Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Seinfeld to be pitchman for Microsoft
  Seinfeld will be a key pitchman in a planned $300 million fall advertising campaign for the software giant, a person familiar with the plans confirmed to The Associated Press on condition on anonymity because the deal has not been formally announced. The Wall Street Journal first reported the plans. Citing people close to the situation, it reported the comedian will be paid $10 million for appearing in ads with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
• Microsoft enlists Seinfeld in Vista battle
  Microsoft is reportedly paying Seinfeld $10 million for his role which will focus on the slogan “Windows, Not Walls,” and will stress the need to “break down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting.” The advertising campaign follows on from the recent Mojave experiment which attempted to prove that Vista’s biggest problem is perception, rather than actual flaws.
• Fair Use Must Be Considered In DMCA Notices
  US District Judge Jeremy Fogel has ruled that an ‘allegation that a copyright owner acted in bad faith by issuing a takedown notice without proper consideration of the fair use doctrine thus is sufficient to state a misrepresentation claim,’ which paves the way for a lawsuit against Universal Music over a ridiculous DMCA Takedown notice they filed.

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

• Dell and Facebook prepping ’significant’ announcement
  Two of the biggest names in tech are teaming up on a cloud computing project that they plan to announce at a special event next week.  Facebook amasses billions of photos, friend connections, and status updates and stores them up in “the cloud,” and Dell is working on being one of the main providers of the infrastructure–servers–that makes the cloud possible.
• Almost one mobile phone for every South Korean
  Tech-savvy South Korea now has 45 million mobile phones, equivalent to 91 percent of the total population, the Korea Communications Commission said Wednesday. The data means each of the country’s 15.8 million households has almost three mobiles on average, it said.
• 24 Ways to Make and Save Money With Your Computer
  You probably rely on your computer to accomplish a lot of things (and waste some time), but do you realize that computers and the Internet are some of the most powerful tools you can have in your financial toolbox? There are many ways that your computer can help you make and save money that weren’t available just a few years ago.
• We’re running out of IPv4 addresses. Time for IPv6. Really.
  Unless something unexpected happens, we’ll be out of IPv4 addresses at some point in the neighborhood of 2012. So when the next Olympics come around, it’s very possible that some of us will have to watch them online over IPv6. (Actually the official website of the 2008 Olympics is already available over IPv6.)

Tonight I flipped away from the Olympics during the trampolene competition and caught Lenovo’s new ‘Cast Away’ commercial featuring their new IdeaPad Y Series of notebooks.  This not so original commercial was however quite eye catching.

Lenovo is advertising their Veriface technology which is basically a facial recognition program that uses their built in webcam to automatically recognize the face of an enrolled user and log him/her on to the computer.  Pretty slick.

According to Notebooks.com, Veriface is quite secure and will only enroll, in the flesh, human faces and can’t be fooled by glossy photographs.  Veriface isn’t exactly new technology as IBM was bundling it with webcams years ago.  As cool as it is, I’m not sure it’ll actually sell any laptops but I can guarantee that anyone who puchases a Lenovo with Veriface will definitely use it.

Here’s the commercial.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar.
  After making sure that I wasn’t downloading a virus, I installed DoSHTTP and started playing around with it. Along with offering customizable options to advanced users, there was also a nice option for beginners like me. After entering a URL, I could initiate an attack by clicking something that said “Start Flood.” A flood did follow—war at the touch of a button.
• Dropped calls plague iPhone 3G, and not just in U.S.
  If you’re having problems with dropped calls on your new 3G Apple iPhone, you’re not alone.
  From New York to Stockholm, 3G iPhone owners are complaining loudly about connection failures – sometimes repeatedly – during calls. The problem typically occurs when the device attempts to move from 3G to another network.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Sharing 2999 Songs, 199 Movies Becomes ‘Safe’ in Germany
  Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.
• Network Access Control: Deploy Now or Wait?
  Network Access Control (NAC) sounds like something of a panacea—: technology that can not only authenticate who is using your company's network, but also ensure that users' methods of access are virus-free and fully comply with your company's corporate security policies. And NAC has been getting a lot of press lately—proponents tout its ability to keep corporate networks clean and healthy in ways that technologies of the past couldn't.
• VMware Bug is Worse Than a Glitch To Users Who Depend on It
  When VMware VI3 Update 2 was release, VMware placed incorrect sizes for the ISO images on their website, apparently due to some automation issue. However, a worse problem awaited people on August 12th; A problem that would disable licensing and keep new VMs from being booted. But already running VMs worked just fine.
• New PCs can wake up when they get phone calls
  Intel Corp. is unveiling new technology that will let computers wake up from their power-saving sleep state when they receive a phone call over the Internet.