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Verizon's Automated Robo-Caller Goes Crazy - Are you satisfied? Are you satisfied? Are you satisfied?

Network World reports that some Verizon customers were recently bombarded with automated calls by the telco inquiring about their customer satisfaction level. In some instances, users were called as many as nine times in a twenty-four hour period. Fortunately, only about 1,400 FiOS and DSL customers were impacted by the ghost in the machine, though the customers who were impacted say that no limit of navigating automated phone prompts would get the calls to stop, and, when warned of the problem, Verizon reps were sympathetic, but ultimately unhelpful. Verizon says a hardware glitch led to the problems, which should now be resolved, but Verizon's dysfunctional response highlights many customers' experiences with the telco's support operations.

How Close Were US Presidential Elections?

Mike Sheppard writes "I'm a graduate student in Statistics at Michigan State University and spent some time analyzing past US presidential elections to determine how close they truly were. The mathematical procedures of Linear Programming and 0-1 Integer Programming were used to find the optimal solution to the question: 'What is the smallest number of total votes that need to be switched from one candidate to another, and from which states, to affect the outcome of the election?' Because of the way the popular and electoral votes interact, the outcome of the analysis had some surprising and intriguing results. For example, in 2004, 57,787 votes would have given us President Kerry; and in 2000, 269 votes would have given us President Gore. In all there have been 12 US Presidential elections that were decided by less than a 1% margin; mean

Olympic Opening Ceremony Fireworks Were (Partly) Faked

A complete newb writes "London's Telegraph newspaper reports that some of the fireworks which appeared over Beijing during the television broadcast of the Olympic Opening Ceremony were actually computer generated. But — hold on — it's not necessarily as bad as you think. The faked fireworks were actually set-off at the stadium, but because of potential dangers in filming the display live from a helicopter, viewers at home were shown a pre-recorded, computer-generated shot." To me, the reasoning behind the faked display is no consolation or excuse — it seems hard to swallow that NBC was unaware of this televised deception. I'm glad that it was good-naturedly "revealed" this weekend (according to that Telegraph article), but it's disheartening that such a large crowd can watch (in person, and around the world) such a display and have

Greek Hackers Target CERN's LHC

Doomsayers Delight writes "The Telegraph reports that Greek hackers were able to gain momentary access to a CERN computer system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) while the first particles were zipping around the particle accelerator on September 10th. 'Scientists working at CERN, the organization that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were "one step away" from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21 meters in length and 15 meters wide/high. If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, "it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it.

Linux Falters in NetBooks

The faithful told us that small, inexpensive, low powered Netbooks were to be the breakthrough product that Linux had always needed. They were perfectly tailored to suit Linux’s strengths (price, configurability, ease of localization). When the Asus Eee 700/701 were released with a custom Xandros Linux distro, it seemed that the Linux faithful were exactly [...]

Even MORE gossip from our X Factor encounter!

heatworld loved our morning coffee with the X Factor lot today – and kept our ears to the ground for all the gossip… which we can now bring you even more of! JLS couldn’t stop singing (and were crooning away to everyone who’d listen), but thankfully, they’re actually very good. Girlband and Bad Lashes, after a bit of coaxing, also wheeled out some tunes including Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, which, again, was note-perfect. We were definitely impressed. But Girlband were quick to point out they were “better than Bad Lashes�. Ooh! Handbags at dawn! Bad Lashes, however, refused to be drawn on the matter, so we’ll just have to wait and see. JLS talked about their love for (and we quote) “latina goddess� Ruth and her impromptu salsa lessons with Ortise, but while Ruth admits the boys are “gorgeous�, she’s still very much

RSAs report on global phishing trends

RSA publishes some intriguing data on global crimeware trends. It’s interesting to see so many of the crimes starting and ending in the US, along with many smaller banks and credit unions being the target. They track the activities of Russian criminals quite closely, and longtime readers of my blog know that Javelin was also the direct target of Russian criminals about 3 years ago. As with many identity crimes ours was one of significant misunderstanding, where we first believed we had a significant data intrusion and later learned that the criminals were using a variety of channels for a relatively innocuous crime and were using subterfuge to try to fool us into thinking that they were inside our servers and had stolen digital assets. We were among the fortunate with connections to have Federal law enforcement on site for the better pa

Liverpool were fortunate to escape with a 0-0 draw as the Reds were outplayed by Standard Liege in the first-leg of the Champions League qualifier in Belgium.

Pepe Reina was the Liverpool hero as the Spanish goalkeeper saved a first-half penalty to ensure that the well below par Reds go into the second leg at Anfield in a fortnight on level terms.

Who said that?

The directions I held in my hand were leading me to a residential district in Lubbock, Texas. That would not have been a big deal, were it not for the fact that I was on my way to visit a horse. I knew that people in a city residential area were likely to know as much about horses as I knew about submarines, but I could be wrong.

Vint Cerf explains privacy remarks

Google's recent flip-flops on privacy were further exacerbated by recent remarks by Google evangelist Vint Cerf. At the Technology Alliance's annual lunch meeting in May, Cerf said: “Nothing you do ever goes away, and nothing you do ever escapes notice. There isn’t any privacy, get over it.� The remarks were widely published, but according to Blogoscoped's Phil Lenssen and Cerf himself, they were taken out of context.

Children who applied to BBC show have personal data stolen

Details such as the names, addresses, mobile phone numbers and dates of birth of 250 children were taken when memory sticks were stolen from a vehicle the production company were using.

Mark Hacking

Mark Douglas Hacking, 28, and Lori Kay Soares, 27, were inseparable from the moment they met while on a trip with some friends to Lake Powell, Utah in 1994, Debbie Howlett reported in a July 29, 2004 USA Today article. For the ten years they had been together, their friends and family were impressed with their strong, intimate relationship. They were young, deeply in love and preparing to move to

Destructoid PAX 08: Damnation hands-on

We managed to get a peek at Damnation at E3 earlier this summer. We were glad that Codemasters had us over to check it out, but we were a bit bummed to see that it was a hands-off preview. Luckily we were finally able to get some hands-on time with Damnation at PAX.

Gagged Hackers Spark Outrage

Eleven of the country's top computer scientists have come out in support of the three MIT students who were silenced by a gag order before they were able to tell a hackers conference in Las Vegas how they were able to break into Boston's subway fare collection system.

Elsevier congratulates its British Medical Association Award winning medical authors and editors

Amsterdam, September 18, 2008 – Elsevier is pleased to announce that eight of its professional and scholarly books were honored at the annual BMA Medical Book Competition ceremony in London on September 9th 2008. An additional 19 Elsevier books were highly commended and five received commendation. In total, 640 books were entered to the BMA's competition with 130 prizes awarded with 23 first prizes, 63 highly commended prizes and 44 commended prizes. Author Richard Dawkins, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, presented the awards.

Aug US CGP, PGP contracts begin to settle at roll over from July

US chemical grade and polymer grade propylene contracts began to settle at a roll over from July, consumers and one producer reported Thursday. Settlements for July PGP were talked at 85 cents/lb while July CGP contracts were at 83.50 cents/lb. One producer however was reportedly still in negotiations. Several consumers talked a roll over or a reduction for the last few weeks. Some acrylonitrile suppliers even began reducing rates by 25-40% because buyers would not pay higher prices. Even if CGP rolled, ACN suppliers were confronting a $160/mt increase in contracts from July to August, which was heard at $745/mt FOB Tampa Thursday. The ammonia hike alone accounted for a $80/mt jump in ACN prices, sources said. A rollover in the polymer grade propylene contract meant PP makers would likely have to abandon their 6 cents/lb August price incr

FBI Investigates Hacked FEMA Phones

One security expert called this type of hacking low-tech and "old school," something that was popular 10 to 15 years ago. Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Yemen are among the countries that calls were made to. Most of the calls were about three minutes long, but some were as long as 10 minutes. Sprint halted all outgoing long-distance calls.

French iPhone Carrier Throttles HSDPA to 384kbps - Users only start noticing once Wired analyzes global speeds...

Earlier this week, Wired News posted the results of a survey comparing iPhone speeds across various global 3G networks. This led to several cases of users in various countries realizing they were getting, well, crappy service. Customers of France's Orange were particularly annoyed to find out that their carrier was artificially restricting downstream speeds of their HSDPA network to 384kbps (HSDPA's theoretical maximum downstream speed is 7.2Mbps). Orange says they were simply "preserving the stability of the network," but customers believe Orange was preserving the integrity of their pocketbook. Thanks to Wired's data, Orange says they'll increase downstream speeds to 1Mbps starting September 15.

Linux Foundation snipes at Solaris

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, didn't mince his words when stating his opinion of Solaris, Sun's operating system, to InfoWorld. "The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is not Unix or Solaris", he said, claiming that there were hardly any new Solaris installations, ever more Solaris users were migrating to Linux on cost grounds, OEM manufacturers were turning away from Solaris, and Sun was in financial difficulties.

Breaking Apple's Digital Music Turf

It would seem counterintuitive that the music industry would want to bypass its richest retail channel. But some of Apple's practices cut profits for the major labels. The reason: There is a growing trend in the music business of labels deliberately withholding some of their music from iTunes. There were several cases in which albums were either not made available on iTunes or were pulled.

Some Pictures Worth a Thousand Words - Caldera OpenLinux Lite

"Interestingly, the CD's Credits file mentions Ralph Yarro, among others. The copyright information states that they used Red Hat's Linux and then added some tweaks of their own to it, and they list files and applications that were not under the GPL, and none of the files in the screenshots are listed as excluded. All the rest, they say, were distributed under the GPL. The Announce file is particularly interesting, because it mentions ELF directly, and that speaks to whether SCO knew what they were distributing under the GPL. I asked Dr Stupid to look at the screenshots and tell me what it means to him, and here's what he told me:

The Google black hole.

Consider the fate of Dodgeball, an innovative mobile service that was a predecessor to Twitter, Jaiku, and the many "location-aware" apps that now clog up the iPhone. The company, which launched in 2003, enabled people to send texts indicating where they were hanging out. In response, you'd get texts telling you which of your friends (or friends of friends) were nearby. In 2005, Dodgeball's creators, Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, had just finished up grad school at NYU and were looking for investors in their service, which had become popular among techies in Manhattan. Of all the prospective offers they heard, Google's seemed to come with the fewest strings. Google paid Dodgeball a small outlay of cash and stock—the exact terms weren't disclosed—and Crowley and Rainert moved into Google's New York office.

CentOS on the systems intrusions at Red Hat

Earlier in the day today Red Hat made an announcement [1] that there had been an intrusion into some of their computer systems last week. In the same announcement they mention that some of the packages for OpenSSH on RHEL-4 ( i386 and x86_64 ) as well as RHEL-5 ( x86_64 ) were signed by the intruder. In their announcement they also clarified that they were confident that none of these, potentially compromised, packages made their way into or through RHN to client and customer machines. As a security measure a script [3] was made available along with a semi-detailed description of the issue [2]. We take security issues very seriously, and as soon as we were made aware of the situation I undertook a complete audit of the entire CentOS4/5 Build and Signing infrastructure.

Blog cafe : New agency, bad idea

A new Resolution Trust Company to hold bad assets would perform far worse than the old RTC that was used in the Savings and Loan crisis. To understand why, consider how assets are put into each outfit. In the old RTC, the assets of failed savings and loans (S&Ls) were put into RTC. If there was a question about the quality of an asset, the decision was made by government regulators as they evaluated the capital of the S&L. The S&Ls themselves didn’t have any say about what went into RTC. If the regulators thought the total assets of the S&L were not worth much, then everything went into RTC. One of the reasons that RTC didn’t cost as much as we once feared was that regulators were very conservative. They closed down some institutions that could have survived.

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