Category: News

When I was in high school, BellSouth introduced a nifty new service: “fuzzy information”. You could pick up the phone and dial 311 (or was it 611?) and an operator would come on the line. You could then ask for “fuzzy” information, like “are there any Indian restaurants in the 30305 zip code?” or “I’m at 123 Maple Street – what’s the nearest dry cleaners?”. The service was free at first, but then BellSouth scaled it down to “the first 3 calls per month are free, any subsequent calls are 99¢”. Eventually, all calls were 99¢… and the service abruptly disappeared a couple of months later.

Apparently I’m not the only one that missed that service. Both Microsoft and Google have introduced similar services recently, and unlike BellSouth’s offerings, both work nationally and both are free!

Ars Technica has this comparison of both services. In a nutshell, Microsoft’s offerings are supreme for now, although Google’s are nothing to sneeze at, either. If you’d rather skip the article and just try them out yourself, here are the numbers:

GOOG411: 1-800-GOOG-411
LiveSearch411: 1-800-CALL-411

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve… DONE THE NEWS! (/cue “The Daily Show” theme)

Popular music trading site OiNK was shut down by British authorities today; rather than feel sadness at the loss of the site, or fear that other sites might be next, I’m actually feeling a bit of schadenfreude about it, since I could never get an invite to the site… hehehehe!

Joey Bishop died last Thursday at 89.  He was the last of the original Rat Pack, and was my least favorite member. How could poor Joey compete with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Peter Lawford? Bishop will be missed – just like an “artist” in Providence, Rhode Island that built a secret apartment in an unused storage space at Providence Place Mall. He lived there off and on for four years before mall security finally noticed the apartment… which included “a sectional sofa and love seat, coffee and breakfast tables, chairs, lamps, rugs, paintings, a hutch filled with china, a waffle iron, TV and Sony Playstation 2”. Check out the artist’s website and wonder how lame mall security was to miss this for four years!

Boring old landline phones don’t get much love these days, so check this out: Priestman Goode has created an ultra-thin telephone which can be made out of made out of cardboard or plastic… and even mailed using a standard first-class stamp! At 4mm thick and around the size of an A5 envelope, the phone looks more like a greeting card than… well, a phone!

Speaking of neat stuff, some bright person got the idea of selling “rust stickers” that make your car or bike look like a rusted piece of junk, in hopes of deterring thieves. The stickers actually look pretty real (click the link for pics), and one satisfied user says that he’s used them on his “shiny new bike” for 13 days in London and it hasn’t been stolen yet!

Hey, speaking of thieves… check out this post at The Consumerist… Apparently one Best Buy store is charging $9.99 for an “open box” 3ft. component video cable. The only problem with that? The regular price is $7.99! I hate that store!

To finish out the “thieves” train of thought… Mona Shaw is an elderly, law-abiding American. But she got so angry with cable company Comcast that she went to her local office and started smashing a CSR’s computer with a hammer. Shaw was quoted as saying that “I scared the tar out of some people, at least…It had never occurred to me to take a hammer to a phone company before, but I was just so upset. . . . After I hit the keyboard, I turned to this blonde who had been there the previous Friday, the one who told me to wait for the manager, and I said, ‘ Now do I have your attention?”“. The incident received so much attention that Comcast issued a press release asking customers not to rebel against their evil authority. Of course, Comcast is the same company that’s blocking Bittorrent, Gnutella… even Lotus Notes! Jackasses! All I know is that I’m glad that Time Warner is my cable company… and that Mona Shaw is my new hero!

Some dudes are using pumpkins as beer kegs!

And lastly… (you didn’t think I’d NOT post this, did you?) the deputy mayor of New Delhi, India was killed last Saturday, in an attack blamed on… MONKEYS! It seems that poor Mr. Bajwa was reading the newspaper on the first floor terrace of his home when he was attacked by a band of wild monkeys. Whilst fighting them off, Bajwa slipped and fell off the terrace, which apparently broke his neck. Oh – and the local exterminators’ solution to the problem??? More monkeys! Yep, city officials have hired people using langurs to fight off macaques, which are the species of monkey that apparently terrorize New Delhi.

Pictured below is a man that published pictures on the Internet of himself sexually abusing children. This idiot used a “swirl”-type feature to obscure his face in the photographs… only he was too stupid to know that investigators could simply load the picture into Photoshop and reverse the effect… thus his picture here:

This guy is apparently German. The photos, “involving 12 different young boys” are believed to have been taken in Vietnam and Cambodia in 2002 or 2003. Germany’s federal police force, the Bundeskriminalamt, undid the photoshopping to reveal the man’s face to the world. I don’t suspect I’ll see the guy around Belmont, NC, but if any jimcofer.com readers are in Euroland… keep your eyes peeled for this moron.

Read the official Interpol notice here.

Do you use P2P applications? If you do, do you use some form of blocklist protection? If not, you might wanna check out this article from Ars Technica, which summarizes a study conducted by three researchers at the University of California, Riverside.

In a nutshell, the researchers discovered that NOT using a blocklist while using P2P apps leads to a 100% chance of connecting with a rogue computer – one run by Big Media (or, more likely, one of the third-parties hired by Big Media) for the purposes of tracking the trade in illegal files. Let me repeat – if you don’t use a blocklist, your chances of connecting to an illicit tracker or peer are 100%. Simply connecting to a rogue computer doesn’t mean that there will be an lawsuit against you in the near future, but it’s not good. It’s a list of “who’s being naughty” that most of us do not want to be on.

The good news is that using blocklists is pretty easy. If you’re running Windows 2000 or XP, Linux or OS X (but not Windows Vista), head on over to Phoenix Labs and download the latest version of PeerGuardian, a simple to use “P2P firewall” for Windows. Just install it, tell setup what you want to block (P2P, spyware adware) and you’re in the blocklist business. Although PeerGuardian isn’t a magic bullet, it is amazingly effective. As the blocklist study noted, “avoiding just the top 5 blocklisted IPs reduces the chance of being tracked to about 1 percent”.

There are other blocklist managers out there. BlockList Manager from B.I.S.S. is one. The popular Bittorrent program Azureus has one built-in. Whatever app you want to use, make sure that you start using one today. After all, although these blocklists might not be perfect, they’re far, far better than nothing at all. And the study (linked in the Ars article) proves it!

MSN has published this list of stupid scientific studies that someone paid good money for. Here’s a sample from a study about cigarette smoking: “While a causal relation cannot be proven, smokers appear to pay for tobacco expenditures out of income that is saved by non-smokers. Hence, reductions in smoking will boost wealth, especially among the poor”. Translation: “cigarettes cost money”. In other feats of science conquering the obvious, researchers from the University of Minnesota Duluth and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte found that meetings are stressful (it took two sets of researchers to figure that out?), a study in the February 2005 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review notes that “it is a matter of common sense that a person is easier to recognize when close than when far away”, and the British Department of Health sponsored a study that concluded that “the farther away you are from a hospital, the more likely you are to die”.

But at least these researchers aren’t in charge of your security, right? It seems that the Department of Homeland Security sends out a daily email called the Open Source Intelligence Report. But rather than use, ya know, actual mailing list software to send out the report, the private contractor used by DHS simply set up a single email address on a Lotus Notes server, and set up a rule to forward any email sent to that address to thousands of people. On Wednesday, a reader replied to the message asking for a change in his subscription; since DHS was using forwarding rules instead of a proper mailing list app, his reply was sent out to thousands of people. A “couple of dozen” people replied to the man’s reply, and soon millions of emails were bouncing back and forth. The DHS admins even replied to the message themselves, asking list members to “kindly stop now please”; they were apparently clueless that the problem was on their end. These people are in charge of securing our nation… and they can’t even secure a simple email list? God help us all! Read all about it at Ars Technica.

Thanks to my sweet hunny for sending me the link to the MSN study!

Lois Maxwell, who played Ms. Moneypenny in the “classic” James Bond films, has died in Australia at age 80. Born as Lois Hooker in Ontario, in 1927, Maxwell began her career in radio. She would end up playing Moneypenny, the secretary to M and longtime admirer of Ian Fleming’s secret agent, in 14 films, from Dr No in 1962 to 1985’s A View To A Kill. Maxwell moved to Australia to be with her son after she was diagnosed with cancer. A spokesman for Fremantle Hospital, Western Australia says she died there peacefully on Saturday.

God bless you, Lois Maxwell. You were Moneypenny to us!

Cool! This happened about 25 miles away from me this week:

MAIDEN, N.C. – A man who bought a smoker Tuesday at an auction of abandoned items might have thought twice had he looked inside first.

Maiden police said the man opened up the smoker and saw what he thought was a piece of driftwood wrapped in paper. When he unwrapped it, he found a human leg, cut off 2 to 3 inches above the knee.

The smoker had been sold at an auction of items left behind at a storage facility, so investigators contacted the mother and son who had rented the space where the smoker was found.

The mother, Peg Steele, explained her son had his leg amputated after a plane crash and kept the leg following the surgery “for religious reasons” she doesn’t know much about.

“The rest of the family was very much against it,” Steele said.

Steele said her son, John Wood, plans to drive to Maiden, about 35 miles northwest of Charlotte, to reclaim his amputated leg, police said.

Read all about it here.

Adnan and Sana Klaric were a married couple in Bosnia. Things weren’t going so well with the marriage, and both Adnan and Sana decided to look online for a little “somethin’ somethin'” on the side. Adnan adopted the monkier “The Prince of Joy” while Sana opted for “Sweetie”; both started checking out chat rooms for someone to have an illicit affair with. As luck would have it, “The Prince of Joy” and “Sweetie” struck up an relationship, and their conversations got hotter and hotter… until they decided to meet. Sana said “When I saw my husband there with the rose and it dawned on me what had happened I was shattered. I felt so betrayed. I was so angry.” Adnan said that he “was so happy to have found a woman who finally understood me. Then it turned out that I hadn’t found anyone new at all”. Ironically, the couple subsequently decided to divorce on the grounds that both had been cheating on the other.

Let this be a lesson to you: although the World Wide Web has hundreds of millions of users, sometimes the web isn’t as big as it seems!

Read the original story.