I like the new Microsoft ad

A lot of people are ragging on the new Microsoft ad with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. I think it's just what Microsoft needs. Before it can sell Vista, it needs to loosen up its company image. I think this ad goes a long way to doing that. Even Bill Gates' caboose doesn't bother me.

Comcast sues FCC over net neutrality

Comcast today sued the Federal Communications Commission to try to block the government body's net neutrality order which requires that the company avoid discriminating against particular types of Internet traffic when managing its network. This is no surprise. You could see this coming when Comcast's response to the ruling was that the FCC had no power to make such a ruling. 

Trying out Google's new chrome browser

I have downloaded and just started to play with Google's new browser called Chrome. Initial impressions are good. It installed easily, brought over my saved data from Firefox and seems very fast. Jody, Tim and I will be experimenting with it more and do the 9/8 Tech Talk podcast on it.

By the way, this week's podcast on the subject of Cyberwar is available.

Screen shot of Google's new browser

Here's a screen shot of Google's new browser.

More details on Gbrowser

Ever notice that it's never in stock?

We're in the market for a DVD player and screen combo that we can put on the back of the passenger seats in our car.  Our research has shown that our toddler's road trip endurance (and the endurance of our own sanity while on the road) will increase three-fold if we can keep her entertained while driving.  Techman J did what any self-respecting geek would do - I Googled it.

Turns out that there are literally hundreds of portable DVD players in all sorts of price ranges and brands.  You can agonize over screen size, screen quantity, and whether they dock with an iPod.  You can also bet the family farm and buy complete replacement headrests that have screens built into them.  But oddly enough, there just don't seem to be that many choices out there that come with a good mounting bag or bracket for the back seat of the car.  Or maybe I'm no good with Google. 

Speaking for myself, the maddening thing about all of this is that no matter what model you find or at what store, they're only available for online purchase.  I'm really starting to wonder why they bother to include a "find in a store near you" function on department store web sites when they don't actually carry any of the item in stock.  It's a little like the old Monty Python "Cheese Shop" sketch.

And perhaps more perplexing is the fact that these things were abundant in sales flyers before we had children and now that I need one, they're nowhere to be found.

TechMan's Tech News Quiz

Welcome to TechMan's infrequent Tech News Quiz. Answer the questions below about current technology news and see your Geek Ranking based on your score. Good luck.

1. General Motors has announced a major new "green" initiative. What is it?

a.) A mini-Hummer hybrid

b.) Bringing back the Corvair

c.) The Volt, a plug-in electric car in 2010

2. Microsoft has chosen a spokesman for its multimillion-dollar ad campaign for the Windows Vista operating system. Who did it pick?

a.) Weird Al Yankovic

b.) Alfred E. Neuman

c.) Jerry Seinfeld

3. Apple said it would have a major announcement in September. What will it be?

a.) The pope will beatify Steve Jobs.

b.) Mobile Me finally works.

c.) Who knows? Apple is tighter than the NSA.

4. The FCC recently ruled that Comcast was blocking Internet customers using the BitTorrent download service. What was Comcast's penalty?

a.) Cut the number of shopping channels on cable TV.

b.) A free on-demand Pauly Shore movie to every subscriber

c.) Nothing

5. The recent Olympics were a technological triumph for China, but what surprising facts came out of the Olympics?

a.) All 2008 participants in the opening ceremonies were prisoners.

b.) Michael Phelps' uncle is Flipper.

c.) The cute little girl singing in the opening ceremonies was lip-synching.

6. A judge is considering a new trial for Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two convicted of illegally sharing 24 copyrighted songs on the Internet. What was the penalty for her conviction?

a.) Must read all news coverage of Britney Spears

b.) Must download and listen to Yoko Ono's greatest hits

c.) $9,250 per song for a total of $222,000

7. The Beatles and Apple Inc. have been negotiating about making Beatles music available on iTunes. What is the sticking point?

a.) Demand that the iPod Nano's name be changed to the iPod Ringo

b.) Paul is dead

c.) Who knows? Apple is more secretive than the Mossad.

8. The Asus Eee mini-PC has proven to be so popular that other manufacturers are imitating it. What names are the wanna-bes sold under?

a.) The Lenovo Mmm

b.) The Compaq Arrrrrgh

c.) The Dell E

9. The Democrats just completed their convention. All of the Democratic Senate candidates have said they support one major technology policy. What is it?

a.) A proclamation that Al Gore did invent the Internet

b.) Universal broadband initiative called No Computer Left Behind

c.) Net neutrality

10. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates retired this summer. What does he plan to do now?

a.) Buy a country and govern it

b.) Buy Harleys with his buddy Warren Buffet and re-enact "Easy Rider"

c.) Give away bales of money

Correct answer to all questions is c. If your score was: 9-10 correct, face it, you're a geek; 6-8 correct, you know your way around a motherboard; 4-5 correct, casual surfer; 2-3 correct, baffled by using a mouse; 0-1 correct, VCR flashing 12:00.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is out

The second beta of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft's browser, is out. You can get it at Microsoft.com. Although this is not the final version, Microsoft has said it is suitable for non-developers to use. But apparently it still has some problems rendering certain sites. A review by Paul Thurrott, whom I trust, explains the problems.

Here's another good link on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 with some cautions about downloading it.

Top popular science books

There's an effort to compile a list of the top popular science books. Here is a link to a start. I've read a few of these. You can contribute your own

Why was that man rocking his Cadillac

This is a little off-topic, but I had to see if anyone knew about this. Today I was filling up at a gas station and an older gentleman at the next pump was filling his late-model Cadillac. After the pump clicked off, he leaned against the rear back panel of the car and started to rock the car. I didn't have the presence of mind to ask him what he was doing. When you find cheap gas, does rocking the car help the tank fill more? Got me

CMU system thwarts Man in the Middle attacks

 CMU has come out with a new security scheme that could protect against Man in the Middle attacks. This is especially important in protecting people using public WiFi points.

Telephone exchange names gone but not forgotten

TechMan was driving through Amish country a few weeks ago and took note of the farms with wash hanging on the line in the yard. It got me thinking about everyday things that have largely disappeared because of changes in technology.

Another example presented itself a few weeks later when TechMan was reading "The Best of 2600," a collection of articles that have appeared in that magazine, which is directed at the hacker community, over the past 25 years.

What caught my attention was an entry by Jeff Vorzimmer on naming telephone exchanges. We of a certain age remember when our telephone numbers started with two letters that were followed by five digits, the so-called 2L-5D system. This started in the 1930s and lasted into the 1950s and '60s. Before that, three letters and four numbers were used.

When TechMan was just a TechBoy, his home phone number began with CR(estview) 2 (272).

In the early days of the phone system you recited a phone number to the operator and having a word to signify the first two numbers made it easier to understand and harder to transpose. But as dial phones became pervasive and then as area codes allowed customer-dialed long distance, the phone company began switching to all-digit telephone numbers.

That spelled the end for named local exchanges.

But how were these exchanges named in the first place? That is unclear, but in 1955, Bell Telephone put out a list of "recommended names for dialable/quotable telephone EXchange names."

Many cities had for decades been using names not from this list, and they were not required to change the names. Names on the list were supposed to have been chosen so that pronouncing the name would easily identify the first two dialable letters of the word, and quoting the letters would not be confused with other "like-sounding" letters.

I found this list on a Web site run by Robert Crowe. If you put in the name of a town at ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html, you can find the telephone exchanges assigned there.

There were up to six acceptable exchange names for each two-digit combination that could begin a phone number. (Some combinations were not used because the numbers were kept for special uses.)

For my childhood number, acceptable exchange names, in addition to CRestview were BRidge, BRoad(way), BRown(ing) and CRestwood. For my current Mt. Lebanon 53 exchange, the Web site says the name was LEhigh, but JEfferson, KEllogg, KEystone, and LEnox also would have been acceptable.

Some exchange names worked their way into popular culture. Pennsylvania 6-5000 was a 1940 song by Glenn Miller and his band. It was the number you called to make reservations at the Cafe Rouge at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City where the band often played.

John O'Hara wrote a novel called "BUtterfield 8" that refers to the characters' telephone exchange. The movie made from the novel won an Oscar for Elizabeth Taylor.

People who listen carefully to early TV shows, hear numbers given out as KLondike 5. TV and movies still use phone numbers starting with 555 because that exchange is not used, so someone's real number could not be given out by mistake.

MUrray Hill 5-9975 was one of the Ricardos' telephone numbers on "I Love Lucy." And the Marvelettes recorded the song "BEechwood 4-5789."

So what did we lose when exchange names disappeared? Dave LeBlanc, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail about vanished exchange names in his city, said, "These familiar little words had been around for so long, they'd become more than mere mnemonic devices; they'd become signifiers of place."

My parents had a cottage in a wooded mountain area, and the exchange was WOodland. Dialing those letters made me think with pleasure of the place I was calling. Somehow dialing 96 does not have the same effect.

Conspiracy theories on 9/11 dealt a blow

 An interesting story today about the report on why a  building on the World Trade Center site collapsed on the afternoon of 9/11. Conspiracy theorists, noting that the CIA had offices in the building, have contended that it was brought down by explosives. But the report says it was fire caused by the World Trade Center collapse that caused the building to fall, despite the fact that such a collapse is rare.

Comcast ruling refuels Net neutrality in Congress

On the list of hot topics in Congress this year -- housing crisis, credit crunch, war -- you probably won't find Net neutrality.

But there is legislation pending on who controls the Internet -- legislation that in the long run could be very important to the consumer and the economy.

Net neutrality is the concept that Internet Service Providers -- Verizon, Comcast, AOL, etc. -- do not have the right to favor one Web site or service over another by blocking, slowing or speeding up traffic to certain sites.

Why might ISPs want to do this? Well, Verizon, which operates a telephone network, might want to make Skype, a competitor that offers free Internet telephony, work a little slower or be harder to reach.

Does Verizon do this? All ISPs say they do not.

But that was brought into question when Comcast was found to be blocking access to BitTorrent, a service used to download large files (and also to pirate movies). Comcast said it did this to protect its users from customers who hogged up a lot of bandwidth, thus slowing the network down for everyone.

Recently the Federal Communications Commission told Comcast to stop the blocking, but did not levy a fine or other penalty.

The "slap on the wrist" given to Comcast has propelled Net neutrality legislation into the forefront again.

Net neutrality bills have lingered in Congress for years, dying at the end of every session.

There are powerful forces on both sides. Internet providers don't want the government's fingers in their pot. They especially don't want to be forbidden in the future from charging certain sites a premium for having their content delivered faster than other sites, something they don't do now.

But companies such as Google want ISPs to be barred from interfering with their operations on the Net. And they claim Net neutrality encourages innovation because the little guys are treated the same as the big fish.

There are several Net neutrality bills in Congress, although it doesn't look like any will be acted on in the remainder of this session. (In a presidential election year, will much of anything important be enacted?)

A House bill sponsored by Rep. Edward Markey, D.-Mass., and Rep. Charles Pickering, R.-Miss., would write into legislation the Net neutrality rules the FCC stated in the Comcast case and would put the FCC in charge of neutrality abuses.

A bill in the Senate sponsored by Democrat Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine takes the same approach.

Another House bill, sponsored by John Conyers, D.-Mich., and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., would allow the Justice Department to bring antitrust actions against an ISP found to be violating Net neutrality.

Although TechMan generally is opposed to government regulation of the Internet, in this case it may be necessary, although involving antitrust law may be too unwieldy.

Insuring that the Internet remains a level playing field is vital to all of us.

To track these and other bills in Congress, go to thomas.loc.gov.

A nuclear cargo ship

 Wired has an interesting article about a nuclear-powered cargo-passenger ship that actually was in service in the early 60s. I never heard about this. 

Beware of Antivirus 2009

 There's a nasty bug going around called Antivirus 2009 that masquerades as an antivirus program. It pops up a realistic looking screen on your computer showing bad programs it claims to have found and then prompts you to buy a program to remove them. Not only don't you get an antivirus program for your money, you probably get a load of additional malware. Antivirus 2009 may attempt to change your computer's desktop, hijack your browser, monitor your Internet browsing activities, change system files, and can do this without your knowledge or permission. The Web has a number of places that claim to have ways to get rid of Antivirus 2009. I can't vouch for any of these working. If anyone has had to deal with Anitivirus 2009, a comment posted here would be appreciated.