Archive for the 'Bad Tech' Category

Battery Centre needs the Battery University

Published on 20090617 in Bad Tech, Stuff and Tech. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

About two and a half years ago Battery Centre sold me me a silver calcium battery for my car. According to them silver calcium batteries are the best thing in lead acid battery technology since Gaston Planté made the first one in 1859.

They are probably right and most new cars will be fitted with one and the battery should last 3 to 5 years. If you have an older car things are not that simple. If your older car was fitted with a “hybrid” or plain lead acid battery originally, you will find that a silver calcium battery will probably not give you the life expected from it.

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Curse Of Silence

Published on 20090311 in Bad Tech and Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

While browsing through hack a day yesterday I found this Nokia smartphone vulnerability.

If you go to the link you will notice that it was the Chaos Computer Club that published the vulnerability. I have written about them before and think they do great work to raise awareness about the risks in computers and other electronics. Some may think that they are irresponsible, but are the large companies that release equipment with these kinds of vulnerabilities not way more irresponsible?
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Running those legacy apps

Published on 20080723 in Bad Tech. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Yesterday Andrew McGill posted the message below on the Gauteng Linux User Group mailing list. Because he is not blogging I’m doing it for him. What he is describing is one of the biggest frustrations people have with so called new and improved software.  more....

How to fight Zombies

Published on 20080409 in Bad Tech and Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Anyone that runs a mail server very quickly learns how to fight spam if he wants to do his job properly. It is also one of the favourite pastimes of the clueless to think up stupid ways to fight spam. Today I saw a brilliant answer to one of these ideas on the postfix mail list. more....

Be careful where you put your grubby little paws

Published on 20080401 in Bad Tech and Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

While we are talking about Jacob Zuma and company down here in SA, the Germans are debating the use of biometric data for identification. One of my favourite groups the Chaos Computer Club of Berlin has pretty much proven that using biometric data like fingerprints, retina scans or facial features are not such a good idea by lifting their minister of interior Wolfgang Schäuble’s fingerprints and then showing how easy it is to fool these sytems. more....

All Software sucks!

Published on 20080330 in Bad Tech and Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Wordpress, the software I use for this blog is great and has a wonderful plugin system that allows people to add functionality that is not originally included in wordpress. Unfortunately many of the available plugins are not so wonderful and often do not work as expected (advertised). more....