Technostuff

Question: What do we and former Japan Prime Minister Koizumi have in common?

 

 

Answer: Except for the obvious observation that we held the same the "Mental Commitment Robot" named "Paro," none.

 

Of course, there are dozens of these babies, and it's quite unlikely that we held exactly the same Paro unit as PM Koizumi did, but can you tell the difference?

Who or what is Paro, actually?

Year 1996.
I buy my books from a catalog. I place my orders through the mail. Then wait for a month for my orders to arrive. Afterwards I send a postal money order through the post office to pay for the books.

Year 2007.
I click and pay. The books get delivered the day after.

Ahh, the wonders of today's shopping. It's one of the reasons why I love the internet. It has made shopping more convenient than one can imagine. I've ordered everything from books to furniture to clothes via online shopping.

Who knows how everything would change ten years hence?

This is a popular trick to lure users to a malicious site. Personally, I seldom make typos when entering words into my favorite search engines; but as they say, there's always a first time for everything! Better check your inputs before hitting that search button!

 

More details can be found in this article from Websense:

 

"This lure relies upon the eventuality that a user will make a typo while entering a term into a search engine. There are an endless number of possible typographical errors for any given term, but with a few algorithms and statistics you can significantly narrow down the number of possibilities. Attackers have been doing this for years and have become very good at predicting the most common typos for each keyword.

(snip)

Someone out there is always trying to get you to visit their website and sometimes the simplest tricks work wonders. The next time you are making a search on the Internet, take an extra second to make sure you got the results you expected before you start following links. One letter can mean the difference between arriving at your online banking site or ending up with a desktop of Spyware. "

 

Detail and screenshots can be found here.

I've recently upgraded my browser to IE7 - and admittedly, it's made my browsing experience much more manageable and less worrying (for now). Actually, I wasn't really interested in upgrading until the other day, when one of the websites I opened suddenly spewed popup messages about a certain DriveCleaner software attempting to scan my computer. Said software offered to scan my computer and remove all traces of adult porn sites that I've visited. What porn sites? Hello? Good thing that my Symantec antivirus automatically detected it as a security risk and promptly quarantined the malicious software.

Back to IE7. Here are some of the reasons why users would benefit by upgrading their IE version to 7: first off, streamlined interface. Gone are the menu bars including File, Edit, etc. Next is tabbed browsing - you're gonna love tabbed browsing. With it, you can open multiple websites in a single window. Plus, it allows you to see thumbnail images of all open tabs in a single view! It is also possible to organize multiple tabs into a single tab group and save it as a favorite. Next, there is a new search box which you can customize - you can set a particular search engine (like Yahoo! or Google) to use when doing a search. It has made life much easier for me. I've been using Yahoo! toolbar for quite some time now, but since I am also using Google to do web searches, I had been contemplating on installing a Google toolbar as well. Well, now that I've installed IE7, I don't need either toolbar anymore.

Other features which I haven't tried yet, but are also incorporated into the current IE7 version: RSS feeds, automatically shrinking of text so all webpage content fits on your final printed page. And for those who are concerned about protection against malicious software, fraudulent websites and online phishing scams, IE7 has incorporated various tools against these. In IE7's toolbar, you can set the popup blockers and phishing filters ON in order to protect yourself from these evils. In the Tools menu, you can see enable or disable add-ons for the browser. Imagine our surprise when in our home PC we found out that there is an eXact Advertising add-on in our IE browser, that has been making logs of all our search keywords without our knowledge! As to how we got that malicious software hacking into our browser, we could only guess. It has now been disabled, thanks to IE7.

Well there you have it. Need I say more?