Richard Giles Blog

Things I’d love to see. Bill Gates in an Apple Switch Advert.

Link thanks to UntuckedShirts!com.

The win for consumers in the Sony PS2 court case may open the door to relax the zoning for DVDs. On Friday “Eddy Stevens, a Sydney retailer sued by Sony for selling and installing Playstation modifications”, won the case to sell the chips. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) have previously looked into the use of zoning DVDs to restrict distribution. In their eyes “used to impose extensive restrictions on consumer choice”, believing “regional coding is anti-consumer”.

It’s good to know we have a body on our side here in Australia.

ACCC praises Playstation decision.

Thomas Claburn at Lot 49 has an interview with Kevin Warwick. For those not familiar with Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, he has raised quite a buzz by implanting a chip into his peripheral nervous system. Wired ran an article on him a couple of years ago, Cyborg 1.0, front page in fact, well before he installed this second chip. The first was simply implanted under his skin and was more like the chips we implant into cats and dogs for tracking. This second implant is much more adventurous. His intention is to see what type of input and output will generate reactions. In a month or so he plans to have his wife implanted with a similar chip and see what type of communication can happen by playing back the others recorded signals.

For those interested in this field of research, and perhaps some unbiassed details of Warwick’s exploits, see Neuroprosthesis News.

Emily Dubberley has a great short story, What you Said. Very clever. I have to wonder why no one has done this yet.

Wow, my first 419 Scam email. It’s tempting to reply just for the t-shirt.

These guys are real slick. Take note of the International Dialing Prefix 873 found in their email below. That belongs to Inmarsat, a global satellite phone service. I can see them now, sitting in a tent in the Congo jungle, sweat beading on their forehead as they wait expectantly by their briefcase size satellite phone, occasionally swatting at blood sucking mosquitos.

I should point out just how serious these scams are. Wired went into great detail in a nice article the other day, Meet the Nigerian E-Mail Grifters, by Michelle Delio. “According to State Department figures, 25 murders or disappearances of Americans abroad have been directly linked to 419 fraud. Other people have been held against their will, beaten and blackmailed, according to information provided by the U.S. Embassy in Lagos.”

The best resource for information is the Crimes of Persuasion site. Further frightening details are found there.

“There have been cases where victims have had meetings with genuine Nigerian Government officials in their offices to discuss a 419 “deal” during office hours. There are also cases of victims verifying the phone number of the relevant Parastatal from the Lagos directory assistance, calling that number (CBN, for example), asking for their scammer by name, and getting put through during office hours.

On January 5th, 2001 the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Mr. M. R. Rasheed was charged in a US Federal District Court with lying under oath and providing false testimony regarding his direct involvement in setting up secret offshore accounts and trusts.“

and

“One of the nine, Jean Pierre Li Shing Tat, a Canadian resident of Mauritius, was found bound and shot twice through the head next to the motorway south of Johannesburg in June/99. He flew to South Africa in response to a “419″ letter later found at his home. After a few days his family received a demand for $200,000 but the deal went wrong and he was murdered. Four others had survived after paying a ransom, and a fifth had been freed by police.“

Here’s the email I received. I’ve removed some of the contact details to prevent temptation. I’d rather not give anyone a reason to make contact with these people.

FROM: COL. BANGI HAMA.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO.
Tel No: Your country Intl. access code +873xxxxxxxxx
Fax No: your country Intl. Access code +873xxxxxxxxx
bangihama@xxxxxxxxx.com

N\B. When you are calling my line, you dial your country Intl. access code, then you dial directly, do not include my country code i.e. (243). Just dial your country Intl. access code + 873xxxxxxxxx and my fax number is your country Intl. Access code + 873xxxxxxxxx

Comedian Steven Wright said “It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it”, and I have to agree. It looks like the people at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University, are trying to prove the concept. No, they’re not trying to paint it, they are trying prove the principle of “Six Degrees of Separation”. The Small World Research Project will use email to try and prove or disprove the theory that there is on average six people between any two in the world.

“In 1967, the Harvard Social Psychologist Stanley Milgram sent roughly 300 letters to randomly selected people in Omaha, Nebraska with the instruction to get the letter to a single ‘target’ person in Boston using only personal contacts.

Milgram gave each ’sender’ some information about the target including name, location, and occupation, so that if the sender did not know the target (and it was extremely unlikely that they would), they could send the letter to someone they did know who they thought would be “closer” to the target. Thus began a chain of senders, each member of the chain attempting to zero in on the target by sending the letter to someone else: a friend, family member, business associate, or casual acquaintance.

Milgram’s surprising finding was that for the 60 chains that eventually reached the target, the average number of steps in a chain was around six, a result that has entered folklore as the phrase ‘Six degrees of separation.’”

Some smart advice to investors.

“From a patient, disciplined perspective, you do not try to achieve perfect market timing. All you want to do is have more of your money in the market when stocks are cheap, and less of your money in the market when stocks are expensive. Today, relative to GDP, stock prices are lower than when Alan Greenspan warned of irrational exuberance in late 1996. That does not mean that the market is at a “bottom.” As Megan McArdle points out, one can argue that the P/E ratio on the S&P 500 stock index is still a bit high. However, today I am comfortable putting a higher portion of my portfolio into stocks than I had at any time in the past 5-1/2 years. “

From Dumb Mobs by Arnold Kling. In the article Kling points out that it is possible that a good part of the major volatility in the market today is due to “Dumb Mobs”. The Internet has allowed a large number of people to invest in the market, and that mob mentality has lead them to swing to excessive bull or bear mentalities. It’s a valid point. One which the “Cluetrain Manifesto” gang may want to explore. After all, the Net has made a great foundation for community growth. It doesn’t mean that the community has the right knowledge, and therefor necessarily promoting correct thought.

Hands up everyone who thinks that the market is starting to get insanely low.

Thanks to GeekPress for the link.

Erick Schonfeld agrees with my view of Microsoft’s future foray into your lounge room in his article, Microsoft’s New Frontier: Your Home.

“While most of these consumer forays are extremely PC-centric right now, that may not always be so. At least, they may not involve what we think of as PCs today. The Tablet PC, Freestyle, and Mira, for instance, are all attempts to unfetter people from their keyboards (and thus their desks) while still retaining all the advantages of a PC. The Xbox, of course, is basically a customized PC attached to your TV (and it doesn’t hurt that it can double as a DVD player). One of the Xbox’s possible successors, code-named Freon, reportedly combines the capabilities of a videogame console with those of a personal video recorder. Whether it’s through Xbox, Freestyle, UltimateTV, or some other gewgaw, Microsoft can embed similar software in an assortment of digital devices throughout the home. Tying all of these devices together, of course, will be even more Microsoft software and .Net information subscription services delivered by MSN.“

Man arrested for burning kitten on grill.

A couple of months ago in a post I mentioned the concept of Microsoft making a push into the lounge room. At the time I suggested that we would see the XBox morph over the next few years into a connected home entertainment hub. Well, it looks like a version of Windows XP will be the first move toward providing the Operating System for exactly that. Reuters are reporting Microsoft to Release New Multimedia Windows XP which “aims to transform desktop computers into remote-controlled digital entertainment hubs“.

The concept isn’t new. I have a friend in the Valley that turned an old Sun Microsystems computer into an MP3 player and Web Browser almost 3 years ago. He connected an infrared keyboard adapter and hooked it all up to his TV. He served his MP3 collection from a storage array in his bedroom cupboard, and shared a DSL among the many computers and a Thin Client in the house.

I’ve had plans to do the same with a Linux box for the last four years, but in that time have lived in rental properties or apartments, that don’t make it easy to run Cat 5 cable around the rooms. I looked into wireless, but it’s only been recently that this has been what I consider affordable.

Home Entertainment appliances will become truly exciting when they come standard with Wi-Fi, which will enable communication with other devices in the home and via the Internet. Imagine a DVD Player that will give you extra details about movies via IMDB or take you seamlessly to extra features on the official web site. Your Digital Recorder could download the days TV program and message your mobile phone to let you know your favorite show is about to start. You could reply to tell it to start recording because you won’t make it home.