It's a toss up on whether to post this here or on my political blog. I hate the Obama Administration and Congress (both sides of the aisle) - and people were worried about NSA wiretaps? Right.
Here is the summary: If you are dumb enough to agree to cars.gov, then you agree to let them do anything they want.
This application provides access to the [Department of Transportation] DoT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the U.S. Government. Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed... to authorized CARS, DoT, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.
While Glenn's video is a little bit off the mark, why in the world would the Fed's even release a terms of service that invasive? It points to the overarching need of the Feds to think they can encroach into everything we do. Wrong.
I've been preaching about this for some time now - one of the worst things about sites such as MySpace is when users are prompted to download and install something to watch a video. It happens far too often-and not always through MySpace.
Today I had a friend and customer bring a laptop with this exact symptom. Whether you use MySpace or not, you need to be careful about clicking. Remember that your anti-virus does not stop 99% of these types of malware.
ATT did a stupid partnership deal with Yahoo a couple of years ago to provide email services through Yahoo, and they have done it without proper warning to customers. That means that some of you using services such as Gmail to pop3 your Bellsouth email in - suddenly find it not working. I've also had customers who try to login to webmail.bellsouth.net and get redirected to the Yahoo portal - and then can't login.
First, QUIT using your Bellsouth / ATT email. Second, sign up for Gmail. Pretty simple - and you won't lose any email.
If you are already "popping in" your Bellsouth to Gmail (or another email service), you will probably need to modify the settings for gmail to pull in your Bellsouth email. Here are the steps:
In Gmail - click "Settings"
Click "Accounts" tab
Find the Bellsouth account in "Get Mail from Other Accounts" - click "Edit Info"
You may need to check "Always Use a Secure Connection (SSL) when retrieving mail".
An alternate method is to login to your Bellsouth email and have it forward to your Gmail. Yahoo only allows forwarding and POP3 with premium accounts, so I'm guessing the partnership allows both.
As usual, something has been designed without a good forethought on security ramifications. Recovering your computer from thieves sounds great in marketing materials - but it comes with a price.
If you have purchased a computer with the ability to contact Lojac, then you are at risk. No you don't have to subscribe to CompuTrace LoJac - you just have to have a computer with the code embedded in the BIOS.
This vulnerability is particularly nasty because it leads to a "persistent and complete control of a compromised system." That's right - once compromised, you effectively can't get rid of it.
Well I've been wanting to do this for a while so I finally sat down, googled around, looked at code, and figured out an easy way to embed iPhone video in html.
First we need to detect the iPhone's userAgent string and redirect to another page where we will embed the video.This script should go in the area"" area of your code. You can redirect to any page.
Next we need to embed the video along with a splash graphic when a user lands on the redirected page.
In the script you can see that I forced my image size to be 850 pixels wide. That allows the image to be large enough on the iPhone display to be seen well. Here is what the user sees on the iPhone display on the embedded video page.
There are also ways to do this via javascript, but I've found the embed method to be simple and straightforward.
