While reading this article about designing "experiences" in the Globe and Mail, I came across this interesting tidbit: If you're a frequent Prada shopper (and who on /. isn't?), the loyalty card in your wallet or purse contains a RFID tag that announces your arrival in the store. When you encounter a saleswoman, her handheld computer brings up your tastes, buying history, vital statistics and personalized suggestions from in-stock and coming inventory; the handhelds also place orders and book change rooms. Every item for sale bears an RFID tag. The RFID tags are courtesy of IDEO, and their website has a nice write-up of all the RFID-powered stuff at Prada, including the changeroom! I'm guessing this isn't coming to Wal*Mart's changerooms when they implement RFID. (Another write-up can be found here.)

It's been around 3 months now since I've had my 12" iBook (G3/800 with 640M, 40G HD, Combo DVD/CD-RW, Airport), and I have to say I am liking it a lot.

My boxes at home and work are MS Windows 2000 Professional, but most of my development work was done ssh-ing into the Debian boxes at work.

I'm trying to do more work from home now and, while the Win2K box is perfectly adequate, I think the iBook is almost an all-in-one solution. I've got Mozilla as my browser and IMAP mail client (when they implement roaming profiles and remote bookmarks, I will be in heaven). I've installed jEdit, which is a pretty kick-ass "text editor", which gives me built-in secure access to my CVS repositories (Apple's ProjectBuilder is pretty good too, but the CVS is a bit slow and flakey). And I just finished replacing the Sendmail that came with OS X with Postfix ... took all of 2 minutes with help from Fink and Fink Commander.

So, with my little wireless network at home, I can sit in the big comfy chair in my living room, or at my kitchen island, and surf/email/code in comfort.

I used to hate Macs, probably because I never used them (except for 2 weeks as tech support at an ISP which made me support Mac users ... I had no clue what to tell them!) But it took me a few weeks to discover the Mac-equivalent of some Window-isms, and now I feel pretty confident with it all. The under-the-hood Unix makes it even better.

In fact, I'm liking it so much I've moved my finances off of MS Money into Quicken on the iBook. And most likely my next home computer will be a Mac. Time to save for a 23" Cinerama display!

According this article at Security Focus, the RIAA has hired hackers to find vulnerabilities in common media players, create virii to exploit those vulnerabilities, and have now infected "95% of P2P application users". Do all your base belong to the RIAA now, or is this posting a hoax? Certainly sounds suspicious to me.

I like to cook. This Christmas, I found an amazing bargain at my local Williams-Sonoma on a stainless steel sauce pan from All-Clad. At around 70% off the regular price, I couldn't resist.

All-Clad makes good products, and they come with a lifetime warranty. I noticed that they now allow you to register your product online. So, I went to their website and clicked on the registration link.

The form they presented struck me as very odd. Nowhere on it do they ask what product I purchased, nor where nor when I purchased it. In fact, it appears that they are only interested in collecting my personal information. To what end, I wonder?

Anyway, it prompted me to write them the following email. Too bad that personal information harvesting isn't limited to spammers mining the WHOIS data.

To: info@allclad.com
Subject: Your "warranty registration"

Sirs:

I went to register my All-Clad product online and noticed the following on your website:

By submitting the information below, we can confirm the date of your purchase, which helps us expedite your warranty inquiries. The additional information you provide will help us to develop new and exciting products for your future enjoyment. Thanks again from all of us at All-Clad!

However, the only required information is my name, address and phone number. Nowhere do you require the make or model of the product I purchased, nor the date of purchase.

How do you propose to "confirm the date of my purchase"? Why not just admit that the purpose of registering my All-Clad product is to collect information for marketing purposes?

Rest assured, I will continue to enjoy using my All-Clad products. I will also be sure to take you up on the lifetime warranty, should I ever need to. However, I will not be giving you my personal information so that you can use it for marketing purposes.

Sigh.

Another submission that might not make it:

Oops ... seems like the folks at the RIAA left a back-door open in their site administration pages, allowing Joe Hacker to come in and post bogus news articles on their site. The main site is down now (although the back-door is wide open), while they clean things up, I imagine, and start pouring through the web logs. Be prepared for a spate of DMCA suits!

With this and my Sony submission, I hope no one comes knocking on my door. Seriously, I just report what I hear! I swear!

I submitted this story just a few minutes ago. I'm copying it here in case it doesn't get posted.

Sometime around 22:30 GMT today, it looks like the home page at Sony Music USA was hacked by a group claiming to be called the FBH: Federal Bureau of Hackers. After dissing some of Sony's artists, they get down to their main reason for hacking: to protest the situations in Kashmir and Palestine, and to tell Bush to leave Iraq alone. A quick google search on FBH didn't turn up very much interesting, except this article on JINSA Online (the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), FBH are possibly based in Pakistan. Weird. I'm sure it won't take long for Sony to fix their site, so I've copied the text that appears there below.

you have been defaced by FBH , federal bureau of hackers

hello there people , we are FBH , and we have defaced this site.dont worry no data was harmed, we did it becos , 1st - we hate sum artists on here , ughh JLO is a fuckin whore, shes a pig that dont fly straight , destinys child are shit .. beyonce and lame jayz-z copy 2pac songs ..biters! , shakira has a fat ass..but not all the artists are shit here...no.. NAS is a tite ass rapper ,he is great, i have all the albums , favorourite songs is , poison , ether, lifes a bitch, the message...hehehe...NAS is a cool nigga....but we really deface this site becos we want freedom in our nations of kashmir and palestine. we dont want George Bush to bomb iraq for oil and pretend that its for terror. He should be doing his best to catch binladen .

he dont care if binladen is alive or not. HE WANTS OIL

WE WANT THE ISRAEL GOV TO FUCK OFF BACK TO THE ROCK IT CRAWLED OUT OF, AND THE INDIAN GOV TO STOP TRYING TO SUCK AMERICAS DICK AND STOP BLAMING PAKISTAN FOR ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS. i mean if a dog by mistake fucks a cat, vajpayee will say to the UN

musaharaf sent this pakistani dog to fuck our indian cat! terror! kill!..lol.. he wont mention the attrocities his army carry out on kashmiri people, rape murder , torcher, imprisonment. he wont mention the massacre which occured in gujrat where 2000

people were burnt alive , just for being muslim. VAJPAYEE U R AN ASSBANDIT..

U must be blind if u are unaware of the killing of palestinians . the slaughter if these people by settlers commiting acts of extreme brutality in the name of theyre religion..judaism is not like this.

iraq has no weapons, hell it has no schools and soon enuff if evil bush gets his way , there will be no children for any school.

kashmir is burning

palestine is suffering

iraq is innocent

help these nations , use ur voice, fuck imperialism , zionism.

FBH are Abunasar bobbyd1gital numan mr-basit... email us fbhowns@yahoo.com

greets to ... w.a.r , darkcode, usg , wfd , aic , gforce , satanic souls , breakice , thebugz , timeout , DKD and NAS ESCOBAR hehe

btw robert-rocky is a tite ass rapper , sign him up

I'm now two-for-two with my recent article submission: DOS Attacks on DNS Provider.

And here I was, hoping to use my journal to post all the articles that *didn't* make it!

In a follow-up to the previous story about sleazy marketing tactics by domain registrars, the not-so-friendly folks at the Internet Registry of Canada (same folks behind Domain Registry of (Canada|America|Europe) got a wake-up call today as the Competition Bureau laid charges against IRoC and its principals under the Competition Act's misleading representations and deceptive telemarketing provisions.