This just came to my attention.

Case Western Reserve students are among the first in the country to experiment with these cell phones that can convert bar codes into links to Web sites, e-mail addresses, videos or wherever the bar code directs the viewer.

My first reaction was huh? First in the country?! WTF? The next sentence paragraph goes on to say:

The 2D barcodes are more commonly used in Asian countries, especially Japan, where cell phone use has outpaced computer use, according to Robert Sopko, the university's information technology services manager of strategic technology partnerships. In Asia, 2D codes appear in television ads, on billboards or signs and in magazines.

Which is why my first reaction was "huh?" This is what one looks like:

That image is a screenshot off of one of the Japanese-language blogs that I read. In fact, I specifically went to 5 of them, and 4 of them had them. The other one used to, but has since rearranged his page with new sidebars. I have seen these things in use for years. If I recall correctly, they had a trial of using them to pay for train fares. Another one was for making payments in convenience stores. I don't remember the details though.

Needless to say, the US is not only behind Japan on broadband we are also behind in the use of cell phones. Brings back vague recollections of a Joi Itoh post where he quotes a Japanese developer living in California about how that developer is amazed at what Americans can do with third-world quality telecommunications infrastructure...don't quote me on that, but it was something like that.

I have decided to take a page out of Jill and George's book. You know, Jill's "Remains of the Day" and George's "Links for [insert date here]". To partially feel better about having a blog in the first place, I decided I am going to start "Passing Notes". Passing Notes will be short quick links and very simple commentary on various things that catch my eye.

I am going to keep them short and sweet because I have found, over and over again, that if there is something I want to right about, I start the Great American Novel and then never really finish it. So I tend not to start at all. Actally, I have thought of doing this before but was reluctant to do so, partially due to prior blog burnout. But I also generally try and keep a balance between my Japanese blog an this one.

Regardless, we'll give it a shot and see how it goes.....oh, we already know from the title.....the following are from yesterday...sigh

Google Joins OIN

It appears that Google has joined OIN, the open invention network. OIN "is an intellectual property company that was formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative environment". What you should read that as is "We pool patents to fight software patent threats against linux". Patents to OIN have been donated by IBM, Phillips, Novell, Red Hat, Sony and NEC. To quote The Register:

"Google has joined the fight to save Linux from an army of patent-waving Microsoft lawyers."

Scary, Data Retention

According to this TheRegister article all those services that promise they don't keep any identifying information are forced into a damned if you do, damned if you don't postion. While their privacy policy may state that, a recent court ruling forces companies to begin storing information at the start of litigation(for the discovery phase).

New Elements in HTML 5

After many years of stagnation, a new version of html is coming out. This IBM Developerworks article provides as summary of some of the new html elements that will be included in HTML 5. For those of you who feel you finally figured out html4, have no fears, it'll be a while before browsers will handle this, so you got a couple of years to learn it.

Gotta Check This Out

My friend Charlie posted a link: Kirix Strata: Access and Manipulate Data from the Web The screenshots look pretty damn cool, so I gotta download it and try it out.

And finally...

End of The Internet!!

Doom and Gloom for the future of internet proved! Don't believe me? Check out the end of the internet

Been a couple of days, but here we go. This one incorporates a couple of days.

1. Nine MS Security Updates Due on Tuesday

   Note, that is today. This is from various sources, but the post at Case's Distilled Netsec finally got me to put it in my notes. If you're on windows, update.

2. Case on OpenID planet!!!

   I subscribe to Planet Openid, and much to my suprise, Case's use of openid came across my feed. It pointed to an article on technology4teachers.

3. Portage County Site Valid HTML!!!

   As I was adding the links to Planet NEO, I found that the Portage County site is like the only valid html site:http://www.co.portage.oh.us/

4. Citrix to acquire Xen Source?

   Saw ofr on TheRegister that Citrix may acquire Xen Source. I use Xen on my servers. More on Citrix here.

5. Blueprint CSS

   hattip to View From W6th. I need to check it out.

6. MotivAsians's Second Annual Picnic

   Information on MotivAsians's Second Annual Picnic. Unfortunately, Elly returns from her ABT Program on Saturday, so I don't think I can make it. See MotivAsians's website too.

7. New Planet NEO is outed

   My Planet NEO has been outed. I am not quite done working out the kinks, and will do a separate post on it later. But it was outed here (WLST) and here (Tim Ferris)

8. Neohawk IT Planet

   Similarly, my new IT Planet is up. Still adding feeds and it also needs "tweaking". I'll have a separate post on this as well.

These notes were from yesterday, but I went to bed early.

1. Lessig on Clinton Lawrence Lessig has a post on Hillary and lobbyists. Worth the read I think

2. Education for Profit

   I agree with plunderbird, Jill has a great post on WLST.

3. Email Stress

   Via Slashdot I found this. How many times an hour to you check your email?

4. 96 percent of teens use social-networking tools

   Tell me something I don't know. http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=7304. Hattip to technology4teachers.

5. Special Task Force of City Council Completes Report

   A little late but I found this on Cleveland.com. Making Cleveland more available to immigrants.

6. Interview with Apple Co-Founder "Wozniak's New Goal is Efficient Housing"

   For those of you into sustainability or greenness(is that a word?) Apple's Co-founder is too.

Well, this explains alot. Over the last month or so, I have been inundated with spam with pdf attachments, and more recently spam claiming there is a video of me up on youtube. Via Slashdot, this is largely due to "Storm Botnet" which controls anywhere from 250,000 to 10 million pcs depending on whose numbers you believe(here or here. Either way, that's alot of infected PCs to be spouting out spam and/or used for DDOS attacks.

We've gotten a number of submissions about the new tricks the massive Storm botnet has been up to. Estimates of the size of this botnet range from 250K-1M to 5M-10M compromised machines. Reader cottagetrees notes a writeup at Exploit Prevention Labs on a new social engineering attack involving YouTube. The emails, which may be targeted at people who use private domain registrations, warn the recipient that their "face is all over 'net" on a YouTube video. The link is to a Storm-infected bot that attacks using the Q4Rollup exploit (a package of about a dozen encrypted exploits). And reader thefickler writes that the recent wave of "confirmation spam" is also due to Storm, as was the earlier, months-long "e-card from a friend" series of attack emails.

Which reminds me, that Japanese equivalent of the FCC has approved ISPs to add "infected by a virus" to their terms of service, allowing them to shut off internet connections of PCs that are infected by a virus. It is part of the effort to eradicate spam as well as ddos attacks using infected PCs in Japan. More power to them.

The three "social engineering" spam emails I have seen are the "eCards", the pdf attachments, and over the last couple of days, the youtube video one. Here is a example of the ecard one:

goldsmtpbgold@landscapesupply.com wants to send you a greeting from funnygreetings.net.
 
 To recieve your greeting, follow the link below:
 funnygreetings.net
 
 Have A Great Day,
 funnygreetings.net

Here is an example of the youtube one:

What are you thinking...if pat sees this your divorced dude. :-{) here is the link I got http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLNOSrA7RlM

Note, that in both cases these emails were HTML based email. What looks like to links to funnygreetings.net and youtube actually point to ip addresses. If one were to click on those links, a payload of virus software would possibly be loaded on to your pc, infecting it adding it to this massive botnet. Here is a look at the "source code" of the youtube email:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<body>
What are you thinking...if pat sees this your divorced dude. :-{) here is the link I got 
<a href="http://76.108.193.115/">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLNOSrA7RlM</a>
</body>
</html>

Note the IP address in the a href. This actually points to an IP address in Florida owned by comcast. Most likely an infected PC. Another one I looked at was an IP address in South Carolina.

If you have been infected, reinstall from scratch. Better yet, switch to Linux. Or buy a mac.

I was over at Advance Northeast Ohio reading Chris Thompson's latest post on Labor and Regionalism and followed the link to Ashtabula's Star Beacon. The first thing I often do when I visit a newsite is scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, look for rss feeds, visit the top page. Then I return to the article and read it.

So as I go through this process, the very first thing (besides all the Sky banners since I have my adblock off temporarily) that catches my eye is:

Our site is powered by Zope

Wow. Another Zope site in northeast ohio. Of course Neohawk and JANO(Japanese) are Plone based, which by definition means they are based on Zope, but that's because I put them together. I have been using zope/plone since 1999 or so. Plone is a content management system built using the Zope web application framework.

It looks like they've built their own little newspaper site web app on Zope. I'd be interested learning more about it.

I tried to head over to cleveland.com this morning and what to I find?

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

So I tried blog.cleveland com, same thing. Except the blog server is running CentOS and Apache. Actually, both cleveland.com and blog.cleveland.com run apache. Clearly blog.cleveland.com is running Linux.

Looks like a permission setting problem in their apache configuration. Pretty big deal, plainly speaking. ;-) Been there, done it. The sysadmins aren't happy right now, I'm sure. Either that or they're playing with me and blocking me. But I don't think so.

Anyway, I was actually looking at highschoolsports.cleveland.com to begin with. Last night, as the Tribe beat out the Yankees I was looking for the results of the Mayfield - Stow game. I left it like that over night, and when I got up this morning, tried to hit refresh and got the forbidden error. So I went to straight up cleveland.com, which is when I discovered that it appears the whole domain is down.

Well, I guess I'll have to wait until I get back from Medina where my son's freshman team plays the Medina JV team. I'd be interested in seeing how long its down though. I would imagine not too long. Or if it appears that it'll be longer time, my bet is they'll get up an "under maintenance" or some such page.

Per my previous post, I received a "takedown notice" from the Mayor of Seven Hills. After talking to a few folks(thanks all, you know who you are!), I have decided to comply with David's request- in part anyway. And most likely, just as he intended the threat of a lawsuit is a little overwhelming. Even if it is a little questionable in my mind. But I neither have the time or resources to fight it.

Here is what I am going to try and do:

1. Remove the offending post
2. Remove David's name from the tag cloud
3. Remove offending tag words associated with that Post and David's name.