Category: Interesting Reads

Beware the fake battery

I know the appeal of buying off-brand batteries for your cell phone or laptop. However, there is often a reason the off-brands are less expensive, and sadly sometimes the generics can be very unstable and cause real serious problems when they fail.

A man has died in China after his mobile phone battery exploded in his chest pocket.

Welder Xiao Jinpeng was working at the Yingpan Iron Ore Dressing Plant in the western province of Gansu.

. . .

He died at a nearby hospital after emergency treatment failed.

Motorola said it was “highly unlikely” that one of the company’s products was to blame – and suggested the dead man might have been using a fake phone or battery.

So the new rule for buying generics is that while you might be OK buying generic/refilled ink-jet cartridges, you probably don’t want to buy off-brand batteries. Admittedly, even the name brand batteries have problems at times, but I believe they still have much lower failure rates. While we don’t know that this man was using a generic battery, I’m willing to go out on a limb and guess it wasn’t a genuine Motorola.

[tags]Exploding cell battery kills man, Dangerous battery, Generic batteries[/tags]

Online open courseware

If you are looking to learn something new on the techie side, here’s another site worth looking in to.

Open-Of-Course is a multilingual portal for free online courses and tutorials. By “free” we not only mean free as in “free beer” but also published as open content. Our focus is on educational information where you can benefit of in daily life.

You will find here lots of free courses and tutorials and you can join a community of over 5000 students. All the courses have their own forum for students to interact and help each other out. You can join the fora after registration. Our privacy policy can be viewed here .

People can also add their own courses or tutorials to our system for free. Open-Of-Course runs on the open source electronic learning environment “Moodle”. Read more about that here.

One of the new tools I’ve picked up lately is Scribus – a layout processing/desktop publishing tool (think PageMaker or InDesign). While looking for some tutorials on learning how to better use the tool, I found open-of-course, and felt that I should pass it on.

[tags]Desktop Publishing, DTP, Open-of-course, Open courseware, Scribus[/tags]

Guide: Smuggling liquids on a place

liquids-on-a-plane_resize.jpg Thankfully, there are more people out there that feel as I do about some of the so-called “security” we are getting for our tax dollars.  And they are way smarter than I am, so they write insightful things about the problem.  So there are frequently new posts out there from which I can draw.  The latest is this simple “guide” to taking your liquids on a plane with you.

My latest experiment with TSA security happened by accident. I recently flew to Memphis on business, and while I was there I bought my wife a souvenir bottle of Vidalia onion salad dressing (pictured at left [well, not on my site when I rip his text]). Vidalia onions are one of the four food groups of the South, the other three being barbecue, fried foods, and gravy.

. . .

I took my time packing up my things, watching her wrap the bottle loosely in the paper and drop it into the trash barrel.

I looked around casually. There weren’t very many TSA agents servicing the area, and they were joking around, screening oncoming passengers, watching the X-ray monitor. Everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere. No one was watching me.

I moseyed over to the walkway and glanced in the barrel. It was filled with half-empty coffee cups and discarded water bottles. There, on top of the trash, wrapped in its protective paper, was my salad dressing.

. . .

Calmly, I reached down into that unstable barrel of atomic liquid and grabbed my salad dressing. Then I calmly boarded the moving walkway, and stuffed the salad dressing down my pants. The TSA lets you keep things there, apparently.

No one came after me. I have to be honest, it was almost like they wanted me to take it. The hardest part was returning a few minutes later to take these pictures on my cameraphone.

Mission accomplished, I suppose.  Read the full article for more details and the camera phone pictures that go along with the story.  This story has been covered by several of my favorite web sites/blogs/smarty-smart folks.  Schneier rightly points out that this probably isn’t a smart thing to brag about online and that he probably wouldn’t have been so glib had he been caught.  Boingboing, other the other hand, looks at this from the critique of DHS security standpoint:

The reason this “smuggling” technique works, of course, is that liquids aren’t dangerous. Everyone knows this — even the TSA. That’s why they don’t guard the barrel after they confiscate your wine, water, and salad-dressing. The point of taking away your liquid isn’t to make airplanes safe, it’s to simultaneously make you afraid (of terrorists with magic water-bombs) and then make you feel safe (because the government is fighting off the magic water-bombs). It’s what Bruce Schneier calls “security theater.”

So take your pick of viewpoints – probably unwise and overly risky or possible because everyone realizes liquids aren’t that risky.  Or both, which is what I think – he wasn’t doing himself a favor by doing this, but it wasn’t likely to be caught given how non-dangerous liquids are and therefore unprotected after “disposal” anyway.

[tags]Liquids on a plane, How to smuggle liquids onto a plane, That Zug guy[/tags]

Nancy Grace suit moving forward

I’m not talking about the suits Ms. Grace wears.  The lawsuit against Nancy Grace over the suicide of Melinda Duckett is being allowed to go to trial.

A judge has ruled that a wrongful death lawsuit claiming that CNN’s Nancy Grace pushed the mother of a missing toddler to suicide through aggressive questioning on her show will be tried in federal court.

. . .

Grace grilled Duckett on Grace’s CNN Headline News show in September 2006 about the disappearance of Duckett’s 2-year-old son, Trenton. Duckett fatally shot herself before the network aired the pre-taped interview.

This will be interesting to see how it turns out.  I thought Ms. Grace was unusually obnoxious, even for her, in this interview.  I don’t know that I would have killed myself over it, but for her and her producers to say they had nothing to do with adding to the stress Ms. Duckett felt is absurd.  And stress reaction is what suicide is all about.  Did Ms. Grace cause Ms. Duckett to suicide?  Well, we don’t know, but even I find that improbable.  Did Ms. Grace contribute?  It sure looks that way to me.  Now we’ll let it go through the court system.  At least, until CNN settles out of court while admitting no wrong-doing.

Thanks to reader/former cow-orker TG for the link to this story.  Apologies to him for the delay in getting it posted.
[tags]Nancy Grace, Melinda Duckett, Lawsuit over Melinda Duckett suicide, Nancy Grace in court over suicide contribution[/tags]

Captain America to be buried at Arlington

If you haven’t kept up with comic culture lately, you might not be aware that Captain America was recently assassinated by a sniper. Sad though this is (in the comic world where it all takes place), it seems that Cap will at least get the hero’s burial he deserves for all the work he has done protecting America.

In the drizzling rain at Arlington National Cemetery, thousands of grieving patriots solemnly watch as the pallbearers – Iron Man, the Black Panther, Ben Grimm and Ms. Marvel – carry a casket draped with an American flag.

Yes, folks, Captain America is dead and buried in the latest issue of Marvel Comics’ “Fallen Son,” due on newsstands the morning after Independence Day. After 66 years of battling villains from Adolf Hitler to the Red Skull, the red, white and blue leader of the Avengers was felled by an assassin’s bullet on the steps of a New York federal courthouse.

I’m not so much into comics that I actually am upset that Captain America was killed – he’s just ink with a strong fiction behind it. Still, for this tie-up to the end of his story (maybe), it is pretty cool that they wrote an Arlington cemetary burial in to the end.

Of course, I also know that dead in comics never means dead. Maybe the story is over. Maybe he’ll be back somehow. I have no idea. I just thought it was pretty cool how the writers put this end of story together.

[tags]Captain America to be buried at Arlington, Arlington cemetary plays in Captain America end of story[/tags]

Kinetica museum

UPDATE: 7-10-2007 – The Orbo demonstration failed due to excessive heat from the lighting used to improve visibility.

This British museum of kinetic art sounds like a pretty cool place to check out. I’ve never been there, but just looked at the website. In concept, I like what they say.

kinetica-museum_resize.jpg

Set strikingly against the backdrop of the old Spitalfields Market in London’s East End, Kinetica Museum opened in October 2006.

Kinetica is the UK’s first museum of kinetic art. It will actively encourage the convergence of art and technology, providing an exhibition space in central London where the most important examples of kinetic, technological and electronic art, both past and present, can be properly stored and displayed.

The thing that makes me wonder about the place, though, is that they are the host site for the new unlimited energy (nee perpetual motion) machine Orbo from energy company Steorn. You might remember that I wrote about this last year. So why suspicion of this? Well, if you can’t see the problem based on the description, you might not understand or care what’s wrong with it, but just the description makes me doubt such a claim.

Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy – that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.

The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles. The principle of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form.

Violates the principle of conservation of energy? Color me skeptical of a machine that produces more energy than it consumes.

[tags]Perpetual motion machine, Unlimited clean energy, Orbo, Steorn, Kinetica museum[/tags]

US court determines Presidents and NSA are not subject to US law

Sadly, I just don’t have time to do this story in the manner it deserves.  I’m preparing for a trip, and won’t have time to completely cover this until returning from travel.  But the story is too important to let wait until then.

Overturning a lower court decision that President Bush’s unlawful wiretap authorization after the 9/11 attacks, a U.S. appeals court has ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit against the NSA for wiretapping.  The simple reason is the court stated that since none of the plaintiffs could prove their 4th amendment rights had been violated by the wiretaps.

The appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs didn’t prove they had been affected by the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, authorized by President Bush in 2002. The program allowed the NSA to monitor communications between U.S. residents and people in other countries with suspected ties to the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

The plaintiffs argued, among other things, that the program violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, protecting U.S. citizens against unreasonable search and seizure. But none of the plaintiffs could prove their Fourth Amendment rights had been violated, wrote Appeals Court Judge Alice Batchelder.

“The plaintiffs cannot show they have been or will be subject to surveillance personally,” Batchelder wrote.

Well, here’s the kicker.  Because the program and all information collected is classified, no one can EVER prove their 4th amendment rights have been violated.  Quite literally, the court has ruled that any program initiated by a President and stated to be classified complete protects the government from all legal repercussions.  Think about this carefully before you dismiss it.  That means, for instance, that if Hillary were to win the election next year (please dear ${diety} no, but just suppose) and she determined she needed to eavesdrop on political opposition.  If she were to start doing this and claim it was classified, no one could bring any legal weight against her.

If any President does anything in violation of current law but declares all information about it to be classified, no one can do anything about it if this ruling stands.  This is an insanely dangerous ruling, and it sets America up for very bad executive branch programs in the future.  It’s especially sad to me that the ACLU actually takes on a case that they should, and because they can only speak of the potential damage of the program, it gets thrown out.  All the cases judges let the ACLU run through that they win, and one this important gets dismissed?  Sad.  A pathetic show of judicial ruling.

[tags]US court appears to hate America, Court declares President above the law[/tags]

Alabama still stuck in 1954?

Andrew has this handy graphic to help understand the state of the state of Alabama:

kantor_alabama-stuck-in-1954.jpg

Now why would he intimate this? Well, let’s just take the quote he used and see if it tempts you to read the full story.

With the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.

Yes, there seems to be an attempt to solve a lack of rain through prayer. Now go see what Andrew has to say about it.

[tags]Alabama stuck in 1954?, Kantor highlights excellence in governance[/tags]

Big brother of the year is bad-ass 5-year-old

Man, this is the kid I want as my big brother when I’m going through life on the next pass-through.

A 5-year-old boy grabbed a rabid fox by the neck and pinned it to the ground during a family cookout, protecting six other children before his stepfather could step in.

“I wanted to protect my little brother,” said Rayshun McDowell, who battled the animal in the front yard of his home Sunday in Kingstown, a town about 50 miles west of Charlotte.

Soooooo, 5-year-old. Rabid fox. Little brother to protect? Much canine ass-whooping occurred. Well done, sir Rayshun. Well done, indeed.

[tags]Bad-ass of the year in under 10 category, Big brother of the year, He opened a can on the fox[/tags]

Robot news – shocking to you

As the robots continue their work toward world domination, they are picking up new partners.  In an attempt to not be crushed by the robots, the humans at Taser have agreed to arm the robots for the coming battle.

RoboCops and robot soldiers got a little closer to reality Thursday as a maker of floor-cleaning automatons teamed up with a stun-gun manufacturer to arm track-wheeled ‘bots for police and the Pentagon.

By adding Tasers to robots it already makes for the military, iRobot Corp. says it hopes to give soldiers and law enforcement a defensive, non-lethal tool.

But some observers fear such developments could ultimately lead to robots capable of deciding on their own when to shoot and kill.

Expect those humans to mysteriously disappear soon.  The robots don’t want humans pointing out their slow growth in power.

I happen to know the robots are collecting lethal weapons too.  This deal with Taser for non-lethal (actually less-lethal according to law enforcement, but that’s a minor quibble) weapons is a ruse to cover the real ambitions…

[tags]The robots will take over, The coming robot uprising, Robots get tasers – zap your ass, Robots stocking up on less lethal weapons to cover amassing of lethal weapons[/tags]

An iPhone view from PC World

Like so many other organizations aimed at the tech and near-tech folks who surf for their information, PC World is taking a look at the iPhone and giving a short review of the ups and downs of this new gadget.

Want an iPhone? Of course you do. It looks sexy, it’s innovative, and–for a while at least–it’ll be the ultimate status symbol.

OK, they almost lost my reading time with this. No, I don’t want an iPhone. It’s a first gen tech toy. It’s an underperforming MP3 player. It’s an oversized phone (but I think that about most phones that are more than phones). It’s an under-functioning web tool (in fact, in more ways than one). It is apparently sometimes difficult to activate (and none of its features work until the entire phone is activated). It has a non-replaceable (by the end user) battery. Oh, and if you want a better functioning gadget for anything the iPhone does (which won’t be too hard to find, given the compromises necessary for this all-in-one functionality), you either carry another gadget, upgrade your iPhone if a better one is available and has the gadget improvement you want, or do without. Still, I kept reading.

Continue reading “An iPhone view from PC World”

Scary news shows why Real ID won’t help security

I do apologize to all harmed in this cowardly attack in in Scotland for using it to illustrate something. I felt it necessary to point out this example of why knowing who someone is does nothing for security because it in no way shows what that person plans to do.

msn_070630_glasgow_jeep_2ph2.jpgBritish security sources tell NBC News that two of the five suspects in custody in connection with three recent terror incidents in Scotland and London are medical doctors and one may have assembled the bombs. Authorities also said they believe that most, if not all, of the suspects come from Middle Eastern countries, including one from Iraq.

. . .

Britain’s top-selling Sun newspaper identified one of those detained as an Iranian doctor who worked at North Staffordshire Hospital in central England. A spokeswoman at the hospital declined to comment on the case and police would not identify those detained.


I find it very difficult to imagine that being able to identify this doctor very precisely via RFID enabled federally mandated ID would have done anything to predict this attack on the airport prior to the act. Of course, that’s because knowing who someone is doesn’t indicate what that person plans to do. I keep repeating that when discussing the horribly useless Real ID because it seems to be a point that policy makers can’t understand even though it is excessively clear to security folks. Not that any policy workers waste their time here, but perhaps someone who knows a high-level policy maker reads my musings and could pass them along.

Continue reading “Scary news shows why Real ID won’t help security”