Christmas gift guide: Gadgets
A little (often, tiny) something for the geek in your life. And not all with big price tickets. As chosen by Kelly Bowerbank
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Christmas gift guide: Gadgets
Unwanted support calls
Alan Denham put the phone down on a "cold caller" offering to help with his computer in distress I have just had a call from a person unknown with a very heavy accent claiming to be from my Windows 7 software provider. That was his first mistake, as I am running XP on one machine and Vista on another. He said he had been getting "distress messages" from my computer, indicating some infection or corrupt files, and would I please go online now so he could give me a website to connect to. At that point I told him I didn't believe him and cut him off. It seems I may have been being set up for some sort of infection or scam, and people need to be warned about it. Alan Denham Similar things have happened to other readers over the past year, and there are reports of other cases on the web. Many calls appear to come from companies based in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, possibly using a UK-based phone number redirection service, or possibly using faked CLI info. They may seem to imply they are calling from Microsoft, but they aren't. If you can get a UK number, you could try complaining to your Trading Standards Office or perhaps lodge a complaint with the free Telephone Preference Service . You could even contact the local fraud squad at cybercrime@kolkatapolice.gov.in – a suggestion made by a user on the Money Saving Expert forum . It seems the "scam" is to do some minor housekeeping duties on the PC then try to sell people a subscription support service rather than to plant a Trojan backdoor but, worryingly, that would be possible. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with remote support: it's a service built into Windows, and offered by, for example, the very reputable Geek Squad in the UK. However, it must be based on trust, and I don't see how you could trust someone who is "cold calling" with no prior contact, and making claims that you know are not true. Computing Jack Schofield guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Unwanted support calls
The dark side of the internet
In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity. "It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about – freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that. His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky … they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'" Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: "At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US.
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The dark side of the internet
Letters and blogs | 26 November 2009
On spam You neglect to give the simplest and best rule for avoiding spam, namely: only read emails whose sender you absolutely know and trust. When you read an email that happens to be spam, the very fact that you have done so is registered to the sender and so you get put onto more spammers' lists in a vicious circle. Conversely if you are expecting an important email then agree with the sender at least what will be in the subject field. And in the worst case of a deletion of something you should have kept then the sender can resend. Following this advice I get, at most, half a dozen spams a day, which I understand to be statistically trivial. Frank Desmond Cork City Assassin's review ...
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Letters and blogs | 26 November 2009
Netbooks, smartbooks, smartphones – can’t we all just get along? | Jack Schofield
People should just buy whichever device suits their needs, and respect other people's freedom to do the same Christmas is coming and PC vendors are not getting fat.
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Netbooks, smartbooks, smartphones – can't we all just get along? | Jack Schofield
Wi-Fi dongles from 3 and Novatel reviewed | Technophile
Wi-Fi dongles from 3 and Novatel take the hassle – and the expense – out of web connection on the move 3G dongles are nice, but the problem with them is that they're very specific, and tend to come with their own software, which may or may not spray all sorts of little extras around your computer, rendering the experience of getting online while mobile seriously vexing. (Yes, BT, I'm thinking of you and your intrusive software.) Why can't we just have free Wi-Fi everywhere?
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Wi-Fi dongles from 3 and Novatel reviewed | Technophile
Is Google Chrome OS cloud computing’s silver lining?
It's based on open source, but Chrome, Google's cloud computing OS, will lock users into an unmodifiable world. Is this limiting or liberating? Although it won't be available for another year, Google's Chrome OS is an attempt to take over the fast-growing netbook part of the PC market, which is currently dominated by Microsoft. It's aimed at people who live their lives online, and who can do everything they need in a Google Chrome browser. And if you've been following the hype for "cloud computing," Chrome OS is designed specifically to work with the cloud. Installing your own software simply isn't allowed. If Chrome OS takes off, it will give Google an unprecedented degree of power over PC vendors, who will only be able to use components that Google specifies and supports. Google will control and maintain the operating system remotely, so if it doesn't want you to have something, you can't have it. It's like having an auto-update service that you can't turn off. World domination Early signs of this power surfaced last week during an online Google press conference. For example, the presenters said Chrome OS netbooks wouldn't be allowed to use hard drives (Flash memory boots faster) and that Google would specify which Wi-Fi cards it would support. Sundar Pichai, a Google vice-president of product management, also said Chrome OS would be used on "slightly larger" netbooks: "We care about the user experience." In theory, companies could change the open source code themselves, or even use a different browser. But then Google's servers wouldn't support it. There's nothing new about the idea of a Chrome OS machine, and there's not much that's new in the code: it's based on open-source projects such as Linux, WebKit and Moblin. Also, Google has been careful to point out its limited ambitions for Chrome OS netbooks
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Is Google Chrome OS cloud computing's silver lining?
Tech Weekly podcast: HP’s CTO speaks, Sony’s Satio reviewed
On this week's Guardian Tech Weekly, we put the Sony Ericsson 12 megapixel cameraphone thorough it's paces, or rather we ask the Guardian photodesk to do so for us - can it measure up for these hard to please photography experts? You can get an enhanced version of this week's podcast which will let you see the pictures taken in the review. Tech Weekly with pictures is here - right click it and "Save As..." before opening it with iTunes, Quicktime, your iPhone or iPod to see AND hear it.
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Tech Weekly podcast: HP's CTO speaks, Sony's Satio reviewed
Internet domain names: a complete list
2010 will see internet domain names in non-Latin script for the first time. Find out which ones are already in use, and who uses them Last week ICANN , the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which approves internet domain names, announced that they were accepting applications for domains in non-Latin script, be it Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek or Chinese, allowing millions of users to access web addresses in their own language for the first time. Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece and Russia are among countries who have expressed an interest in obtaining own-language domain names, and ICANN expects about fifty new domains to be created initially. The Internet Assigned Number Authority maintains a list of all the top-level internet domains currently in use (country codes, generic domains like .com and internationalised domains that use other characters, like Arabic or Cyrillic). They also record the name of the organisation that sponsors the domain - usually a government department or a university. Check the table below or download the spreadsheet to view the full list of internet domains and sponsoring organisations. Download the data • DATA: Top-level internet domain names as a spreadsheet Can you do something with this data? Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter Full list Computing Internet Katy Stoddard guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Internet domain names: a complete list
Internet domain names: a complete list
2010 will see internet domain names in non-Latin script for the first time. Find out which ones are already in use, and who uses them Last week ICANN , the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which approves internet domain names, announced that they were accepting applications for domains in non-Latin script, be it Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek or Chinese, allowing millions of users to access web addresses in their own language for the first time. Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece and Russia are among countries who have expressed an interest in obtaining own-language domain names, and ICANN expects about fifty new domains to be created initially. The Internet Assigned Number Authority maintains a list of all the top-level internet domains currently in use (country codes, generic domains like .com and internationalised domains that use other characters, like Arabic or Cyrillic). They also record the name of the organisation that sponsors the domain - usually a government department or a university. Check the table below or download the spreadsheet to view the full list of internet domains and sponsoring organisations. Download the data • DATA: Top-level internet domain names as a spreadsheet Can you do something with this data? Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter Full list Computing Internet Katy Stoddard guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Internet domain names: a complete list