Category: Interesting

The Anti-Rape Condom

While I can’t ever see a woman wearing one of these all the time comfortably for it to be useful, the idea of it reducing rape is an interesting one (and I encourage anything that tortures the bastards that try it).

A South African inventor unveiled a new anti-rape female condom on Wednesday that hooks onto an attacker’s penis and aims to cut one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world.

[…]

The device, made of latex and held firm by shafts of sharp barbs, can only be removed from the man through surgery which will alert hospital staff, and ultimately, the police, she said.

Personally, I’m all for something that just chops the rapist’s Johnson off, but this is a start. Link via b3ta.

November 27, 2005

A Note To Conspiracy Theorists

Those tin foil hats you’re wearing? They don’t work and actually may increase the signal strength of those mind control rays. Links via memepool.

November 27, 2005

Mt. Bachelor Uses RFID For Lift Tickets (Updated)

While RFID is stupid, there’s been so much money invested into it that it’s really too late to switch to better technology. And while adoption of the technology hasn’t been speedy by any means, Mt. Bachelor is apparently using it in their new lift tickets.

The company I work for is a lodging partner with Mt. Bachelor, so we are allowed to sell tickets to our guests. I went to their office today to pick up our first order of the season for this long weekend, and noticed the tickets look different than last year (and the few years prior). They’re smaller, and have just a single smaller bar code. I asked the sales rep there about the new tickets, as it just seemed that the small barcodes would be hard to scan at the base of each lift. He told me there is a small radio antenna inside each card that gets picked up at the base of the lifts. I asked him if it were RFID, and he said that that sounded right.

The tickets that Mt. Bachelor uses are produced by RTP which talks right on their tickets page about the tickets that use RFID. I can only assume that they are Passive RFID tags that can only be read by an external antenna, as the tickets are small and thin and flexible so there’s no way to have a power source in the ticket. That also means that people with these RFID-enabled tickets won’t be broadcasting a radio signal unless activated by an antenna, so skiers don’t have to worry about getting tracked around the mountain unless there are high-power antennas all over the mountain that I don’t know about.

I’ve also been told that the area where the hole is in the ticket cannot be enlarged or modified — I’m guessing because some of the RFID components are in that area around the hole.

If I didn’t have to sell these tickets to guests, I’d dismantle one and post it here (but if I get a used one, I’ll post it up). Anybody been skiing up there yet that has an old ticket that can verify this for me?

Update on 11/27/05: According to Mt. Bachelor (and thanks to Barney), the regular tickets are not RFID-enabled, but the Season Passes are. Makes sense, as the daily passes are a bit twinky while the season passes are a bit heavier-duty.

November 23, 2005

This Means Nothing

BitTorrent’s creator strikes a deal with the MPAA, but it doesn’t matter when other torrent search engines are out of Hollywood’s jurisdiction.

November 22, 2005

History’s Worst Software Bugs

The Y2K “bug” had nothing on these screw ups.

November 22, 2005

Tim O’Reilly is a Jackass

That’s basically the premise behind Simone’s well spoken rant. All the power to you, Simone, and I’d like to see him enforce that no compete agreement.

November 22, 2005

Scoble Pulls Anti-Google Post

I’m horribly behind on my feed and e-mail reading, but I did find this whole mess a bit entertaining. Thanks to Jo-Anne for the tip.

November 15, 2005

We Got Our First Nigerian Scammer

Our office here has an online reservation server so you can book our homes online. We usually get about five or six bookings a day on it, as well as all the bookings we get from people calling us.

Last night we had a $2,000 booking online that the front desk was getting all excited about, until they noticed the card didn’t go through. Since I have access to the credit card logs on the server, I looked at the logs and it gave an ugly error code followed by “Hold Card — Call” which I assume meant that the card was stolen. They tried to call the phone number on the reservation, and it didn’t go through (and reverse look-ups didn’t show anything). So I started to look a little closer at the reservation, and there were several things that were whacky:

So I knew this was obviously a stolen card, and since it was an online transaction, there would be some sort of IP record in my server logs for this guy (and Visa was probably going to ask for it when we call). Since a full online booking with our system only hits a certain page after the booking was completed, it was easy to search the log lines out just by searching for that file name. After matching up the time stamps from the booking with the logs, I come to find out that the booking was made from an IP address in Nigeria.

Needless to say, the booking has been cancelled and our accountant will be calling Visa here shortly. More than likely, the owner of the card was caught up in some phishing scam and gave out their credit card number. Just the same, I do want to make sure whoever did this gets busted (though I do doubt that it will happen).

November 10, 2005

E-Mail Pet Peeves

If anybody uses their e-mail for any sort of serious conversations, or wants to make the attempt to, please don’t do any of the things in this page, like sending an e-mail with a bunch of “>>>” characters in them, use Plaxo (I’ve opted out, so you won’t get them from me or I won’t take them), attachments and no body, unprofessional e-mail address, and unresearched hoaxes.

October 20, 2005

Search Engine For The Visually Impaired

For those folks who need bigger text when they’re looking at search results, and a browser’s adjustments aren’t good enough for you, just try this site which takes Google’s results and supersizes them. Thanks Jo-Anne for the link.

October 19, 2005