In celebration of the Veterans’ Day this year on November 11, we are offering a special for our beloved prospects. Enjoy account activation without paying the $15 one-time activation fee. Offer good for phone activations only and will last till November 12, 2am Pacific Time.
This offer does not apply for online activations. Call us now!
As expected, security flaws cropping up with Google Chrome leads us to recommend the latest version of Firefox or Internet Explorer instead when conducting online transactions. As a result, Chrome is not yet suited to be used when your credit or debit card number is at stake, especially when making payments with PayPal.
Below is the details of the address spoofing flaw of Chrome, courtesy of The Register:
Google’s Chrome browser has been marred by yet another vulnerability, this one allowing attackers to impersonate websites of groups like the Better Business Bureau, PayPal or, well, Google.
Researcher Liu Die Yu of the TopsecTianRongXin research lab in Beijing says the spoofing vulnerability is the result of faulty code inserted by programmers from the Mountain View, California search behemoth.
"I don’t see Apple Safari vulnerable in the same way," he writes in an email to The Register. "They share the same engine(webkit)."
As his proof of concept demonstrates, it is in fact possible to send Chrome users to a page under his control while causing the browser’s address bar to display the domain name bbb.org.
A Google representative says Chrome’s spoofing vulnerability is a "known issue" that will be fixed in an update that will be pushed to end users soon. Those too impatient to wait can download version 0.3.154.3 of Chrome on Google’s Dev Channel
Scams are all over us so take extra caution when you receive a text message from an unknown sender (that is, their cellnumber is not on your phonebook) asking you for a share-a-load, pasaload or whatever favor in kind or in cash. Like the Love Bug virus that uses social engineering, these scammers are clever in that they may address you with titles of endearment like ‘hon’ (short for honey). If you’re not careful, you may fall from their trap.
That being said, scams are everywhere, be it in email, blogs, websites, organizations, even in Wall Street which is taking the global economy on its feet. Not to mention identity theft, phishing and the like…
If there’s an introductory book on complexity theory, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else by Albert-László Barabási would be it. Its layman approach to unlocking the complexity behind the theory is illustrated with familiar examples like
the topology of web pages (where the nodes are individual web pages and the links are hyper-links), the collaborative network of Hollywood actors (where the nodes actors and the links are co-stars in the same movie), the power grid of the western United States (where the nodes are generators, transformers, and substations and the links are power transmission lines), and the peer-reviewed scientific literature (where the nodes are publications and the links are citations).(Source: Wolfram MathWorld)
The book revolves around the idea of scale-free network. Social networks, the Internet, even the economy may be seen from a different perspective using this concept. The author argued that if you strip complexity to its parts, you would come up with its skeleton which is networks. The nodes and links that make up the network comprise the structure of complexity.
The author adds:
The goal before us is to understand complexity. To achieve that, we must move beyond structure and topology and start focusing on the dynamics that take place along the links. Networks are only the skeleton of complexity, the highways for the various processes that make our world hum.
Btw, this is not to say that this is THE only way to understand complexity. It’s only a part in our toolset. Now, we have the topology map at our disposal. The tricky part is mapping the interaction of its parts.
Source: Wired Blog
Finally U.S. mobile users seem to see the value in typing out a few quick words on their phone, instead of leaving long voicemails.
The typical U.S. mobile subscriber now sends and receives more SMS text messages than they do mobile telephone calls, says Nielsen Mobile——something the rest of the world has long been at.
As of the second quarter of 2008, a typical U.S. mobile subscriber sends or receives 357 text messages a month, compared to placing or receiving 204 phone calls, says Nielsen.
While the number of calls has remained relatively steady, the number of text messages is up 450% from two years ago.
Second quarter 2008 was also the second consecutive quarter in which the average number of text messages sent was significantly higher than the average number of phone calls placed, says Nielsen Mobile. In the first quarter of the year, an average user made 207 calls compared with sending 288 text messages.
Not surprisingly, teenagers seem to be the biggest users of the service. The typical U.S. teen mobile user now sends or receives 1,742 text messages a month, compared with making or receiving 231 mobile phone calls, says Nielsen.