A significant part of the British government has spoken out against the recent surge of recording and tracking the general public’s whereabouts and communications.

CCTV cameras, databases recording emails, SMS communication and Internet traffic have all been in the news lately, and covered in some depth on Tech Snake. And it appears that government officials have also taken note on the intrusions into civic liberty.

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Users of Internet Explorer are being urged to switch to a different browser in a bid to escape a serious zero day flaw.

Internet Explorer 5, 6 and 7 are all shown to contain the flaw that could potentially allow somebody access to your computer. Admittedly, if you stick to well known websites you should be relatively safe, although Trend Micro Anti-Virus estimate 10,000 websites have already been compromised – with many more to follow after the flaw has been made public.

So maybe now is the push you need if you’re still using Internet Explorer, to perhaps switch to a more secure alternative? Firefox, Chrome or Opera (or even Flock) are alternatives that are actually faster and more web standards compliant than Internet Explorer also, so it’s a win-win situation. If however you don’t have a choice and you’re stuck with Internet Explorer, make sure that the browser is put into it’s high security mode (Tools menu, Internet Options, Security Tab, Internet – set the slider to “High”) and also make sure you only stick to websites you know and trust.

After the bad press Sony have got over the last couple of years for battery recalls (and most recently the recall of over 400,000 of their own laptops), you would think they would have sorted their issues out, or examined exactly what was going on in manufacturing that is producing this shoddy technology. But on the surface, it doesn’t appear they’ve done anything.

News appears today, that the battery in your Toshiba, HP, Dell, Acer or Lenovo could be potentially dangerous. The affected batch from Sony – produced between October 2004 and June 2005, is prone to overheating and could even catch fire. And it’s not just a few either, there are an estimated 100,000 batteries produced during this period that might have the same fundamental flaws.

Laptops that are currently on the affected list are: HP Pavilion dv1000, dv8000 and zd8000 – Compaq Presario v2000 and v2400, and HP Compaq nc6110, nc6120, nc6140, nc6220, nc6230, nx4800, nx4820, nx6110, nx6120, nx9600; Toshiba Satellite A70/A75, P30/P5, M30X/M35X and M50/M55 – Tecra A3, A5 and S2; Dell Latitude 110L, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610 – Inspiron 500M, 510M, 600M, 1100, 1150, 5100, 5150, and 5160 and Precision M20.

Use the links here to check to see if your battery is up for recall, for various makes of laptops: HP – Toshiba – Dell

If you own a different model of laptop by one of the listed manufacturers, I would check anyway, just to be sure. And if there isn’t a link for your laptop, check with the retailer that sold it to you, or contact the company directly. The batteries have the potential to catch fire, so double check with family members too that may not have access to this article.

A job everyone can relate to – especially me as it’s something I do during the working week! System Administrators are the key to any IT systems in a business. They’re the people that keep things running on a day to day basis. They’re the ones who keep everything secure and well-oiled. So it comes as a surprise when somebody who works in such a high position of responsibility goes bad. Thankfully it’s not something you hear about every day, although fairly recently I wrote an article about the sysadmin in San Francisco who failed to hand over the passwords to the mainframe! Anyhow, on to the story:

Priyavrat H Patel, a sysadmin who worked for a screwdriver company, was convicted in the US for Computer Intrusion. He will spend 6 months behind bars, pay $120,000 in restitution, and be under house arrest for a further 6 months after release, and still be answerable to the courts for another 2 and a half years to make sure he stays an upstanding citizen. Apparently, the fuel that caused Mr. Patel to remotely access the servers and bring down their email and network systems? The demon drink of course! Read the full Register article for the rest of the details.

Of course it begs the question, why weren’t the passwords changed when the guy left?

I don’t know if you’ve ever owned any EA games, and I don’t know if you’ve ever needed their support with them – but trust me, don’t bother because you are going to get nowhere fast with the support team.

I have been a long time owner of EA Sports and Electronic Arts games generally for many years. I have the Battlefield series (apart from 2142) and I’ve enjoyed the Need for Speed games (the older ones more, I must admit.) I have had problems with games in the past, but never had to use EA’s support – and I’m counting my blessings now.

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In a move that is surely showing the flailing business model of Twitter, the free micro-blogging site has axed the use of text message updates to most of it’s UK users, in a bid to cut costs.

An estimated $1,000 per year is the cost to Twitter for every UK user. And they’re not prepared to find a way to make money from these users – it seems easier to just cut everyone off.

As most of us know, Twitter has been suffering huge infrastructure problems with what seems like daily outages of some form another, with many users finding the service increasing frustrating. If it’s not the IM features, it’s the text or website blogging features that are down – every user of Twitter knows all too well the classic whale picture when things aren’t working as they should. With this recent cost-cutting exercise, is it too little too late? Or is it the sign of a system desperately trying to find a way out of a badly scaling web app?

During the writing of this article, twitter is displaying for UK users a box stating “important changes to our SMS service” on the left, above the twitter comments – which is a little ridiculous, as the infamous “We’re working to restore IM services to all users. Thanks for your patience!” message is showing the underlying problems of the site to the right of the page. Patience is getting very thin now guys – I know lots of people that have already gone elsewhere purely due to the frustration these problems are causing.

Terry Childs, who I recently reported had been accused of locking the “FiberWAN” system for San Francisco’s local goverment, has given up the password to allow people back in. I guess the pressure just got to him in the end – I have visions of government workers with towels and jugs of water working him over to spill the beans!

What started out as a bit of a “misunderstanding” quoting his lawyer, has been resolved. We will wait and see what the court decides as punishment – which hopefully won’t be on the same level as the ridiculous $5 million bail.

Being a sysadmin, I know the power our profession wields. I also know that there are a lot of unscrupulous people. The combination of the two are very rare, in my experience, but with this story it’s strange how badly this guy’s employers got it.

City worker, Terry Childs, was employed five years ago. He had spent time in jail, and also had counts of aggravated burglary and aggravated assault. He was put into a position of power with the City of San Francisco’s new FiberWAN network – a system which holds 60% of the city’s data. After a falling our with the head of security, Terry Childs allegedly decided to lock the system down with a master password – which only he knew. When confronted with the problem, he gave up a password which didn’t work. He was then arrested. As if this wasn’t disconcerting enough for the City, it also appears he has been paid his wage whilst sat in jail!

According to the mayor of the city, the city is still able to function – although they have called in experts from Cisco to hopefully sort the problem out. Childs remains in jail on bail of $5 million.

Steve Balmer stated publicly that he wants people to comment on XP, voicing to Microsoft that they shouldn’t give up just yet on the OS. Now it appears the OEM’s are starting to revolt too for the corporate customer’s sake.

And I’m with them, and other corporate customers! Vista is good – it has lots of bells and whistles, and has lots of nice graphical add-ons, but what really counts in an OS in the corporate environment is something stable, easy to use, “in keeping with windows” and above all easy to support. I don’t think Vista is any of those. Things have never been so different and difficult – Windows XP has been a progression of 2000, which in turn, although based on the NT codebase, was basically in-line with Windows 98’s features, which was built on the back of Windows 95. These were all logical progressions. Vista falls short – Maybe it should have been called Windows 7 Beta?

And it appears that my worries supporting Vista in the workplace are not misplaced. Lenovo are going to continue to supply it’s customers with XP well into 2009 – joining the ranks of Dell & HP in their post-June support. Hopefully support will continue until the release of Windows 7. Please Microsoft don’t mess up the next one!!

In a response to BT’s comments that ISPs need to do more to make it clear when selling “up to 8Mb” broadband, Tiscali I think have got a hold of the wrong end of the stick – probably on purpose.

Tiscali’s PR person, Jody Haskayne is quoted as saying “I think the point is that most of the major isps are doing very similar things in terms of marketing.” This comment is of course true. However, firstly, I’m not entirely sure if this practice or comment justifies misleading customers and secondly, if this is even what BT means by ISPs “doing more.”

I think BT are trying to make the point to the ISPs that if you don’t over sell your broadband, then you won’t have problems with your “up to 8Mb” broadband services. It appears to me that lots of factors are blamed for poor broadband – most of which are only in a very rare number of cases. Bad equipment, interference, distance from the exchange. Of course these things do play a part in how fast your broadband will be, but I don’t believe for a second that good old congestion isn’t the real issue with the vast majority of customers. If it wasn’t down to congestion then why after people swap service provider to somebody else (that is usually more expensive) all of a sudden they magically get a usable broadband service? Look on any of the broadband forums and you’ll see story upon story of woe turned to joy once users have moved from the cheap broadband providers to the more expensive ones. [SHOW ME]