Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

LiveJournal has launched a new Mobile site scheme - which includes a useful summary friends view.

At first glance there's a lot of unnecessary page furniture removed, giving you a small, fast loading page. I thin it will be useful for checking things on my phone on the road (beyond the custom view I put together a couple of years back after tweaking one that had been made available for general use). I suspect it may also be useful for quickly checking and updating without getting in the way of work...

(Though the new T-Mobile MDA Pro I'm playing with at the moment is a GPRS/3G/WiFi device with rather nice 640x480 display, which seems to work quite well with standard LJ themes. The browser in Windows Mobile 5.0 is a huge improvement over mobile browsers I've used in the past.. However this new view does seem tailored for the Blackberry 7100t I'm also using. At the moment I seem to be able to put more phones on the table than my friend Chris, what with those two, the O2 iMode NEC, my regular SPV C500 on Orange, a Nokia 3230, an O2 X4, an SPV M2000, and the iMate JAM. Yup, my very own mobile data test lab...)

Here's a set of Futurama panoramas...

Gotta love that robot porn (which for certain values of interestingly appears to be some sort of simple radio transmitter)...

(linkage via Digg)

A fascinating piece on The Register by Charles Arthur on "phantom withdrawals", rogue IT departments, and a narrow escape for the UK economy...

This is the story of how the UK banking system could have collapsed in the early 1990s, but for the forbearance of a junior barrister who also happened to be an expert in computer law - and who discovered that at that time the computing department of one of the banks issuing ATM cards had "gone rogue", cracking PINs and taking money from customers' accounts with abandon.

It's surprising how many people I know had some form of phantom withdrawal on their accounts, but were frightened off by banks telling that they would be accused of fraud if they claimed the money back. After all, the ATM system was secure. They'd told us it was, and that should have been good enough for us.

Well, now we know the truth.

It was wide open. And people were running through its holes with impunity.

A must read for anyone interested in IT security and electronic civil liberties.