Brendan was kind enough to bring his creation to the station and spend some time with us before the show to explain the project.

Here are some pictures of The Recompute:

And here is a video shot by Dwight Silverman using QIK

Bendan joined us on the air for about 30 minutes beginning at about 8:30 pm CST and it was a GREAT conversation.

During the KPFT pledge drives, Technology Bytes is responsible for raising a certain amount of money toward the overall station goal. This usually equates to about $1,500 during each show we broadcast during the drive.

We have always said that once we make our goal for any given episode we’ll stop begging for money and just do a regular broadcast.

If you are a regular listener of Technology Bytes you may recall that during the last KPFT pledge drive, we raised our $1500 goal in the first 45 minutes. This was unprecedented, and obviously very exciting for everyone involved. It also meant that we had a one hour and fifteen minute oasis of non-fundraising programming in the middle of the KPFT pledge drive.

Fast forward to the current pledge drive. Last week we met our $1,500 goal, but it took us up to the final minutes of the show to do it. This is pretty common. In looking ahead to the second fundraising episode we pretty much expected the same thing. That is, until we got the following e-mail:

I would like to make a significant donation to your show. I notice that
sometimes large on-air donations are followed by fallow periods. I wonder
how best to maximize my contribution. I’m thinking that a matching
contribution until the show’s record completion time (45 mins?) might work
well. So I would contribute $750 in the record breaking scenario, and less
otherwise. What do you think?

E-mail were exchanged to validate the claim and we’re pretty confident that this is a legitimate offer.

So basically, this listener will match up to $750 in pledges that come in under the 44 minute mark to help us meet our $1,500 goal AND break the record.

That means if we raise $750 in under 44 minutes we’re done for this fundraiser. And it doesn’t have to go down to the wire, either. If we raise $750 in the first 10 minutes, we’re done.

OOOH! Here’s a thought. Let’s take this one step further!!! If you call 713-526-5738 RIGHT NOW and make your pledge and specifically state that it is for Technology Bytes, we might make our goal before the show even begins. But you have to make sure the volunteer that answers the phone knows you are pledging for Technology Bytes and not for the current show so the amount will be credited to our show.

Another option, make an online donation!

Make your pledge NOW and donate whatever you can. We can do this and we can do this quick.

We’ve got one lone event on the radar this weekend… This Saturday, February 20th, Bob, “Dr. Mac” Levitus, will be giving his State of the Mac Address to the attendees of the February Houston Area Apple Users Group. Special Interest Group meetings kick off at nine am, Dr. Mac’s address happens around eleven, and things are wrapped by two. Hit www.haaug.org to get SIG details and driving directions to the Bellaire Civic Center, located at 7008 South Rice Avenue in Bellaire, Texas.

I’m curious if Dr. Mac actually gives his talks wearing blue scrubs over what I can only assume is a black Genius t-shirt and a stetho-mouse: half-mouse, half-stethoscope. I assume that he uses the device to deduce whether you are, at heart, a Mac or a PC. If the pic on haaug.org *was* PhotoShopped, I don’t want to know. I’d prefer to live in a world where the stetho-mouse exists, even if that world is completely out of touch with reality. Like the one Google just moved to.

In all fairness, I think that everyone enjoys the occasional break from reality. It’s why people still watch Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. It’s probably why Lucas made episodes one through three. It’s also probably why a lot of you partake in the immersive and often complex worlds created by Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Things like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, EVE Online and arguably Second Life. The problem with a few of these pass times is that the in-game rewards are often based on time spent playing the game. This usually takes the form of hunting around for money or doing various repetitive things to gain those precious experience points. Of course, real life money can always be converted into virtual riches, even if you have to go through some fairly shady sources to do so.

Tonight’s big announcement is that Technology Bytes has its own MMO-RPG that lets you compete with other players to earn real-world
rewards. The game is so completely immersive that, for many, it is indistinguishable from the real world. To play, you simply surf
to www.geekradio.com. That’s it.

While you may not realize it, you are now playing Technology Bytes Farm Town. To start the game, you simply go around the house looking for loose copper and silver coins. That’s right, your first job is a copper farmer. As a level one noob, you’ll want to start by farming your immediate area. Your own pockets, under the cushion your sitting on, and so forth. Once you have a feel for the game play, you can widen your search to other rooms and immediately outside your home. Be careful when farming in the street, though, as Tech Bytes Farm Town doesn’t let you respawn. Once you’re out, you’re out. Which is probably why we should get a Tech Bytes Farm Town Last Will and Testament up on the site. (I’ll get with the developers…)

When you’re ready to begin questing, you may search friend’s houses, the coin return slots of pay phones (if you can still find them) and vending machines located in public areas. When you’ve amassed a total of $40.00 in change, head back to where you launched the game, and click on the Donate button on the left of the game UI. Once you have submitted your Tech Bytes Farm Town Copper, you will be rewarded with the title of “Member” in the Guild of Listener Supported Radio.

Now, I’m not a fan of running in-game cheats or hacks, but there is a way you can control more than one virtual player or avatar at a time. In games like World of Warcraft, this is known as multi-boxing. To do so in Tech Bytes Farm Town, simply open a new browser window, get it side-by-side with the existing geekradio.com window, and surf to www.technologybytes.com. Now you’re multi-boxing; now you’re elite.

Of course, you can always just skip all the farming & questing and just donate real life money without the need to go through any shady sources to do so. And if you choose to pledge during a guild meeting night, like right now, you can submit your gold through our in-game voice chat system. It’s a little like Ventrillo and it’s called the telephone. Just pick it up and dial 713.526.4000 to get online with one of our game operators now.

Well, that over half of that for our own pledge farming quest, and that’s it for BarretTime.

When Waco’s K X X V’s regular TV sportscaster became ill, college freshman Brian Collins agreed to step in. All you have to do is read the lines, right? Not too tough… Unless you happen to have been working with an inexperienced teleprompter operator who accidentally fast-forwarded through each of the scripts, leaving Collins with only a few occasional words to use. The video can be found on YouTube, and is fairly painful to watch. When you *do* get to that magical meme, Boom Goes the Dynamite, you will have suffered sufficiently to knowingly command the phrase yourself. Don’t cheat. Feel the pain. It’s the kind of awkward pain that probably made The Office such a hit…

Now that the president has delivered a teleprompter-error-free State of the Union Address and Jobs, who also achieved elocutionary excellence, has dropped the iPad on the nation, it’s time for our own local State of the Mac address to be given by Bob “Dr. Mac” Levitus at the general meeting of the Houston Area Apple Users Group next Saturday, February 20th. That gives you a full week & a half to make peace with whatever feelings you may have about the Apple iPad before Dr. Mac puts his finger in the wound once again.

I’m not letting my own personal feelings show, am I?

A number of Special Interest Group meetings take place between nine and two, with the main presentation kicking off at eleven. 7008 South Rice Avenue at the Bellaire Civic Center is where you want to be to hear what Dr. Mac has to say about everything Apple. Hit www.haaug.org for details and directions to February’s general meeting and to catch up on the group’s activities.

And if you find yourself on the PC side of the fence… Amend that. If you find yourself on the *North Side* of the PC fence, then you may want to check out the 1960 PC Users Group. That’s Farm to Market 1960, not a group of people still stuck on the Intel 4004 processor. They’re a support group of volunteers from the Spring, Tomball and Northwest Houston areas of Texas with an interest in personal computers and their usage.

And as luck would have it, their Investors Special Interest Group is meeting tomorrow night, Thursday February 11th, from seven to nine PM. This month’s special topics include Preferred Dividend Stocks and Exchange Traded Funds. There will be an open discussion during the meeting, at which point you could pose questions about modifying your investment strategy to siphon off a few dollars every month for KPFT.

I’m guessing that they would probably tell you that you’d be hard pressed to find a return similar to the one you would realize by investing in KPFT at any one of our various membership levels. Now, I haven’t looked at a prospectus in ages, but I’m pretty sure none of the Fortune 500s are offering coffee cups and t-shirts along with welcome letters. You’ll also get better voting rights with KPFT. One share out of 906 million won’t sway any elections at Apple, but a single membership in KPFT has the same voting weight as our very own Jay Lee’s membership.

Once you’ve devised your new investment strategy, you may wish to display it graphically. A personal investment pie chart, with a big slice for KPFT may be the way to go, but you’ll want to spruce it up a bit with some text overlays. If that’s the case, then next Thursday’s Graphics SIG may be for you. In addition to following up on some questions as to ‘how best to overlay text onto a photo’, the group will be discussing some non-photographic uses of graphics editors, as well as taking a quick look at the photo organizing program, Picassa.

Both of these meetings take place at the Cypress Creek Christian Community Center, located at 6823 Cypresswood Drive in Spring, Texas. The group’s website is www.1960pcug.org, where you can find a full calendar of the group’s monthly SIG meetings.

And finally, if you’re not on either side of the PC vs Mac fence, but are instead frustrated by the lack of a third option, then the Houston Linux Users Group, aka the HAL-PC Linux SIG, is where you will find like-minded individuals and a quality presentation over something Linuxy. The group meets this Saturday from two to four in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located ever so close to MicroCenter at 610 and San Felipe. Hit www.hal-pc.org then surf to their SIG Calendar for further details and directions.

That’s it for forcasting your financial future and that’s that for BarretTime.

Malwarebytes didn’t detect it. Spybot didn’t detect it. Combofix didn’t detect it. I couldn’t even see it as a BHO using HiJackThis. It was simply invisible to me, but each and every Google search popped up a window that clearly showed my Web browsing traffic being redirected.

I did a little research and was able to figure out I had come across a nasty TDL3 rootkit.

From Rootbiez

TDL or TDSS family is a famous trojan variant for its effectiveness and active technical development. It contains two compoments: a kernel-mode rootkit and some user-mode DLLs which performs the trojan operation (downloaders, blocking Avs, etc,.). Since the rootkit acts as an “injector” and protector for the ring3 bot binaries, almost technical evolutions of this threat family focus on rootkit technology so as to evade AV scanners. As in its name, TDL3 is 3rd generation of TDL rootkit, still takes its aims at convering stealthy existences of malicious codes. Beside known features, this threats is exposed with a couple of impressive tricks which help it bypassing personal firewall and staying totally undetected by all AVs and ARKs at the moment.

Thanks to Daejin Media I got tipped to a program called Hitman Pro 3 – Second Opinion Malware Scanner.

Hitman Pro 3 scanned the infected system, detected about 5 things and removed them and had me reboot at which point it scanned again and found two more. After the second re-boot the system was free of the hijack.

It doesn’t install anything on your computer, either. Just a single executable that scans your computer and cleans up the mess. Hitman Pro is FAST, too. I had everything cleaned up in about 10 minutes.

Part of the magic of this program is how it uses a scan cloud to determine if suspicious files are, in fact, dangerous or not.

From the Hitman Pro Web site:

For the files that are classified as suspicious, the Hitman Pro client sends a request to the Scan Cloud for confirmation if these files are indeed malicious. The Scan Cloud is a cluster of multiple computers, residing on the Internet. The Scan Cloud will respond to this request with the answer:

* Safe
* Malicious
* Unknown

When the file is unknown, the Hitman Pro client uploads the file to the Scan Cloud where the file is scanned using the anti virus programs of 5 different vendors. Each of these anti virus programs analyzes the file and responds with “safe” or “malicious”. Click here for more details about the Scan Cloud.

Hitman Pro is not free. They do offer a 30 day free trial, though. After that the price is subscription based.

Not since discovering Spybot Search & Destroy have I been THIS enthused about an anti-spyware tool.

No one’s familiar with the prehistoric saying, “This is how you taunt a t-rex” because the people who picked up and practiced that catch-phrase didn’t get the chance to use it frequently enough for it to catch on in popular culture before being torn apart by a T-Rex in a tiff.

But when I mention something like the “5 Second Rule”, everyone knows what I’m talking about because that’s advice that has kept its sayers relatively safe for hundreds if not thousands of years. While not every culture expresses this concept in the same manner, they all seem to have a general equivalent. For example, the Russian translation goes “Promptly picked up is not considered fallen.” We now know that five seconds is more than enough time for bacteria to get a foot hold in our freshly fallen food, but at its inception, the other competing phrase was, “Just flick off the flies.”

“Don’t take candy from strangers” has much more notoriety than “Strangers have the best candy ever” for similar reasons.

Another saying that’s been around for ages is, “Don’t touch that, you don’t know where it’s been.” Mothers seem to drop that one a lot. As geeks, we have a natural predilection for anything electronic, regardless of its bacterial history or proximity to raptors. An iPod found in the gutter is still an iPod… Just like an iPod given to me by a stranger in a windowless van is still an iPod. I may be using it to listen to podcasts from therapists for the first few months I have it, but it’s still an iPod. (Ironically, it was the iPod Touch…)

I think the point here is that if someone is tempting you with something like comic books or graphic novels, you need to stay out of the van.

If you are looking for comics or graphic novels, or if you have some that you’d like to put back into the world without the aid of a windowless van, the web site www.wheresthatbeen.com has been launched to help you safely get your hands on new reading material without someone getting their hands on you.

Thanks to the efforts of our own LoopyLow in IRC, you can now accept comics from strangers *and* have a detailed retort prepared for your mother the next time she drops the phrase “You don’t know where that’s been” or otherwise accuses you of accepting goodies from strangers. You can get started this Friday by possibly accepting some goods from the good strangers of the February Geek Gathering, where the launch party will take place. Just like the IRC channel is the show within the show, this will be the party within the party.

wheresthatbeen.com is up now, and if you’re into comics or graphic novels, you’re invited to participate. Actually, I think that the site could be used for all sorts of things from sci-fi books to open source hardware. Really, whatever physical thing that you’d like to put out into the world to share with others could get a new lease on life via this site.

So, the Party that encompasses the Where’s That Been Launch Party, the Arduino Party, the Photography Party, and even last month’s knitting party, is indeed happening this Friday, February fifth, at the Coffee Groundz in Midtown Houston. 2503 Bagby at McGowan is where you want to be.

Things get started around seven, or shortly thereafter, depending on how people do on McGowan. The WiFi and general geekery are free, but the coffee, food, spirits and beer will cost you. No promises as to whether the knitters will show up again, but we will have the usual array of open hardware to play with. Well, half the amount. KD5 has headed to Florida to see the Shuttle launch, so the Arduino army will be at half strength until the March Gathering.

Well, That’s it for Where’s That Been (and where we will be) and that’s that for BarretTime!

Users could face fines of up to £500k if they cause a data security breach!

London, 20th January 2010 – A survey released today reveals that in the last year, 4,500 memory sticks have been forgotten in people’s pockets as they take their clothes to be washed at the local dry cleaners. From 6th April onwards if data is lost and it causes a major security breach, this could now cost a company up to £500k with new powers given to the Information Commissioner’s office (ICO) to fine companies who have not sufficiently protected customers details under the Data Protection Act[1].

However, when compared with the same study twelve months ago, the number of these devices languishing forgotten in people’s pockets has halved, and yet it’s still a staggering number of possible data breaches and a potential money spinner for the ICO.

However, the study sponsor – data security experts CREDANT Technologies, has a theory that this decline is likely to be a change in users’ habits as opposed to a significant breakthrough in people’s vigilance. In fact, its experience on the frontline of this battle is that users are now downloading information onto smartphones and netbooks, which have boomed in popularity in the last year, so although on the surface the decline looks promising in reality the situation has just been spread across a multitude of other devices.

Sean Glynn – vice president and chief marketing officer at Credant Technologies said “Although this study shows a positive drop in the number of lost memory sticks we would urge users to take more care than ever not to download unprotected customer details and other sensitive information that if lost could lead to a security breach, especially now there are harsh fines afoot. ”

The survey was carried out in the UK to gauge the frequency and ease with which mobile devices, such as memory sticks, are lost or forgotten in strange places such as dry cleaners and should warn people across the globe to demonstrate prudence when downloading information to carry around with them as it does frequently get lost. In previous studies conducted by Credant Technologies amongst taxi drivers in London and New York over 12,500 handheld devices such as laptops, iPods and memory sticks are forgotten at the back of taxis every 6 months!

Concluding Sean Glynn said “This survey is just one illustration of the stark truth that device losses are happening everywhere, everyday, worldwide. Organisations want to leverage the business benefits of mobile computing and provide their employees the flexibility to work wherever and whenever they want to. However, this must be balanced with the requirement of protecting the organisations data, especially to avoid penalties – such as that promised by the ICO, brand damage or even embarrassing press headlines. If sensitive or valuable data is being carried then people should protect it with encryption to prevent unauthorised access at any point – as it could easily end up in the wrong hands.”

Not just USB sticks left at the dry cleaners……but wedding rings, lipstick and ……….
When asked to recall what the strangest objects were that they’d found in customers pockets most had found pens, lipstick, stockings and a wedding ring, however one unfortunate dry cleaner had found a pair of false teeth!