Computers-Plus

Finally, someone in the government has realized what ex-girlfriends have known for years – technology makes stalking easier. We’ve all done it, incessantly stalked our ex’s Facebook page, or maybe checking a particular someone’s Twitter feed over and over again.

But on a more serious note, the attorney general of Illinois is calling some real attention on the use of technology to stalk students around college campuses.

Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, recently hosted a discussion on “Campus Safety and Cyber Dangers: Stalking on College Campuses in the Digital Age” at DePaul University. 

Madigan says college campuses have become a breeding ground for stalkers and technology is just making it that much easier.

Tools like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter provide intimate details of a student’s life, clueing stalkers in on a victim’s exact whereabouts.

This

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GSM is the standard digital technology that allows us to make calls worldwide. But what we assume is secure has actually been proven insecure by researchers who demoed an easy way of eavesdropping on encrypted calls and messages.

Although the government can easily hack into a cell phone using a $50,000 network sniffer, these researchers determined that there was an easier and cheaper option: a $15 hack that almost any Joe Shmoe could do it. Scary.

All it takes is four $15 phones as network sniffers, a laptop computer, and a few readily available open source software solutions.

“GSM is insecure, the more so as more is known about GSM,” said Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs.

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It seems the disk drive industry has decided which future technology to use and in which order, judging by recent Western Digital and Xyratex discussions with investment analysts.

The current perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR) is running out of steam as continued size reductions in the magnetised bit area lead to unreliable data storage. There are two long-term technologies suggested as a way to defeat this: heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and bit-patterned media (BPM) plus a short-term boost to areal density improvements with PMR by using partially overlapping tracks in Shingled write technology.

WD’s CFO, Wolfgang Nickl, presented to financial analysts yesterday and provided a three-step technology roadmap.

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Apparently, the squeaky wheel writes the tweet.

elspethjane.com

An example of a funny Google search

Techies this week were full of 140-character complaints, like the chief executive of SimpleGeo’s tweet to @ATTCustomerCare after an AT&T problem that resulted in the release of some iPad owners’ email addresses.

Steve Case, the former CEO of AOL, tweeted about Twitter’s need for a “commitment to reliability” after a massive series of Twitter outages and resulting “fail whales.”

Even the New Yorker had something to say, in an open letter to Twitter asking, “Why, with only 140 characters, must we waste seven on http://?”

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Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, says “tweets” are now “gurgles,” in honor of unfortunate “oil-soaked birds” and in reference to the New York Times’ recent ban on the word “tweet” in its publications.

In that case, we liked the

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