Tech Stuff | Ain't Complicated

Inspirational Texting

Today, among things for which I’m thankful, is this:

In the U.S. alone, people send around 530 million text messages every single day.

Faith Comes By Hearing, the world’s foremost Audio Bible ministry, is now using text messaging to deliver God’s Word in audio.

By texting “BIBLE” to 80672, people can have the encouraging Word of God sent directly to their mobile phone. Once subscribed, people will receive a chapter a day of the Audio Drama Bible. In less than a year, people can listen through the entire New Testament.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like a great idea.

My APU Did Its Job!

We live so far out of town that we can’t get DSL or cable Internet.

That doesn’t pertain to this post except to help explain this: We seem to have frequent power outages, interruptions, and/or disruptions — especially in the winter time.

Over the years, that has translated into lots of time lost due to the power failing and the computers going dead. Even when the power merely winks off and on, it means lost work and/or corrupted files. For certain, it means having to reboot and start over.

Well, two or three months ago I decided that was enough of that. So I purchased and installed an APC Battery Backup unit.

Yesterday morning during computing time, the power winked. The printer shut off and restarted. The answering machine went through its routine. My ThinkPad beeped its way from AC to battery to AC.

But our desktop Dell just kept right on as though nothing had happened.

Because my APU did its job — it kept delivering uninterrupted power to the desktop.

Hey! Maybe that’s why they call it a UPS sometimes! (You know, Uninterrupted Power Supply.)

Anyway, that’s the first time the thing earned its purchase price.

That was fun to experience.

And I’m thankful.

(PS: I bought mine from Circuit City’s website. You could buy it from Amazon.)

Cell Phone Security

I keep trying to get the point across to people that email and cell phones should not be considered private and secure. I think most think I’m a paranoid kook. Or at least paranoid. Albeit a well-meaning one. Like a kindly old uncle (which I am, which I feel like, which I am) or a gentle befuddled grandpa (which I’m kinda, which I’m not, which I am) 🙄

Well, here’s something new I learned this morning while scanning the newsletter of a mission-related agency:

2) Is Cell Phone Security Even Worse Than We Thought?

Here’s a question from a field worker who writes, “Our mission team is located in a ‘police state.’ We know the police listen to our phone calls regularly. We also know they can use triangulation to locate us. We’re fine with that stuff. 🙂 But now we’re facing a couple of new concerns:

“*** REMOTELY EAVESDROPPING WHEN WE’RE NOT ON THE PHONE — The microphones in cell phones are now being turned on remotely to allow eavesdropping on their owners anytime (even when you’re not making a call). We’ve figured out how to overcome this problem… but we kind of hate to always have the batteries out of our cell phones. 🙂 [By the way, if you think this worker has been watching too many episodes of “24”, just do an Internet search for the term, “FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool.”]

“*** REMOTELY ACCESSING CONTENTS OF YOUR PHONE — We’re hearing (from some pretty tech-smart guys) that it’s easy to remotely hack into the contents of our phone, getting full access to our pics, calendars, docs, task lists, etc. The implications are huge. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Now what?

Yahoo! Slurp and Me

They helped cause a spike on this site that led to my host suspending the domain.

After at least 30 hours of being suspended, I was allowed to bring the domain back online. Since then, I’ve been monitoring its bandwidth consumption. And particularly watching two bots: Googlebot and Yahoo! Slurp.

I also set up robots.txt to severely restrict bot access to this domain.

Googlebot is behaving; Slurp appears not to be.

Robots/Spiders at 6:53 am on 10/18/08 Yahoo Slurp 7785+312 156.18 MB 09:46 Googlebot 4411+33 111.47 MB 02:42

Robots/Spiders at 7:20 am on 10/19/08 Yahoo Slurp 8357+334 164.00 MB 10:05 Googlebot 4413+35 111.53 MB 03:59

I checked my recent accesses…and found a whole bunch by Yahoo. 🙁

Read it all

Skype User, Beware

Another company in the bag for the Chinese government?

Skype’s China Spying Sparks Anger

Savvy Internet users in China began avoiding the version of Skype offered by its Chinese partner two years ago, but news it filtered and recorded text messages has sparked new worries about the global firm’s commitment to privacy.

The U.S.-owned Web communications firm faces a backlash at home and in China for apparently allowing core principles to be compromised in order to meet the demands of Chinese censors, analysts warned.

“We may never know whether some of those people whose conversations were logged have gone to jail or have had their lives ruined in various ways as a result of this,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet expert at Hong Kong University.

“This is a big blow to Skype’s credibility, despite the fact that Skype executives are downplaying it as not such a big deal.”

Skype, with its promises of total security and privacy, has long been popular with Chinese looking to keep their conversations away from the prying eyes of government censors.

But the eBay-owned firm had to apologize on Thursday after a report revealed that its Chinese service not only monitors text chats with sensitive keywords, which it had earlier admitted, but also stores them along with millions of personal user records on computers that could easily be accessed by anybody.

Worse Than DUI

Texting while driving “more dangerous than drugs or alcohol”

Texting behind the wheel is more dangerous than driving while under the influence of alcohol or cannabis, researchers said Thursday.

Research carried out on young drivers (aged 17-24) using a simulator found that reaction time slowed by 35% when they were writing or reading text messages while driving. In comparison, reaction time deteriorated by 21% for those under the influence of cannabis, and by 12% at the legal alcohol limit.

I’m no teenager (and only two of our five flesh-and-blood children are still teenagers), but I better remember this the next time texting while driving seems so urgent. 😯