Two cautioned over wi-fi 'theft'

From the BBC:

"Two people have been cautioned for using people's wi-fi broadband internet connections without permission.

Neighbours in Redditch, Worcestershire, contacted police on Saturday after seeing a man inside a car using a laptop while parked outside a house.

He was arrested and cautioned. A woman was arrested in similar circumstances in the town earlier this month.

BBC Midlands Today correspondent Dr David Gregory said the cases are among the first of their kind.

He added that if people were using someone else's network to enter illegal porn sites, for example, it would be very difficult to trace them.

The man arrested at the weekend was cautioned for dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services with intent to avoid payment.

He attracted attention from neighbours in the early morning, as he had put up cardboard around his car windows but the light from his computer could be seen through the back window.

West Mercia Police said people with wi-fi should follow security advice given by their internet provider."

Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion

"Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, the online advertising company, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year."

PC Woes

Late in the afternoon last Wednesday (4th April) my PC started acting strangely. The monitor kept going into power-saving mode while I was using it, and when it woke up again some of the icons were missing in the System Tray and Quick Launch bar.

I decided a reboot was in order, but it took ages to go through the shutdown motions. I had to go out and when I returned the PC was off. When I hit the power button to turn it back on though, nothing happened. I tried a few things to no avail, and in the end popped open the case. The light was still on on the motherboard, but nothing flinched when I tried to power on.

In cases where I can't get the hardware to react I have to fall back on the local PC repair shop, so in it went on Thursday morning. The guy there said the motherboard was fried and the power supply was dead. He also reminded me that when you replace the motherboard you have to reinstall the operating system. I mentioned to him that one of the fans was making a noise too, and could he look into it. Turns out it was the one the graphics card. I had a spare one from a friend so fitted that myself when I got the box back later that day.

I knew my hard drive was pretty full and I didn't have current backups of the latest files (naughty me), so I took the plunge. I bought a new 250GB hard drive and a copy of Vista!

Back home, I fitted the new graphics card (which didn't sit properly and had to be bent to connect with the motherboard, which took me ages to figure out), and set about installing Vista. It was almost immediately apparent that things weren't good. I couldn't nail it down to one single thing of course, because I'd committed the ultimate tech crime of changing more than one thing at once. :) I did notice they'd left the foam in under the motherboard, which is apparently a bad thing, and the power light on the front wasn't connected. It was Easter weekend too so I couldn't take the PC back to the shop until Tuesday, so I hobbled on through the long weekend putting up with random crashes every few hours.

So I head back to the shop on Tuesday morning only to find the place has shut down! There was a big sign on the door saying, "DON'T PANIC!", with an explanation that they'd moved, and gave the new address and phone number. Off I went to the new shop, explained what was happening, left the PC there for the day, and returned that evening to be told they couldn't find any problems and had just connected the power light.

Now I'm back online and the PC is running somewhat normally (about 24 hours without a full system crash, just applications hanging/disappearing). I'm still sorting out files and reinstalling applications but on the whole, I'm back up and running. I'll blog about the pains of installing and running Vista soon so look out for that.

Jaiku

Twitter is so March 2007...

Handy Password Checker

Microsoft has a handy password checker available where you can test the strength of your passwords. If you have trouble creating passwords, have a look at their advice on how to create strong passwords.

Make sure to change your passwords regularly, and don't use the same username/password combination in more than one place.

If you struggle remembering your passwords I recommend PasswordSafe - it's free, open source software and employs strong encryption (and it was created by security guru Bruce Schneier).

Thoughts on Twitter

I mentioned Twitter before and didn't really give a specific preference for or against it, but now I've played with it for a couple of weeks I'm in agreement with Liz Lawley, who has shared her thoughts on twitter. Have a read, sign up for Twitter, add me as a friend and let me know what you think of it (and, of course, let me know what you're doing!).

Ficlets

Are you a writer of fiction? Do you struggle writing complete novels? Would you like to work collaboratively with other writers?

Ficlets: "A ficlet is a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world.

Once you've written and shared your ficlet, any other user can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel. In this manner, you may know where the story begins, but you'll never guess where (or even if!) it ends."