Fugitive exec nabbed after Skype call
Kobi Alexander, the founder of Comverse, was nabbed in Negombo, Sri Lanka yesterday by a private investigator. He is wanted by the US government in connection with financial fraud charges. He is accused of profiting from some very shady stock-option deals, to the detriment of Comverse shareholders. Once the deals became public and he was indicted, he resigned as CEO and fled the US.
Alexander was traced to the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo after he placed a one-minute call using Skype. That was enough to alert authorities to his presence and hunt him down.
The fugitive former CEO may have been convinced that using Skype made him safe from tracking, but he—and everyone else that believes VoIP is inherently more secure than a landline—was wrong. Tracking anonymous peer-to-peer VoIP traffic over the Internet is possible (PDF). In fact, it can be done even if the parties have taken some steps to disguise the traffic. Continue...
Monday, March 12, 2007
About birthdays
Is it somebody's birthday?
Or your own?
I like to make gifts to myself and my birthday is usually a good excuse.
When it comes to me, of course, I always know what to buy, usually the problem is knowing what NOT to buy.
But when it comes to somebody else I always lack ideas.
If you live in UK (but also somewhere else, many are willing to ship internationally) there is a website that collects all the addresses of a wide range of Birthday Gifts ideas' suppliers.
You do not have to spend time shopping. You can sit in front of your computer and choose.
And they also have good suggestions.
Sometimes you do not have the palest idea that meets your money expectations, but there you can really find just the right thing.
Let's be honest, if we could just forget the budget, there wouldn't be any problem...
I am always looking for something that looks expensive, but comes cheap, and that is USUALLY hard to spot...
But they search the web for the best deals on any category (and I didn't count them, but I never saw more all together...) so, you save time and money.
Besides that they have things I didn't even know they existed!
So, you can have a good chance to make a very unique present...
This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.
Or your own?
I like to make gifts to myself and my birthday is usually a good excuse.
When it comes to me, of course, I always know what to buy, usually the problem is knowing what NOT to buy.
But when it comes to somebody else I always lack ideas.
If you live in UK (but also somewhere else, many are willing to ship internationally) there is a website that collects all the addresses of a wide range of Birthday Gifts ideas' suppliers.
You do not have to spend time shopping. You can sit in front of your computer and choose.
And they also have good suggestions.
Sometimes you do not have the palest idea that meets your money expectations, but there you can really find just the right thing.
Let's be honest, if we could just forget the budget, there wouldn't be any problem...
I am always looking for something that looks expensive, but comes cheap, and that is USUALLY hard to spot...
But they search the web for the best deals on any category (and I didn't count them, but I never saw more all together...) so, you save time and money.
Besides that they have things I didn't even know they existed!
So, you can have a good chance to make a very unique present...
This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
About copyrights
I agree that copyright owners deserve fair compensation.
First, I believe that most copyright does not create new wealth as do inventions. Generally copyright only shifts wealth from one pocket to another.
I have known many top inventors. Dr. Damadian (MRI), Wilson Greatbatch (Pacemaker), Gordon Gould (Laser), Gertrude Elion (Leukemia treatment and other inventions), and Jim Fergason (LCD) to name a few. The value of those inventions are incalculable. What is a movie or song worth to society? Is there any comparison?
Second, I think that the priorities are backwards. Copyrights have very robust protections, protections which have steadily increased while the ability to protect patents is much more limited.
Third, I think that the term of protection for copyright is far too long.
Most certainly copyrights deserve protection for a long enough period to give a reasonable return. How about twenty years or the life of the author, which ever is greater? The Mickey Mouse bill really was outrageous. DRM is outrageous.
Forth, I believe in fair use for both patents and copyright (i.e. research).
The problem is that the copyright interests are attempting to force people to pay again and again for the same work. They are trying to kill all fair use.
Fifth, copyright interests are impeding innovation, not based on the merits but with abusive litigation. And many of the bigger copyright interests are campaigning to weaken inventor's rights while at the same time overreaching with their own rights. Copyright owners should be chasing infringers not crippling new technology.
I am deeply disturbed by the actions of companies like Apple and their iPod.
The truth of the matter is Apple is not a great innovator today. They did a good job of packaging others inventions and of marketing, but they really did nothing to advance the collective arts.
I also do not understand why anyone would by music which is locked in a propriety format. I sure will not. When I pay for a product I do not expect to be forced to watch commercials as is the case with DVD.
I do not mind paying for rights, but I will only do so once for any given work. I will not purchase products which unreasonably restrict my ability to use those products. I will not purchase software with copy protection.
I have a right to make backups and if I cannot backup one product I look for an alternative. I will not pay for subscription software unless there is valuable and constantly updated data which merits ongoing payments.
Ronald J Riley , Exec. Dir. Ronald J Riley, President InventorEd, Inc. Professional Inventors Alliance
First, I believe that most copyright does not create new wealth as do inventions. Generally copyright only shifts wealth from one pocket to another.
I have known many top inventors. Dr. Damadian (MRI), Wilson Greatbatch (Pacemaker), Gordon Gould (Laser), Gertrude Elion (Leukemia treatment and other inventions), and Jim Fergason (LCD) to name a few. The value of those inventions are incalculable. What is a movie or song worth to society? Is there any comparison?
Second, I think that the priorities are backwards. Copyrights have very robust protections, protections which have steadily increased while the ability to protect patents is much more limited.
Third, I think that the term of protection for copyright is far too long.
Most certainly copyrights deserve protection for a long enough period to give a reasonable return. How about twenty years or the life of the author, which ever is greater? The Mickey Mouse bill really was outrageous. DRM is outrageous.
Forth, I believe in fair use for both patents and copyright (i.e. research).
The problem is that the copyright interests are attempting to force people to pay again and again for the same work. They are trying to kill all fair use.
Fifth, copyright interests are impeding innovation, not based on the merits but with abusive litigation. And many of the bigger copyright interests are campaigning to weaken inventor's rights while at the same time overreaching with their own rights. Copyright owners should be chasing infringers not crippling new technology.
I am deeply disturbed by the actions of companies like Apple and their iPod.
The truth of the matter is Apple is not a great innovator today. They did a good job of packaging others inventions and of marketing, but they really did nothing to advance the collective arts.
I also do not understand why anyone would by music which is locked in a propriety format. I sure will not. When I pay for a product I do not expect to be forced to watch commercials as is the case with DVD.
I do not mind paying for rights, but I will only do so once for any given work. I will not purchase products which unreasonably restrict my ability to use those products. I will not purchase software with copy protection.
I have a right to make backups and if I cannot backup one product I look for an alternative. I will not pay for subscription software unless there is valuable and constantly updated data which merits ongoing payments.
Ronald J Riley , Exec. Dir. Ronald J Riley, President InventorEd, Inc. Professional Inventors Alliance
San Jose, a sunny place to live
If you plan to move or to buy a home in San Jose I think you are a lucky person.
I was there many years ago and what I liked best was its wonderful weather.
It never rains in California...well, it isn't 100% true, but close to it...
And if you come from a place like the North of Italy, you certainly appreciate it a lot.
No freezy Winters or chilly Springs, cold Autumns or the hottest Summers...
If the weather is not the issue you can be sure to have many other reasons to live there.
San Jose is the gateway to Northern California! It's a clean, safe, family-friendly city with world-class amenities. It has great golf courses, one-of-a-kind museums and is a short drive to wineries, the beaches of Santa Cruz, the Monterey Peninsula, Napa Valley and San Francisco.
The region houses many large technology companies such as Adobe Systems, Cisco and eBay. Also, South San Jose is home to the IBM Almaden Research Center. This provides many employment opportunities for home owners and contributes to the large middle to upper-class professional population that invests in South San Jose real estate.
If you are searching for South San Jose Homes & Property it pays to make a visit to Realty Direct.
There you have the whole list and links to Real Estate in South San Jose, besides any useful information you might look for, like a detailed description of recreational opportunities, educational, historical and cultural attractions.
This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.
I was there many years ago and what I liked best was its wonderful weather.
It never rains in California...well, it isn't 100% true, but close to it...
And if you come from a place like the North of Italy, you certainly appreciate it a lot.
No freezy Winters or chilly Springs, cold Autumns or the hottest Summers...
If the weather is not the issue you can be sure to have many other reasons to live there.
San Jose is the gateway to Northern California! It's a clean, safe, family-friendly city with world-class amenities. It has great golf courses, one-of-a-kind museums and is a short drive to wineries, the beaches of Santa Cruz, the Monterey Peninsula, Napa Valley and San Francisco.
The region houses many large technology companies such as Adobe Systems, Cisco and eBay. Also, South San Jose is home to the IBM Almaden Research Center. This provides many employment opportunities for home owners and contributes to the large middle to upper-class professional population that invests in South San Jose real estate.
If you are searching for South San Jose Homes & Property it pays to make a visit to Realty Direct.
There you have the whole list and links to Real Estate in South San Jose, besides any useful information you might look for, like a detailed description of recreational opportunities, educational, historical and cultural attractions.
This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.
Is Google evil?
News: Internet privacy? Google already knows more about you than the National Security Agency ever will. And don’t assume for a minute it can keep a secret. YouTube fans--and everybody else--beware.
Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names, choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal on web pages.
That obsession with privacy may explain Google’s puzzling reaction last year, when Elinor Mills, a reporter with the tech news service cnet, ran a search on Google ceo Eric Schmidt and published the results: Schmidt lived with his wife in Atherton, California, was worth about $1.5 billion, had dumped about $140 million in Google shares that year, was an amateur pilot, and had been to the Burning Man festival. Google threw a fit, claimed that the information was a security threat, and announced it was blacklisting cnet’s reporters for a year. (The company eventually backed down.) It was a peculiar response, especially given that the information Mills published was far less intimate than the details easily found online on every one of us. But then, this is something of a pattern with Google: When it comes to information, it knows what’s best.
From the start, Google’s informal motto has been “Don’t Be Evil,” and the company earned cred early on by going toe-to-toe with Microsoft over desktop software and other issues. But make no mistake. Faced with doing the right thing or doing what is in its best interests, Google has almost always chosen expediency. In 2002, it removed links to an anti-Scientology site after the Church of Scientology claimed copyright infringement. Scores of website operators have complained that Google pulls ads if it discovers words on a page that it apparently has flagged, although it will not say what those words are. In September, Google handed over the records of some users of its social-networking service, Orkut, to the Brazilian government, which was investigating alleged racist, homophobic, and pornographic content.
Google’s stated mission may be to provide “unbiased, accurate, and free access to information,” but that didn’t stop it from censoring its Chinese search engine to gain access to a lucrative market (prompting Bill Gates to crack that perhaps the motto should be “Do Less Evil”). Now that the company is publicly traded, it has a legal responsibility to its shareholders and bottom line that overrides any higher calling.
So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing— it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s whether Google, with its insatiable thirst for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and—perhaps most worrisome of all— a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own citizenry.
EEkid@aol.com
Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names, choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal on web pages.
That obsession with privacy may explain Google’s puzzling reaction last year, when Elinor Mills, a reporter with the tech news service cnet, ran a search on Google ceo Eric Schmidt and published the results: Schmidt lived with his wife in Atherton, California, was worth about $1.5 billion, had dumped about $140 million in Google shares that year, was an amateur pilot, and had been to the Burning Man festival. Google threw a fit, claimed that the information was a security threat, and announced it was blacklisting cnet’s reporters for a year. (The company eventually backed down.) It was a peculiar response, especially given that the information Mills published was far less intimate than the details easily found online on every one of us. But then, this is something of a pattern with Google: When it comes to information, it knows what’s best.
From the start, Google’s informal motto has been “Don’t Be Evil,” and the company earned cred early on by going toe-to-toe with Microsoft over desktop software and other issues. But make no mistake. Faced with doing the right thing or doing what is in its best interests, Google has almost always chosen expediency. In 2002, it removed links to an anti-Scientology site after the Church of Scientology claimed copyright infringement. Scores of website operators have complained that Google pulls ads if it discovers words on a page that it apparently has flagged, although it will not say what those words are. In September, Google handed over the records of some users of its social-networking service, Orkut, to the Brazilian government, which was investigating alleged racist, homophobic, and pornographic content.
Google’s stated mission may be to provide “unbiased, accurate, and free access to information,” but that didn’t stop it from censoring its Chinese search engine to gain access to a lucrative market (prompting Bill Gates to crack that perhaps the motto should be “Do Less Evil”). Now that the company is publicly traded, it has a legal responsibility to its shareholders and bottom line that overrides any higher calling.
So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing— it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s whether Google, with its insatiable thirst for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and—perhaps most worrisome of all— a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own citizenry.
EEkid@aol.com
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