Today, however, there are multiple sizes and frame styles to choose from for under $200. The resolutions are good enough that some can even be used as a monitor for your computer. If I can find one for under $100 that has good resolution and picture quality, I might just pick one of these up.

I have no official source to quote because this was a conversation overheard from a local IMAX theater manager.

The best part is I found this website by doing a help search inside Microsoft Powerpoint for “compress” (I was wanting to compress a large Power Point presentation). The first result is a link to a MS Office web page that links directly to this company’s product page featuring PowerShrink herself.

I’m guessing she sits on your Power Point file to accomplish the shrinking feature.

Continue reading more… 

According to their site, clipmarks.com has recently been hacked (as of Friday night).

Yep. That’s all I got. I tried to digg their site directly, but digg wouldn’t let me link to clipmarks.com for some reason.

As I was doing some light domain name research, I came across what I thought was a find of a domain name: zip.info. whois.sc reported that it was available. There is some whois info reported for the domain, but no nameservers or website was associated with it. So, I figured the previous owner had let it expire or not paid a bill.

So, I clicked on the buy link and was taken over to Spry’s website to place my order. Just to be sure, I double-checked the domain’s availability from Spry’s own front page. Yup, .info was available. So, I proceeded to create and account, give them my credit card info, and purchase the domain.

Once I had logged in to Spry’s account manager, I noticed that while the new domain was listed, clicking on it gave me an error message about not finding any information about the domain. I submitted a help ticket asking why and my answer was that even though I had just paid for the domain, it wasn’t available and I could either register another domain or get a refund.

As of right now, I’m still waiting for my refund (it’s only been 10 minutes, but refunds usually take days). I figure I’ll get my refund, but I’m more concerned with this potential bait-and-switch tactic. Was this an innocent mistake by Spry? Are they secretly trying to get people to create accounts under false pretense hoping they’ll just register a different domain name and stay a customer?

I’m wondering if this has happened to anyone else or if it is possible with other domain names?

I’ll update this post once I get my refund.

UPDATE: Received an email from Spry:

Our system gets its information for available domains from a third party provider. I don’t know why they showed the domain as available when in fact it was not. I apologize, and I will send this to billing to process your refund.

So far, so good. But I’m still curious how often this happens. With Spry or any registrar.

In what can only be described as a final release after an extremely long build-up of discussion, ICANN announced that it was rejecting the proposal to create an adults-only domain name called .XXX.

Opponents argued it would make pornography on the Internet easier to find.

Well, thankfully this didn’t pass, so internet pr0n is safely hidden in the bowels of the interweb. Hopefully, no one will ever come out with some kind of search service (a kind of search engine) that would allow anyone to search for anything–even naughty bits.

Being the curious beings we are, a friend of mine and I immediately started searching for passwords to see just how much Google was indexing. It didn’t turn up much in the way of anything “secret” until we refined our search to just wp-config files (the file that contains the database connection information for Wordpress installs).

That worked. Since Google Code Search actually indexes the contents of compressed files like ZIP and TARBALL files, we were able to find copies of people’s wp-config files and several contained usernames and passwords.

Here’s an example search.

Now, this only pulls up 50 results (after filtering out the sample config files), but we only looked for Wordpress config files. Who knows what other similar files out there are being indexed and made public. So, a lesson to webmasters– don’t put anything you don’t want seen in a zip file on your server. Perhaps obvious to most, but worth repeating.

Apparently, after failed attempts to blow-up the Hizbullah-propaganda-spewin’ station, they decided to try and hack it–and they did. Am I the only one left wondering why it is so much easier for the IDF to blow-up UN buildings than it is TV stations?

I strongly believe that the world we live in right now will be so very different in 10-20 years. With cheap, easy to produce, small technology that all talks to each other connecting us to everyone and everything. How we interact with our world will change forever.