Month: March 2007

tech

SMS Security

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I found today a new blog to read. It’s titled Red Tape, it can be found on MSNBC’s site and its purpose is to unmask government bureaucracy, corporate sneakiness and outright scam artists. A lofty goal from a site owned by General Electric but anyway…
A post today talks about whether or not the SMS messages that you send can be “captured” and then read by others. In one word: yes. Its a fascinating read. One part that liked was:

Cell phones and pagers also can be “cloned,” meaning the clone will receive a copy of every text message sent to the original device. In the most famous case of pager cloning, alleged Israeli organized crime figure Assaf Waknine obtained a clone of the pager carried by a Los Angeles police detective who was investigating him.

Read all about it for yourself. You will make sure that you never text a bank account or credit card number again.

ramblings

News of the Day

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Note to self: when driving around with tons of illegal drugs in the car – drive carefully! Check out the news article below from the good people at the AP (the reporters group, not the supermarket chain which utilizes an ampersand). In one word, it’s ridiculous!
Car with pot in trunk hits state trooper: 54-year-old caught with 43 pounds of marijuana after South Carolina crash
The Associated Press (Updated: 12:21 p.m. ET March 6, 2007)
ORANGEBURG, S.C. – It might have been one of the easiest drug busts in the history of the South Carolina Highway Patrol: A car with 43 pounds of marijuana crashed into a trooper’s cruiser, authorities said.
The easy bust happened after two patrolmen parked their cars in each lane of northbound Interstate 95 near Santee early Sunday morning following a series of wrecks that had tied up traffic, Highway Patrol Capt. Chris Williamson said. A Chevrolet Malibu going about 70 mph hit one of the cruisers, causing minor injuries to the trooper behind the wheel, Williamson said.
Officers found two large duffel bags in the trunk with 43 pounds of marijuana in plastic bags, worth more than $150,000, Orangeburg County deputy Warren Pendry said. They also found a few marijuana cigarettes and cocaine, Pendry said. The 54-year-old driver from Daytona Beach Shores, Fla., was charged with driving under the influence, possession of cocaine and trafficking marijuana, authorities said.

music

Keeping Track of Your Bands Is Tough To Do

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Or at least it used to be. That problem will hopefully be a relic of the past now that there is Tour Filter.
I for one am one of those people who gets tunnel vision from time to time and with all of my various responsibilities (job, school, etc) tunes out a lot of the outside world. This results im me sometimes only finding out last minute (sacrilege!) that my favorite band is either in town or even worse just played somewhere really cool and I missed it. I’ve felt like a complete schmuck; one example is when I learned that learned Robert Plant played Irving Plaza the previous week, that he was playing the Beacon the following night with tickets obviously soldout (how did this happen?!?) which left me scrounging around craigslist last minute and lamenting the lost chance to see him at Irving. While I got tickets to the Beacon show, it was stressful and annoying – two words I never want to associate with Mr. Robert Plant.
Well, hopefully this problem will not happen anymore. While I’ve signed up for Ticketweb and Ticketmaster’s alert lists, they send me bands I don’t care about. I want to track my bands or bands that others think I would like because I like band X. That is Tour Filter’s promise. I’ll give it a few months and see how it goes…
Via Wired Mag