While reading some mail I received from Gamespot this morning (Subject: Download and play Flatout 2 today), I noticed two new items to the right of the actual mail. Gmail seemed to pick up the “today” in the subject line, and added an “Add to calendar” link, and also picked up a physical address from the mail, and added a “Map this” link.

That’s pretty cool I think!

Screenshot:

Tags: Gamespot, Gmail, Add to calendar, Map this

WOW!
This is awesome!
I’m so looking forward to seeing this!
I signed up immediately! Go on, add your name to the list to get mail when it finally launches!

The guys over at Re-Inventech wanted to run a press release on the

Gaming console that is capable of reading and playing games from three of the world’s most popular gaming consoles has finally been developed

called the Phantom HP.

The site says the console will be able to play Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo (?) games. That would be so cool, except, it’s not true.
I call bullshit!

Here’s why. (Thanks to the guys on the take2.co.za forums that helped with the investigations…)

The domain reinventech.co.za was registered only 10 days ago, by a company calling themselves MLS IGroup (Pty) Ltd, on behalf of a Gerald Yepp (in turn from a place called In Detail Advertising. The domain is still to be paid.
In-Detail Advertising’s site says their philosophy is to “to create RESPONSE DRIVEN ADVERTISING that wins you business”. Added to that, the reinventech site has a single form to add your name and e-mail address to be notified when the console will launch. Double bullshit.

Other reasons that may spark the neurons to think “Hold it!”, could be:

• Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will never let the reverse engineering of their consoles slide, legally.
• The Phantom console on the reinventech site looks suspiciously *exactly* the same as the Phantom Console from Infinium Labs, that never saw the light of day.
• Two of the members of Re-Inventech’s surnames are Hott and Price, which is suspiciously similar to a site of In Detail Advertising called hotprice.co.za
• It’s too damned close to April Fool’s Day.

Starting a bit early hey guys?
Honestly, I wonder if Gerald Yepp *really* thought it was going to work?
Or, maybe it did work. Something like this has the capability to become rather viral.
And, to those of you reading this far, don’t, really, don’t fill in that stupid little form on their website, ‘cos chances are they’re using it to harvest email addresses…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Phantom, reinventech

I just read on Tectonic about the Mail & Guardian’s latest little venture called Amatomu.  It’s basically a South-African technorati.  I think it’s well-timed for the market, and it will show all South-African bloggers in one place, which I think is good.

Especially with the the publicity the Geekdinners and 27-dinners are getting as of late…  Who knows, maybe I’ll get more than 5 visitors a day.

One thing I was wondering was why it was not a .co.za domain…  Seeing that it is a South-African focussed site.  I see they also have the amatomu.co.za domain pointing to it, but the logo specifically says .com  *shrug*  Who am I to talk eh?  My blog lives on a .org

On a side note, I’m trying out a new blog update doodat called Deepest Sender.  It’s a Firefox plugin and allows you to select text and/or a link and send it to your Blog.  Similar to Wordpress’s PressIt bookmarklet, but it supports a bunch of other blog software like blogger.com and others.
So far so good, it has a fairly simple wysiwyg editor with a live preview option, and supports something called FoxyTunes, whatever that is.

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This is very nice indeed.
Vodacom, MTN and CellC are all on the dropdown list for when you enable notifications for events.
This is just so cool! Thanks Google.

Click on Settings -> Notifications, and at the bottom of the page is the section to setup the mobile notifications.

Yay!

Nice!

Useful!

Wait, what?

OK, so on the Google Blog (And on IOL Technology and a bunch of other places I’m sure) I noticed that Google has made a code searching site. They seemed to grab the source code from a whole bunch of open source projects (including, so far as I’ve noticed, code for FreeBSD’s ports and CPAN and and and), and you can now search through the code.

I’m honestly not sure what use this is? Other than maybe seeing how other people did something you’re wanting to do, but how do you search for that? Hope somebody else commented their code?

*shrug*

That’s all fine and well, I’m sure I’ll use it at some point in time for more than fun.

Fun? Yes! Check this out. Some guy on slashdot searched for “backdoor password” and came up with some interesting hits… I then tried to find some equally interesting tidbits, but didn’t find quite ones like that, but here are some searches I did (most end up finding some really interesting comments in code):

* fuck

* george bush

* john kerry

* i hate my job

* dumbass

* root password

You see the recurring theme here. Frustrated developers putting comments into their code, or just finding default usernames and/or password for systems.

Can you find any other interesting searches?

UPDATE: Just found this on he wordpress wp-hackers mailing list, about finding wordpress database usernames and passwords on google’s codesearch… Can’t protect stupid users from themselves…

UPDATE 2: After looking at the wordpress entry above, I did some more digging for more config file type searches, and found this search for phpMyAdmin’s config.inc.php file… Lots there too… Reminds me of that age-old normal Google Search for publicly accessible phpMyAdmin interfaces…

UPDATE 3: Just found another beauty at digg.com, about some winzip keygen found on Google codesearch. hehe.

UPDATE 4: Whoa, nice one! Quinton just sent me this beauty.

UPDATE 5: Damn, even more! Found this over at Chris Shiflett’s site, listing some rather bad security holes becoming apparent when searching…

UPDATE 6: Man oh man, this gets better. Harry Fuecks over at sitepoint.com pointed out a proof-of-concept mass-distributed-computing option… This is getting better and better. I wonder if anybody at Google actually anticipated this kind of response…?

Technorati Tags: codesearch, google, password, security

I came across this site a couple of months ago, and something similar came up in conversation this morning…

It’s a site called The Bubble Project, and what this guy is doing is pretty simple.  He prints speech bubble stickers, and goes around the city sticking them on movie posters and other advertising posters, all blank.  Then later, same day, next day, whenever, he goes back and takes photos of the speech bubbles…  Only now, other people have written something on the stickers.  The results are humorous and disturbing all at the same time…  Check it out.  Careful though, there’s a lot of pictures there, it could take a while before you emerge back into the light.

Technorati Tags: bubble project, speech bubbles

Mwahahahaha.
The guys over at Penny-Arcade are brilliant. It’s amazing how sitting around and chatting about your day can actually transform itself into a brilliant comic strip like they do…
‘Forgot your password‘ links and ‘Secret question’ mechanisms for instance. It makes for a good comic strip.

Tags: Penny-Arcade, comic

We have some bad news for those on the sunny island of Malta: you don’t exist and we have the evidence to, er, prove it. Look on the bright side, though: since you either don’t exist or are currently drowned, you can reasonably argue with the boss that the rest of the afternoon spent in front of a bottle of excellent red wine is in order.

Haha, unlucky!

read more | digg story

haha.nu – interesting findings over the net – Escher in Lego

That is so cool! Thanks Bretton for passing on the link.
Great work that. I love Lego.
What’s Escher? Look at the Wikipedia article on Escher.

Tags: Escher, Lego

I started up Firefox on Windows today, with http://www.google.com/ig being my homepage (Google’s personalized homepage service). I got redirected to http://www.google.com/sorry/?continue=http://www.google.com/ig, which sometimes gave me an HTTP 404 error, and other times it gave me a story along these lines:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

At first they had a CAPTCHA block there, asking me to type the letters/word that appeared in an image. At first I thought it strange, but being on Windows, and even though I have Ad-Aware *and* AVG Anti-Virus running (both just updated to latest definitions), I know they’re not foolproof, so I played along and typed the letters. No submit button mind you! I pressed enter, and get take to an HTTP 404 page. Clearing the cookie didn’t work, even trying in IE didn’t work. I had someone confirm that going to the /ig page on Google works just fine on a non-Windows box (FreeBSD I believe).

Oddness.

Further investigation now shows that Google has *removed* the CAPTCHA bits, and replaced it with a:

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

How nice.

Going to any other Google service works just fine (I had to log into everything again after clearing the cookies though), so I’m still not sure what’s going on. Maybe they’re just having a bad day… Not nice to be seeing all those 404’s though…

Anybody know what’s going on? What is Google sorry for?

Update:
Lots of people find my comments rss feed when they search for
“but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”
You might want to come check here too.

Tags: Firefox, personalized homepage, sorry, CAPTCHA, Ad-Aware, AVG, Google, Google sorry