10 Amazing Internet facts

1. The Internet was created as a college project by Al Gore, and it's initial construction took 6 months, used 350ft of timber, and approximately 1000 nails.

2. Fishermen experimented with the Internet for deep sea fishing, but found they could not filter out dolphins as easily, so returned to regular nets. Norton is working on Dolphin safe Internets, but it is feared the cost may be too much.

3. The Internet is one of the most popular games on the PC format, selling over 12,000 copies on it's first day of release. It was first completed 14 months after release by a Korean programmer. He described the end boss as challenging, but slightly predictable.

4. The Internet has no snakes on it anywhere. A legend describes St Patrick driving snakes out of the internet, but glaciation and the lack of landbridges are the more accepted theories in the scientific community.

5. Star Wars was originally set on the Internet, but the lack of Ewoks moved production to a small moon, where filming took place.

6. The Internet is approximately 7 miles wide, and 4 miles high. To walk across the Internet, you'd need sturdy boots, and a sensible jumper, as some parts are in Russia.

7. Voting has been banned for the Internet, so it can not take part in any local, national or international elections, but it is allowed to pass on the votes for others.

8. The Internet picked up a speeding fine in California in 1996, which remains unpaid to this day.

9. It has only had 2 safety recalls, one in 1993 for faulty electrical wiring, and one in 2004, when it was discovered that under certain conditions, it may catch fire.

10. In 2002, The Internet sparked controversy by changing its listed Interests to "Hookers and blow", but quickly retracted that statement, claiming the comment was taken out of context.

The End

How to be a stalker, or avoid one.

I've always been pretty good at "Internet Research", and i'll be the first to admit, there is a fine line between just being creepy and stalking someone, and using the tools given to you to find information on someone, for whatever reason.

Firstly, lets cover the legal aspects, most of the searching and info you can pull from the 'net isn't really covered by privacy laws, if it's been published so anyone can see, without guessing passwords (or hacking - technically, guessing a password isn't hacking, but there are people out there who know what they are doing, and can get past security without needing passwords) it is fair game.

You'd be very unlucky to attract the attention of a true hacker, most don't really have the time to spend trying to get to you stash of "favorite" pictures, but people running websites may express a view that will focus attention on them.

Those firewall warnings that pop up occasionally aren't cyber-criminals trying to steal your photoshop serial number, but usually automated computers looking for open ports. I guess you could imagine an open port as a door or window on your house. Most traffic comes through the front but some needs to come through a window...
OK, so that simile doesn't work...

Back to the topic of personal privacy, one of the first things EVERYONE needs to decide is how much info they are happy with giving out. If you run a business, you'll often have to accept that you'll always be known, and contactable by anyone.

The next part of this long, fascinating, and un-proof read 'blog will explain what people can find out about you, and also what you would need to do to keep yourself under the radar.

First off, you'll need to get yourself into detective mode. Internet leads are far easier than the stuff Police need to follow up, it's like tracing the branches on a tree, but you can do it from the comfort of your own home, and there will be less leads, so it'll have a finite end when you have found everything.

Start off with search engines, and do a search on the username/forum name of the person you are looking for. People will often try to find something unique, and you'll often find they have the same name on many different forums. This is usually known as the ego-search, as i bet everyone has tried to see how e-famous they are.

From the different forums/websites they contribute to, you might often find more details in the profiles. Many forums have locked profiles, only visible to members, but some are open, and will hand out your e-mail address like a cheap nightclub flyer. It's not a big deal to register on a forum either to get a better look inside too.

In the posts made on forums, image hosting sites like photobucket may give away more details. Be wary of automatic geotagging. One particular brand of fruit named mobile phones can add the GPS co-ordinates into the EXIF data of a pic. The EXIF data is usually techie stuff, like camera type, exposure settings etc, but if could also direct anyone to whatever object you have just snapped.
Any post with an image will have the album's address in it. That album may give away another username used by the person when they set up their image account, or searching for that username will find other images posted from that account that might be under other aliases.

One links to the other, so if you have multiple personality disorder, make sure you also have multiple image accounts.
Remember to have your main album locked, as otherwise, someone can backtrack through the image of last night's dinner to find that pic of that rash you had.
The above actually happened too...

Even if your main album is locked, the pictures are usually free to view by anyone with the correct URL. If me4.jpg is posted, expect the curious to look and see what me3.jpg might be, or worse still, me7.jpg and all of a sudden, people can see if you recovered from the rash you had...

Digital cameras can name pictures in a way that makes any others obvious. I saw a site that actually listed the default picture names for cameras. DSC_3384.JPG will give people an idea what to look for by changing the numbers and other similarly named pics can be found. This is what would be described as phishing.

You'll often find a randomiser on your image hoster for naming pictures if you can't think of a name which is a solution to that problem.

So by now, you can assume that quite a few of your pics have fallen into the wrong hands, and your email address has been found, along with a list of other interests you may have.

Google and Yahoo will often be able to find ancient info from whenever those e-mail addresses have been used, so check yours out, and see where it leads.

The google cache can store info for months even after it has been deleted, so you may often need to sit that one out and wait until it drops off the list. That still isn't perfect, as http://www.archive.org/ - The Wayback Machine, will store vast sections of websites for years, and they never time-out.

If you have a name, there are a few people-based search engines that are specifically for finding people. They'll trawl Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc and often even grab a thumbnail userpic to help make identifying the right person quicker. School reunion sites will allow you to search via names, rough ages and areas.

At one stage, the UK electoral roll was easily accessible with just an name and area, and it would go as far as listing the names and addresses of your neighbours too.

Now, they have a list of your classmates from school, your home address, and even know who lives next door too.

If you are the owner of a website or business, registration details will often give out home addresses too. http://www.domaintools.com/ can tell you who has registered a website, and where they live. Companies House will also have an easily accessible address for the director of a company.

You can protect yourself from website registration, by choosing not to display registrant details for personal users, or using a management company for business registrations.

The main game-plan is keep putting every bit of info you find through a search engine, and keep going until you hit a dead end.

Last but not least, is the threat of social engineering. This is the very stuff that most con-tricks work on. It is the art of dragging more information out of someone by just asking questions, in the right way.

For example, you might often have seen people complain that their Facebook or MSN has been hacked. This is very unlikely, as places like these have massive security.
There are plenty of password brute forcers out there to download and set up automatically. These programs can try different passwords at rates of 100's a second, and they try every possible combination of letters and numbers until they find the right one.
That's the reason why many login pages allow only 5 attempts before locking someone out, or they introduce a pause before confirming whether a password is correct or not.

So how did they get into your MSN then? The flaw in systems like that, is that people often forget passwords, and the security questions are often very easy to guess. Even if you can't guess, you can use social engineering to just ask them.

A simple way would be a short conversation, a basic question like where someone grew up wouldn't attract attention, and the engineer could then claim that their parents were from that area. Next, they suggest that their parents were from there, and both your parents might even know each other, and with that, they can ask for your mother's maiden name, which is a basic security question used by everything from Instant messaging to Credit cards.

If someone gets into your hotmail/msn account, they can then read any emails you have, or even ask places to resend a password under the guise of forgetfulness and deeper they go.

Always remember, anything you say on the net can usually been seen by anyone, and it can lead to a massive papertrail right upto gaining control of credit cards, getting into ebay, adding more postal addresses, internet shopping etc.

Protect yourself by trying it out for yourself. If you can find out the information, so can others. Be wary of what details you pass on in harmless chat as it can be used against you.

It's simply a question of knowing the right places to look, and it does have it's good side. I've found lost friends for people, and once even tracked down a girl whose number i got in a bar, but lost my phone in a taxi on the way home.
I felt horrible for a while saying i'd give her a ring, and then never call, and it was maybe a month later i thought back, remembered she'd mentioned where she worked, found an email address that fitted, and sent an email saying "You might think i'm crazy, but did you ever meet a guy in XXX on YYY who said he'd call but never did?"
It was the right one in the end.
We went out a few times, nothing much came of it, but it would have been bugging me for ages if i didn't stick to my word.

There are good uses, and bad uses. It's always handy to know how to use the Internet to your advantage, but always make sure people can't use it against you. If you get a free hour or so, see what you can dig up on yourself, you may well be surprised.

The End

It ain't like dustin' crops, kid!

You know the scene, or maybe just remember the scene from last summer, but the sky will be an amazing azure blue, Little fluffy clouds dotted about with smug grins as everyone likes them, and they have their own theme song, and a couple of trails from high flying jets.
I don't know about you, but i always look up an imagine who is on that plane, and where they are going. There will be over 100 people sitting up there, looking out the window at the suckers down below, whilst deciding what kingdom to classify the various food products in the in-flight meal under.
You can see the roads in the sky, the trails running parallel for miles, then turning off to hit other skyways. Life is good for those up there.

Not everyone thinks the same though. "Field of Dreams" had a tagline, "build it, and they will come". Back in the real world, the tagline is "do it, and they will think it's a conspiracy"
There is growing concern from the edges of humanity that the trails aren't just condensation from the jet exhausts, they are chemical sprays put down over cities for mind control.
Obviously mind control doesn't work on these enlightened few, so they will try to help the rest of us break free of our chains with the truth.

9/11 was prime for conspiracies, my favourite being a commercial jet was fitted with missiles un-noticed by hoards of plane-nuts, and it fired a missile into a building it was about to crash into, like a giant missile.
That's like slapping someone round the face before you shoot them, it's far wiser to explain a flash as lens flare from polished aluminium, than an invisible missile that was unnoticed at a major airport, and unneeded when a plane was about to hit the building. Were they concerned the skyscraper-spec toughened glass might bounce the jet off?

That's pretty easy to point at laugh at, but there are plenty of others to take it's place.

The Chem-trail one is even better though.
The fans of this theory believe these jets are spraying chemicals at altitude to make people ill on the ground. Prince (the one that looks like a Bond henchman) agrees with this theory, noting that fighting and arguing increase in his neighbourhood after a plane flies over.

This has to be some of the weakest theorising i have ever seen, from stating that they are unmarked military/NATO planes, to thinking a vapour spray miles up in the sky will reach the ground in any meaningful quantities.

A telescope, or a pair of binoculars will help identify the plane as civilian jets, a radio scanner or even Internet air traffic control and scheduled flights lists will be able to tell you what the plane is, and where it is going.

Even a quick check on air corridors will show you where the highways in the sky are located, so where does this "black-op" idea come from?

I have a strange feeling that someone will admit to starting it as a joke a few years ago, and be proud of how many people they sucked in.
Until then, we will be presented with youtube videos of the secret network of thousands of jets, and films titled "-you decide..."

Grab you tinfoil hat, head into the basement, get yo' proxy on, and have a wander round youtube before the Government gets to you next!

The End

Legendary...

IQ tests have been around for quite a while, MENSA adverts in the newspapers, Tetrapak milk cartons, and online questionnaires.
This is all well and good for Facebook application bragging, or breakfast cereals, but what if you wanted to demonstrate how stupid you were to work colleagues?
Many of these would assume you are a well rounded person, a contributor to society, unaware that the crossword you did at lunchtime contains more fictional words than an American Newsreader's telepromter.
Maybe you are at the other end of the scale, incredibly intelligent, and have a crush on Shania Twain, but wouldn't want her to write you off as a Rocket Surgeon, or Brain Scientist...

Luckily, you can convey these messages loud and clear with the help of an Urban Legend. One Urban Legend states that Urban Legends were created by the government to build a database of who to save in the event that anarchy breaks out from the hysteria related to an Urban Legend.

I'm always impressed by the conviction of the target that the story is true, and the look on their face as you cut them off, mid-tale, and reveal you've heard the story four years ago.

Where it goes from here is my favourite bit, like the anticipation of opening a Kinder-egg, hoping you get the helicopter, and not the scale model of a park bench.

Some of the story-tellers will take the point that you know the story of "Batman in the wardrobe" as further proof that it is true, and happens all the time.
Strike whilst the iron is stone cold and bet them you can guess their bank details.

The others can break down, trying to figure out just how much of what they know is infact garbage, and how many people they have told the story to already.

Urban Legends are pretty easy to spot with a little training, they will usually follow a pattern of somebody doing something they shouldn't, or often something that others might not want them to do, and in the end, the worst possible scenario happens.
Don't be frightened to throw a little technology and rough science into the mix. Guessing facts is better than not knowing them at all, right?

Microwave ovens become nuclear powered, and energy drinks ironically contain B******s.

These legends are like rainbows, the closer you try to get, the further away they originate, but someone had to start them.

Somewhere in the world, someone must be making them up.
That person, to me, is a true legend.

The End

Auto-tuUuUuNe!

Back in my day, just after Marconi had had sold a few of his "wireless sets", you had singers, who would sing.

Lots of things can make melodic noises, it was something to do with evolution, that's why all the dinosaurs are dead (couldn't hold a note), but wet wineglasses are hugely successful at other people's house parties.

Lions can't sing either, so you'll notice they are endangered. I can't remember the last time i saw a wild Lion.

Humans did well, as they could use their vocal chords to pass on information, like how much warmer it is for the time of year, or to sing.

Singing is quite an important part of the mating ritual. You'll find that many men will start to sing when attempting to attract a mate in the depths of nightclubs.

The lights are low so those with "unlucky" faces are on a level pitch with those more gifted, and suddenly, all the males will start to sing along to Oasis, or show off the fact they know all the words to Ice, Ice, Baby.

Good singers could frequently rise to the top on their talents, mate continuously on tour, and pass on their genes.

Evolution in action.

But ever since Cher, there has been a new force in action, that even Darwin didn't spot.

Autotune.

Cher, unhappy with Father Time seemingly using her face as a punch bag overnight, realised she needed to get back that evolutionary gift, the art of singing, to swing the odds back in her favour.

Deep in Cher's laboratory, under a dormant volcano, teams of scientists put together a a secret computerised weapon to make any rusty steel door swing open to C minor.

The weapon, known as autotune, was put to effect on the track "Believe" and she was instantly catapulted back into the spotlight.

With the extra revenue, her face was accelerated to 88mph and sent back in time to a more youthful look, and everything was going just swimmingly.

The secret weapon didn't stay secret for too long though, Paris Hilton, from her own secret base disguised as a hotel, reverse engineered the software and also became a famous singer, despite being able to hold a note for about as long as being able to hold a conversation on Particle Physics.

Autotune broke cover, and now appears in many chart singles, from songs about a plague of fireflies to Hip hop artists describing cars that they hired for a video shoot.

The effect of singers using Autotune could probably best be thought of in terms of Art.

Imagine if Claude Monet thought, "You know, this rubbing coloured grease malarkey is wearing a bit thin, why don't i just take a photo, as it'll be far more accurate than i can ever produce."

Could you call him an painter if he just snapped a quick one on his iPhone, and mailed it directly to Flikr?

"Check out my new painting of these waterlillies that were like awesome, bro."

sent on my iPhone using OldMasters app.

Seeing as you don't need to be able to sing to be a singer, why do we need all these talent shows?

Out of thousands, they'll whittle away to just a few acts, and finally choose one to become a popstar.

And as soon as they have proved they can sing, Autotune comes in and makes it all a moot point by doing the singing bit for them, all they need to do is read the lyrics out over the phone and a microchip does the rest.

On the bright side, Autotune has some good sides, fitting small autotuners to Lions will undoubtedly save their species from extinction.

Work has already started with Pandas-

http://www.botjunkie.com/2009/09/18/taiwan-wants-singing-robo-pandas-that-shoot-guns/

Finally Cher, who famously sung Rescue Me, has rescued the Giant Panda.

As a short sidenote, a comment in the above Panda article caught my attention.

“You can imagine a robot shooting down balloons, like in the wild west, using two revolvers, or three, but much faster than a person.”

Yes, yes i can. Wild West robots with guns was the main theme of theme-park-phobic Michael Crichton's novel, Westworld, and just to recap, it didn't end well.
The End

The Art of Twitter

If one thing spurred me on to start this, it was Twitter.

I joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago, as i wanted to make sure i didn't miss the technological boat, but as a "watcher" on there, life is pretty quiet.

The first thing i felt about it, was how much it was like having famous people send you text messages of the less interesting things they do. OK, so not like totally dull, but more like the kinda stuff you couldn't have a TV show on.

After that, a huge number of points came out, like that fact that the messages you see are largely one way. I will @ reply someone occasionally, but deep down, i know it will be lost in a huge rush other posts, and never seen again.

Still, whaddya expect? Steven Fry to pop round for a cup of tea after?

The main things i see these now are people wanting to be followed. Nothing wrong with that, but give something back in return, at the very least, if you can, re-follow back. It's just manners. Secondly, be interesting! I've seen people beg for followers, and when you check out their page, there is nothing about them, only countless @replies to popstars which will be ignored.

There are other tweeters, the comedians, and these come in many different shapes and forms.

Because of the 140 character limit, you can get some sharp one-liners, and that's the payback for a follow. These people put it out there, and see who cares enough to follow them.

Others work in reverse, hungry for e-fame, they'll tweet up terrible topical "jokes", or even worse, steal someone else's.

Some of the names make me cringe too, hundreds of young girls adopt the surname of whoever won Talent Factor, or whatever you have locally. I can imagine them writing out their new married name in the back of a school book over and over again.

Still, the boys will be drawing skulls, flaming cars jumping barrels, and robots, so i guess we were just as stupid when young, but stupid in a different way.

The Paradox

So this is it, the End has started, but this is actually the start and not the end. If you have no idea what that means, that's probably because it's a paradox, a contradiction in terms.

I've never done a blog before, infact, i don't even like the word blog. At the very least, it should have an apostrophe at the start, " 'blog", but it's well established, so i'll have to stick with it.

So sit back, relax, and skip through the first few posts as i'll probably write allsorts whilst it still has huge novelty value.

And we all like novelties, don't we?