droid X and HTC EVO – No Pop

Nic asks if Scott is planning to make the switch from Windows Mobile to an Android phone. Scott explains he has two major issues with, for example, the Verizon Droid X. First, he needs remote desktop access. LogMeIn has a plugins and apps for mobile phones, so there is a solution there. Second, he does not want to have his e-mail in the cloud. Scott prefers to have his e-mail on his own personal domain, or at the very least hosted by the ISP he uses. Since his ISP is nolonger COX but is now Clear, and Clear does not offer e-mail, Scott is unsure what to do.