Interesting article on intel technologies in Las Vegas, including NORA….

A 43-year-old technology visionary and high-school dropout, Jonas soon realized that his system could also identify employees colluding with gamblers, say, by discovering that they share a home address. He calls his program NORA — for Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness.
Every time a player registers for a loyalty card or a hotel room, Jonas explained from his lab near the Strip, the player’s name, address and other data are sent to NORA. Also in the casinos’ NORA database is information about employees and vendors.  Link—>

Let’s say I want to buy the new “She Wants Revenge” album, so I decide to do a comparison between iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. On iTunes the tracks are only available in DRM form at a cost of $7.99 for the album, which is a great value for a 13 tracks. On Amazon, I can get the same 13 tracks for $8.99 in a higher bit rate and no DRM.

I hate DRM enough that $1.00 premium is worth it to me for the higher quality and no DRM. Given I like to access my music collection from multiple computers, I’ve already maxed out my 5 authorized systems on iTunes. That means if I buy the album from Apple, I’ve got to listen to it on the five machines that have been authorized. If I am heading out the door with my MacBook, I can’t bring this album as it isn’t authorized on my iTunes account.

This is a no brainer for me and as a shareholder of Apple, I hope they accelerate the iTunes Plus program so that I can continue to give them my business. Tonight, my $8.99 goes to Amazon.

If this analyst is right, I am willing to bet the iPhone will be Gphone enabled:

But Richard Doherty, research director at The Envisioneering Group, says Google is driving toward getting device makers to produce basic handsets equipped with a “Gbutton” that takes users right to a Google texting screen. The goal: Get GPhone texters in the habit of querying its vast databases for directions, phone numbers, movie times or restaurant tips and woo advertisers to sponsor GPhone-delivered answers, Doherty says.  Link—>

This makes a lot of sense for both parties and creates yet another potential revenue stream for the iPhone  as the software approach will likely involve revenue sharing, just like a Google toolbar does.  Given the integration with YouTube already present on the iPhone, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Google phone software get coveted icon placement on the iPhone as well.

When AOL started bleeding dial-up subscribers to the likes of DSL and cable broadband services, they instituted policies that made it almost impossible to cancel. On Friday I decided to cancel my Vonage lines as they were no longer being used. With a new Cisco VOIP solution at work and many of my devices able to support Skype or Project Gizmo with voice-out minutes, I no longer needed Vonage.

I logged into the Vonage web site and found out that I can only cancel via telephone during normal business hours. I thought this was interesting as I can basically order hundreds of dollars of Vonage services via the web and my entire relationship with the company has been online, so it was surprising that I had to call them to cancel.

It turns out, the reason I had to call was to endure 48 minutes worth of what can best be described as “cancellation marketing”. No matter how many times I expressed my frustration with the call and indicated there was nothing they could do to keep me as a customer, they continued to make me new offers, ask questions I refused to answer, and basically ignored my request to cancel for as long as possible. For a similar experience, see this blog entry and these customer complaints (on my call, they made about 15 additional attempts to keep me as a customer, despite the fact that I kept asking to just proceed with the cancellation now).
This type of activity is despicable and is a demonstration that the company is bound for failure. I used to highly recommend Vonage services. I no longer will.

Another node in the network….

East Bay TEW site looks great!

Is a joint venture between Alameda and Contra Costa Counties and the City of Oakland.
The group serves as the region’s hub for gathering, analyzing and disseminating information which may pertain to terrorist threats. The group uses an “enrichment” system marked by the imperative to immediately pass information it receives to all relevant constituents, liaisons and contacts so that all view and add to it based upon experiences with involved subjects, methods of operations, and events described in the disseminations. In this way, critical and also seemingly innocuous information can be added to in order to create clearer pictures of potential threats. 

A few months ago I had two RAID NAS storage devices fail on me within two days of each other. These two devices comprised 100% of my backup capability, which got me thinking about some off-site alternatives for some of my data. After a lot of research, I decided to go with Amazon’s S3 service which provides reliable and very cheap online storage and JungleDisk (which gives me a nice interface to S3 with custom encryption of files before they are uploaded to Amazon).

After a few months of use, I must say that I am very impressed. The Amazon storage is costing me about $1.00 per month and the lifetime license for JungleDisk is $25.00.

I am not uploading things like pictures or music yet, but I just may do an annual load of our photo library just to be safe. If you are looking for a cheap and reliable offsite backup, it is worth taking a look at this combined solution.

I am subscribed to this list and must admit I was more amused than annoyed given the entertainment value of the posts.

Here’s the story: DHS provides a daily summary of news items for its mailing list subscribers,  which includes people with security and disaster response roles, vendors and news media. But its mailing list was misconfigured today. Anyone who hit “reply all” reached everyone one the list,  triggering some 200 emails — and counting.   The temptation to reach out was too much.  It quickly became a big networking party. (Although as time went on, frustration mounted prompting more and more people to send emails to everyone on the list asking everyone to stop sending emails to everyone on the list.)

Many used it as a opportunity to say hello, where they were writing from, inquire about jobs, show support for their team, “Go Hogs,”  there may have been some matchmaking, and one even mentioned that his firm sold anti-spam products.

Wrote one:

I don’t think everyone realizes that yet, but what a nice way for all of us to get to know one another!

Some of the responses

– I like long walks on the beach and a nice chardonnay with my roasted duck.

– Or even a nice chianti with that roasted duck - it is autumn!

– Look at this as a business development opportunity.  (To that end, one chimed: does anyone need homeland security consulting?)

– Howdy from Tampa, a sunny place for shady people.

– I’m a Sagittarius …

– I like scuba diving …

SysAdmin’s advice: Today’s lesson… Folks!
Always place large distro lists in the BCC field.
Reply or reply to all is a non issue.

And, finally, wrote one person:

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED

what does that mean?

Update: Are there any security issues raised by this? Some of the responses are from the world over. One list subscriber, who said he was writing from Iran, broadcast this query: ”why are so many messages today?” This prompted another person to write: Open source really does mean open source!!!!! For those of you that have responded to this email from an official computer with your snazzy little signature at the bottom, especially those that have every piece of contact information listed, including those of you that have disclosed sensitive phone numbers and classified email addresses have knowingly provided this information to people all over the world.  Full Story