Warning: keystroke logging is a threat -- and Franco is still dead

Monday's edition of The New York Times published a Tom Zeller piece on the proliferation of keystroke logging spyware, especially originating in Brazil. While no doubt a useful warning to Times readers unaware of the risks, the article was quirky:

-- Keystroke logging is not new. In fact, The Times reported on the issue twice in October 2004 alone, and as far back as 2001.

-- The article only discusses key logging software. It fails to mention key logging hardware, which, although introduced only via a physical attack vector, is even more pernicious, because no defensive software measures can detect it.

-- The Times' search engine can't find the article under the word "keystroke" -- it turns out the author uses the neologism "keylogging" which you'd guess does not appear in the style guide.

-- The Times' search engine does offer plenty of links for purchasing key logging software. No doubt the advertising engine is powered by Google -- and a lot more attention goes into picking the best keywords for ads than The Times will ever spend on indexing its own news stories.

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NBC loses its mind with Brokaw covering WW II in Olympics closing

NBC claimed that at 7 pm it would cover the closing of the Torino Olympics. They just spent an hour on the gallantry of black US soldiers in WW II. Wrong story at the wrong time. They have covered these games as a documentary instead of live sports events, so why not an hour long piece on war instead of celebrating peaceful competition?

Timely T-Shirt

Imagine a car navigation system with Google Earth imagery

Volkswagen is imagining just that, and is working with Google on prototypes.



Hmmm... If they got really sophisticated, they could use 3D information to predict where the car is as it drives through an urban canyon blocking views of the satellites.

See the Engadget article.

Wigblog vanishes

Very strange. If you try to view Wigblog right now the entire blog is inaccessible:



You don't have permission to access / on this server.

The management interface shows all my old posts, but if I republish, I get other errors, and the blog is still down. My guess is they had a disk disaster or a software failure. Makes you wonder if you should back your blog up regularly. I saw signs that Pyra Labs, who created Blogger, were pretty flaky in their technology. You'd like to assume that belonging to Google implies unbreakable tech.

Super Bowl Update:

Wigblog is back. Whatever burped must've gotten fixed.