intodimensions.com

I came across Printfu.org - you upload a PDF to them and they print it and send it to you. Seems like a good service (and relatively cheap) for when you have large PDFs you need to print. There’s a hint at MacOSXHints about it.

CNN.com:

University of California-Berkeley police are investigating the theft of a campus laptop computer containing information on 98,000 individuals.

The university said a person who walked into its Graduate Division offices on March 11 was seen leaving with the laptop by a campus employee, who reported the theft to campus police.

The computer contained information on most individuals who applied to or attended UC-Berkeley’s graduate school between 1976 and 2004.

About a third of the computer’s files contained dates of birth and or addresses as well as Social Security numbers and names.

[posted with ecto]

Paul Graham:

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad’s hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.

For most of us, it’s not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker’s computer.

DrunkenBlog:

Every developer community has its “Doctor Who’s”. Faces who show up at all the conferences, always seem to have their hands in the cool stuff, and everyone in the know knows their name but not a whole lot of others do.

Jonathan Rentzsch is one of those people, and is a guy who wrote his own preemptive multitasking engine for the Classic Mac OS that benched in 400% faster than Apple’s built-in Thread Manager for copying files. For Mac OS X, he created a solution to allow developers to do things they couldn’t otherwise do called mach_inject and mach_override — similar to Unsanity’s APE — and released it under the BSD license to be incorporated by anyone.

As a special easter treat, Rentz agreed to do the blog and let me pick his brain about a whole range of subjects including, but not limited to: mach_inject/mach_override software, WebObjects, Apple and enterprise, code optimization, programming languages, Core Data and even the rarely-discussed Mac software casting couch…

[posted with ecto]

Techtarget.com:

Claire Sellick approached a woman in London’s tony theater district with a clipboard and a chance to win tickets to an upcoming show. All the woman had to do was answer a three-minute survey on locals’ theater-going habits. Or so she thought.

The first question was easy. “What’s your name?” Next came questions about her attitude towards the theater, with more personal inquiries interjected now and then. For instance, the survey company needed the woman’s date of birth (to prove she was legally able to win the seats) and her mother’s maiden name (for later verification) and her address, of course, to mail the tickets if she won the drawing. What about a phone number? Her pet’s name? The name of the first school she attended?

At some point, the woman began connecting the dots. “I work for a bank and this information could be used to open a bank account.”

“Yes,” Sellick responded.

The event director for the Infosecurity Europe trade show recalled with incredulity what happened next. “She then proceeded to give me all her details!”

That encounter is recounted in the conference’s annual pulse-taking of people’s susceptibility to social engineering. The results typically are released a few weeks

before Infosecurity Europe kicks off in London to drum up publicity and to track the public’s propensity to easily divulge sensitive data. Last year, people at a transit station gladly gave up their passwords for a chocolate Easter egg. This year, they provided all the ingredients for their identities to be stolen for a chance to see a show. [Conference organizers did make good on their promise and sent ticket vouchers to three randomly drawn winners, then destroyed all the data they collected.]

[posted with ecto]

We have some of our financial dealings with Chase Manhattan, and we deal mainly with them online. This morning when I tried to log in to our account I happened to type in the wrong password and the site gave me an error message: “Error Message LO011: The User ID and/or Password you entered is not valid. Your User ID and Password must consist only of letters and numbers”.

Now what’s wrong with this? Surely a good password should also be able to contain punctuation marks, right?

[posted with ecto]

CNN:

Microsoft and the European Commission have agreed the software company can sell a stripped-down version of its Windows operating system under the name “Windows XP Home Edition N,” Microsoft said Monday.

Well there’s a pretty stupid name if there ever was one, don’t you think?

[posted with ecto]

Geeks.com has a pretty good package-deal on a Mac mini with 17-inch LCD display, keyboard, and mouse for $799. It’s the 1.25GHz Mac mini with 256Mb RAM so you might want to spend more on that, but it’s a pretty good package deal.

[posted with ecto]

A reader asks on Slashdot:

Today I received a letter from my university’s network administration advising me that my network access would be terminated due to ‘illegal P2P activity.’ The P2P activity that the e-mail cited was BitTorrent and the file being transferred was an update to the Azureus BitTorrent client. The letter stated, ‘Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,’ implying that BitTorrent is inherently illegal. It seems such misunderstandings are common, but it is particularly frustrating when coming from people in the IT field. How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?

Indeed - is P2P inherently illegal? Of course not! It’s easy to take the student’s side in this issue, but it’s also important to remember that the university has to keep track of what happens on their networks. Just shutting down a protocol is not the answer though, I don’t think. That would discourage students to get, for example, Linux distributions, which is not good.

[posted with ecto]

The Writing Center’s next workshop, “Documenting Sources: Using APA Format,” will be held Monday, March 28, at 2:30 p.m. in the Lowrimore Auditorium (CEMC 114). We will discuss strategies for creating a reference page and using parenthetical references in the body of a paper. This workshop will help first-time users of APA format as well as experienced writers who need a refresher class on documentation techniques.