Every month, the road outside our office fills with small groups of people looking like they are off to a wedding. All are dressed in their best clothes and walk up to the front doors in pairs or family groups. The callers are from the near-by Kingdom Hall and are basically trying to sell their latest newsletter but sometimes they don’t tell you that for a few minutes.

Being somewhat experienced at this monthly event we have a variety of ways to discourage the callers, ranging from outright lies: “We are Pagan Communists who worship Lucifer, how much for your little girl?”; through the placatory brush-off: “Sorry, can’t talk now I’m on the satellite phone to Kathmandu”; to the outright naff off: “I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy or Father Christmas and I don’t read books written centuries after the events depicted in them”. This usually does the trick.

In the same way, we’ve all grown good at dealing with cold-callers who telephone, with the possible exception of double-glazing salesmen who are quite at liberty to call and give us a quote to remove the brand new windows we installed in our newly modernised home and office.

Not all cold callers get the brush off
There are one group of cold callers I sometimes listen to. These are the ones who give free listings on their websites. We’ve never actually had any work from such a listing but there is always the chance. The one thing I’m never interested in is their extra-special listing which will “only” cost “this” much. One offer I did take up this month came from BT, giving me a free chunk of their cyber-shopping arcade, called Tradespace, here.

Tradespace is where photocopier salesmen mix with Jill’s Office Solutions and the Dorset Tourist Board. BT intend it to be an online community bringing small businesses and individual sellers together with potential customers to do business. It includes blogging, space to show off photographs and videos of your products and ways to plug special events or offers. All done via a web-based control panel. Then there are the RSS feeds, automatic mapping to show potential customers your location, comments and ratings sections and FREE phone calls.

BT giving away stuff for free
The best way to learn more is to take the tour offered in the URL above. BT say they are going to actively market the Tradespace and as their budgets are far larger than my own, this can’t be a bad thing. This is the second free-bee we’ve gratefully accepted from BT. The other is DigitalVault, here, 2GB of free on-line storage that we use extensively for the transfer of large files. They may upload at a paltry 86Kbps, meaning a gigabyte takes 3 hours to send but the system “just works”. There is also a free trial of 20GB on-line space, usual price

Back in the last century, when we got started as designers and our clients paid their bills (unlike today

ITPro and others have been crowing here about a supposed Mac vulnerability demonstrated at the CanSecWest conference. Get your facts right pur-lease.

There are a number of points the reporters missed out which rather change the whole scenario. Not the least that the cracking attempt was sponsored by Microsoft whose fanboys delighted in mis-reporting the supposed Mac hack.

So what exactly happened?
Much of the events have been kept secret but Engadget’s report here is more revealing than most, the comments following it tell the true story.

On the first day, a pair of MacBook Pros were set up with the competition being to access one remotely, get into the Users folder, open a file and act on its instructions. No-one managed to even crack into the Mac for the whole 24 hours. This was with just the simple on-board firewalls and security at factory defaults. Pretty much as most Mac users still use since they took delivery of their computers.

As the competition was to prove that Mac OS is as vulnerable as Windows, this rather defeated the aim, so the rules were changed. On the second day they made it easier. Hackers had to give a URL to the adjudicators who set the Mac to go automatically to the URL where the dirty deed was done.

Ah ha! So the Mac was vulnerable.
Well, actually no. What the URL used was an outdated Java routine that relied on an old browser plug-in. So the Mac itself wasn’t cracked. It withstood all attempts for 24 hours and even the “successful” hacker admitted it took them 9 hours on the second day. The item cracked was a third party plug-in, nothing to do with the Mac or its operating system which was never accessed. The winner only managed to access a user-level file once the door to the Mac had been left open.

Don’t forget there were two Macs in this competition.
The second Mac was set up the same as the first but with a slight change in the rules. To win, contestants needed to follow instructions in the file system root. To access this the hacker would have to gain administration and root-level privileges. Now that would have been something for Microsoft to crow about. Sadly for them, the bog standard Mac, running bog standard software at default settings repelled all attempts.

Macs by default, do not run at root level, it is actually quite a palaver to set up a root account. To install software or make changes to the operating system, Macs require an administrator password which gives temporary root access. Windows, on the other hand, does run at super user level by default (afaik) so once a hacker has opened it up, the whole computer is theirs. Vista has the “improvement” with its infamous warnings as depicted here.

Mac Users have got used to seeing strange downloads automatically appearing when they go to some websites. The resulting .exe files mean nothing to the Mac and are usually the result of going to sites where a message suddenly appears telling you your computer is vulnerable to spyware and would you like it to check things out for you. The download starts without permission but that’s all. On a PC it would probably join the growing malware, worms and viruses on unprotected computers.

But that’s old news.

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UPDATE
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Latest reports say it is a QuickTime vulnerability that allows a client-side Java error to execute arbitrary code when a Java-enabled browser visits a malicious website. Solution

Why does technology fail exactly when you need it most? Our laptop refused to wake from sleep. Loads of power in it, caps lock lights up, just no signs of life. We spent a week pressing it’s buttons every now and again in case some magic cured it, then reluctantly accepted that seven years is a good life span and it is time to move on.

Last Friday was spent playing with

Silverlight was shown to the public for the first time at the recent Las Vegas National Association of Broadcasters show. Microsoft are aiming the new browser plug-in squarely at Adobe’s Flash and claim its interactive Web capabilities and streaming video will be superior even to QuickTime’s.

Instead of using special new magic to display vector-based graphics, text, animations and video, Silverlight will integrate with existing tools such as Apache, JavaScript and XHTML. A Windows-only creation application, Expression, will be released in June as an alternative to Adobe’s Creative Suite CS3. The preview release is available here.

Not to be left out

I don’t think I’ll buy an Apple TV because they aren’t up to the job

This looks like a job for The European Commission. They may be examining Apple’s pricing structure over the few pence difference between Euro and British iTunes stores but what about the massive con Adobe are working?
The prices charged for the Adobe CS3 Master Collection (ie. the full package), according to Amazon’s, US, British and German stores, varies by over a thousand dollars. The table below shows the prices at each store with their respective Dollar/Euro/Pound conversions. It is far cheaper to buy in America than Britain even though they are the same software. The German version presumably had extra work on the language but is still cheaper than buying a copy from Amazon UK.

The sting
Not only that, Adobe have ventured down the path often taken by Microsoft, by making a whole basket full of different versions. All at different prices and containing applications which may be largely unused. There is no ‘pick and mix’ allowing a buyer to choose which parts to upgrade. For example, I don’t need Photoshop CS3 but do want inDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat. I’d like to get Dreamweaver and Flash as well but maybe at a later stage. I have to decide between a bunch of pre-arranged bundles or buy separates at even higher prices.
The solution
Alternatively, I have an account with Amazon US store where they will accept my UK credit card but only ship to a US address. That’s okay because I just get it sent to a forwarding address and pay the small extra cost of delivery to the UK.
And to think I thought Quark were money grabbers

When Apple released the first G5 Macs in 2003, using the IBM Power 4 CPU’s, aka PPC G5, the first machines were bagged by Virginia Tech to build the world’s third fastest supercomputer running at 10.28 teraflops. We’ve got the same running here even as I type and it’s really easy to set up. Maybe not so fast because we are only using 2 Macs compared with their 1100.
How to make your cluster
Mac OS X Tiger has Xgrid built in already. Take a look in the Sharing Preference Pane and you’ll see it in the list. Unlike adding graphics to Blog columns in ITPro, it’s easy-peasy to set up: a tick box, a scrolling list and a text field. If you use the Mac’s firewall, a few ports will need opening as well, by typing in four numbers. And that’s it. Plus more than one Mac networked together and applications to make use of your new mini super computer.
For this, I’ve used Visualhub, an excellent little video converter that’s cheap and faster than Quicktime Pro as well as having more codecs built in. It is currently compressing a couple of movies I recorded with EyeTV, about 5GB, and converting them to MP4 with H.264 encoding at “Go Nuts” quality.


Using all our power
As the little CPU gauge on both machines show, Visualhub is utilising the entire processing power of our two main Macs, giving me an effective 4.3 GHz twin processor Mac. Very sweet it is too, especially as the Unix Nice facility