So, Christopher Soghoian created a very simple PHP script to generate a Northwest Airlines (NWA) boarding pass and now has become the centre of a very strange attack by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) forcing him to shut down his site.

Mr Soghoian (pronounced Soh-Goy-An) said in his blog that there was no ill-intent in his generation of the page – and that it was merely an attempt to draw attention to a floor in the current security procedures. I think this is diluting the point a little.

Regardless of this being done to draw attention, as a stupid prank or with malicious intent – his site only made it slightly easier then U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer’s detailed instructions. Just making it illegal to create a fake boarding pass is not going to fix the problem. I can not believe that a home printed document can allow people past security. Why not put a “Self-Check-In” terminal that scans the barcode in the entry foyer and issues a real boarding pass. At least there can be confirmation that there really is a ticket issued with those details.

It amazes me how consistantly the wrong end of the issue is attacked, I suppose the phrase “Don’t shoot the messenger” comes to mind.

I love technology and I love doing things “just because you can”, there are however some times when i see something and I just think – why?… why would you do that? And this is one of them.

The Department of Automation and Applied Informatics of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics has finally ported BitTorrent to the Series 60 world.

For those that don’t know – Series 60 is the operating system in most (popular) mobile phones at the moment – particularly Nokia. With the exception of the Nokia 770 Tablet PC many modern phones are based on this operating system.

At the moment the Series 60 BitTorrent client called SymTorrent runs as an application on your cell phone and allows you to download torrents just as if you were on your P.C.

I have to admit that when I first heard about this – I didn’t know how to react, a little part of me went “cool”… but that was quickly extinguished by the burning desire for an answer to the question “Why the fuck would they do that?”. Unfortunatly – I still don’t have an answer for that one. Why you would need to download torrents to your cell is beyond me… Lets go through some possible reasons…

Just because you can – No that’s a crap reason
Some people may not have a P.C. – And still need to download torrents? Oh do fuck off – that is one of the most unlikely scenarios I have come across.
There are some movies encoded for cell phones available as torrents – That doesn’t mean you have to download them on a device that just does not have the processing power nor the network connectivity to maintain a torrent download properly. To speak nothing of the fact that it is a download only client… leecher!

All in all – this has just confused me. And lets never speak of it again.

those who know me know that I am quite impatient, and that is probably understating it. Because of this – I have never really listened to a lot of music. My problem is that I like one particular song by a particular artist – or I like that artists style across a whole album. Either way I can just not be bothered allocating the time required to find similar music.

My solution has now arrived in the form of Pandora Internet Radio. This is a fairly established service that I had never really given a chance to impress me, but after some glowing reports from friends I thought I would give it a try.

The premis behind pandora is quite simple, every song has a sort of DNA – the things that make is unique. This data is stored in the music genome project. What pandora does with this data is truly amazing. By telling it a particular song or artist that you like, compliations of tracks are created for you (which pandora calls stations). Over time by saying that you like or dislike particular tracks – you can end up with a station that plays music that you really like track after track.

I have spent some time teaching pandora about the type of music I like and have ended up with a fairly cool lounge station.

All in all this is a fantastic and very cheap service that I recommend highly.

Well, it seems to have been quite a while now – but we are back to “white powder” scares with the L.A. Times office getting one about an hour ago. It was found a little after 7.30pm – so there were not that many people around, and only a few people had to be evacuated.

I wasn’t really expecting this sort of thing to pick up until all the war stuff had started to die down again, I mean – our attention is focussed on North Korea, Iraq and a little back on Afghanistan now – can we handle our attention being split back to domestic (for U.S. inhabitents atleast) attacks?

There is no confirmation at the moment as to the powder really being anthrax or some other biological agent, and I hope that it isn’t. I suppose this comes just at a time when most people were starting to feel safe about their mail again.

I was just asked by a very good friend if he could tell somebody about my blog. A little bemused I approved while thinking to myself that there really is no way for me to stop him.

One of the things he asked was “is it offensive?”. My instant response to that was yes, of course it is. Based solely on the fact that rarely a day goes by that there isn’t somebody that I at least partially offend. But then I thought about it a little more.

And without sounding too introspective (and too much like a wanker) – how am I really to decide if it is offensive? There is the occasional “fuck” in my text, along with other choice words – but you can hear that walking down the street. Some of the themes I deal with could be considered to be a little controversial – but does that make them offensive?

Everything here really is just my opinion, and the things that aren’t are generally fact. You may have trouble distinguishing the two occasionally – but tough. I am far from a professional writer, and don’t always state my source. This site merely is my brain falling into the internet, and being represented by dots on your screen… there isn’t a lot more to it then that.

I found crap service!,
originally uploaded by troykelly.

It took me five months, but we finally found a place in Japan that has bad service, and this is it.

I love the contextual advertising approach that has been made famous and common-place by Google. I think it is the best kind of advertising around at the moment. I appreciate that the advertising is targetted to me, and unlike some others am not too worried about “big brother” knowing what I am looking at to deliver a better service.

What I am concerned about however is the ammount of advertising “SPAM” that is now appearing in Google’s contextual advertising. A lot of the ad’s I have clicked on recently have just taken me to a holding page, with … more Google ad’s. A lot of these sites have some crap content down the bottom of the page – but there is no value in them at all. They don’t provide any of the information that their advertisment suggests, and they are a complete waste of time.

I think Google needs to act swiftly to stop this sort of thing or else they will dramatically devalue a great system

For those of you that hate sites that “protect” their downloads with cookies, here is iksemel version 1.2 for getting google talk to work with asterisk Iksemel v1.2