Jason Hong's Confabulations

Really interesting article in the NYTimes about the Eye-Fi card, which also geotags your photos for you using Skyhook. Also, see below about interesting news about the location capabilities of the next iPhone. NYTimes [The Eye-Fi Share card] is a 2-gigabyte memory card ($100), compatible with most digital cameras, with a twist: it has Wi-Fi networking built in. Each time you bring your camera home to your wireless network, it transmits your photos back to the computer, automatically and wirelessly. It can also upload them to Flickr, Picasa or another online photo-gallery site, automatically and wirelessly. You know how your digital camera gives every photo an invisible time and date stamp? Well, the Eye-Fi Explore ($130) card invisibly stamps every photo with where you took it. ... (Indeed, the new iPhone, coming July 11, incorporates both G.P.S. and Skyhook. It even has a third location system, developed by Google, that pinpoints your location by studying your proximity to cellphone t...

I didn't expect to have two posts in a row about World of Warcraft, but I found this one too interesting to resist. It looks like Blizzard will be making physical tokens available for customers to purchase, to increase the security of their accounts. Apparently, there have been many hacked accounts, leading to the loss of (virtual) gold and items. This was a venue for phishing and malware that I didn't see coming, but it makes sense once you see how the value chain eventually ends up as cash. http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=24660&rhtml=true

A fun read about a scientific conference held in World of Warcraft about World of Warcraft. Thus began the first scientific conference held in Azeroth, the online universe inhabited by millions of people playing World of Warcraft. Anyone who has been part of a conference's organizing committee knows that some glitches and mishaps are just unavoidable. And as usual, the problems that actually did occur were unforeseen. It was a success nonetheless. By the end of the third day, a real scientific exchange took place, I married one of the conference participants, and within an hour of the wedding, we were all dead. ... With fireworks bursting and confetti still drifting all around the dancing mob of wedding guests, Catullus announced the final event: a massive attack on Sentinel Hill, an Alliance stronghold. As we surged over the hills around the unsuspecting fort, everyone yelled, "For Science!" Bainbridge had enlisted the help of Alea Iacta Est, the largest guild in Azerot...

Microsoft has hired Paul Laudanski, the man behind the anti-phishing Castlecops.com website, to help with the software company's phishing and spam investigations. Laudanski, a former volunteer firefighter, announced the move on Castlecops.com last week, saying that he's looking to find someone else to run the site that he founded in 2002. http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=101724&pagtype=samechan