TheWayoftheWeb

Just as Youtube became pornotube, so someone has managed to pervert the course of VOIP internet phonecalls.
Rather than using the internet as a source for free calls, you can now make calls which bill your friends and family, rather than yourself. Assuming you don’t get beaten to death after your first attempt.
As reported on Slashdot http://slashdot.org/articles/06/10/29/1938226.shtml, JahJah allows you to enter your number, and your target number, and once they hear a recorded message at the start of your call, they’ll end up paying. It also works for mobiles, for extra annoyance…

Should anyone wish to go old school, the alternative is to phone the operator and request a ‘reverse charge’ call, which gives the other person to option of telling you to get *****’d.

Sony has succeeded in hounding down one of the three biggest sources for foreign video games and memorabilia… And the news has even made the BBC!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6083856.stm

Personally I think this is the end of my desire for a Sony PSP or PS3. Nintendo and Sega both tried this tactic in the past, but I wasn’t in a position to understand what was going on….plus there was no way to resist Streetfighter. Sony have obviously got many fingers in many pies, but it’s the least i can try and do, now that Sony have contributed to the demise of a firm that had a reasonable customer service reputation, and could get me a game sent from Hong Kong, including Fed Ex delivery, for less than it woud cost new in the UK….

With the backlash last year over the root kit DRM on Sony CD’s, and their battery problems…could this be Sony imploding into it’s own backside?

Incidentally, my favourite by is the quote from Lik Sang revealing how many Sony Europe employees were buying their own PSP machines from Lik Sang. And the fact Sony claims it was for investigatroy purposes….move over Watchdog, Sony is here to save us…

I don’t know if anyone has yet been diagnosed with internet schizophrenia, but it can’t be long in coming….

I’ve long been interested in blogging, and scoail networking. I enjoy amusing videos as much as the next person. And I like to have an email account for personal use, and one for any selling on ebay. I also like to pay bills online, and I’ve shopped at amazon…

Assuming I don’t want someone to steal all my identities at once, that means a username and secure password for each site…And obviously I can’t store them on my PC, as that would leave me vulnerable as well…

I know of people with various systems for creating and remembering passwords, involving a secure password with an alhpanumeric code taken from whichever site to which it applies….but they’re the kind of people who have a media PC set-up and run their own servers. Linux, probably…

So what solutions are there? I have, in addition to my work email, 4 email accounts. I have 4 blogs, under two log ins. Most have Google Adsense etc running. Then I have a Flickr account, Youtube account, Amazon account, Ebay account and a LinkedIn. I belong to at least 7 or 8 forums for personal use. So we’re already up to 19 different usernames and passwords, if I don’t slip into using the same one for anything.

Oh, and while I’m here….does anyone actually use Del.icio.us? I’ve got an account (so that’s 20!), but I haven’t discovered what it’s useful for… I have an ever expanding bookmarks folder in my browser, and not enough hours to browse sites i already know about!

I’m a pretty avid gamer. And since the dawn of gaming, I;ve always looked with interest at the likes of the Cyber Athletes League, and imagined a world in which I could be paid to play games all day. I haven’t got the cash to race cars in real life, but online I’m fairly good at it, and if competitive gaming had taken off when I was in my peak, I’d have put myself up against most of the top ranked drivers on PGR3 and Forza Motorsports with a fair amount of confidence…

But there is one underlying problem. To get to the olympics, you would start by joining your local athletics club and progressing through regional heats. To get to gaming finals, generally the heats stage is online. Which means for anyone on slow broadband, you’re running with one shoelace undone.
You could take the fastest racers on time trial scoreboards, or fastest game completion times etc, but you then run into the problem that some gamers invariably exploit ways to cheat. So the scoreboard becomes meaningless, unless you want to know who can exploit standby cheating to the greatest extent….

And in a day and age when companies can’t realise a game without game-save ruining bugs (MotoGP 06), and Electronic Arts is actively selling access to cheat codes for the latest Tiger Woods game, I can’t see any way to persuade every gamer worldwide to adhere to the rules, or to persuade companies that equality should be taken into acount when they’re drawing up revenue and budgets…

That leaves the only online gamers in with a chance are those with cash, suprisingly supportive parents, and lots of time in their tenage years to exploit all the loopholes and hone their skills.

So even when it comes to armchair sports, it’s a game for the young… And one with moe to watch than merely steroid abuse.