Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Internet Explorer 8 Beta available

Microsoft have released a beta version of the eighth installment in their IE-Series.
Go check it out at microsoft.

review@heise.de

Monday, August 18, 2008

Final Fantasy XIII

just a short notice : there will be a FFXIII Demo for PS3 along with the Bluray of Advent Children. More info here.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Yahoo Fire Eagle and Web Self Exposure in general

Yahoo have launched their service "Fire Eagle", which is like twitter for locations. You can by various means tell the service your current location and have it displayed online. I have tried it. The pixelart design is pretty cool and - from what i see - the website seems to be up to the current technical standard (can't judge the backend...).

No reason to get over-excited, for me. I'd rather spend some time thinking about where the web takes its users.

The (growing) Web population is obviously divided into three groups. Group one is careful, sceptic about things like online banking or ebay, and very reluctant to use them. I don't know what those people actually do online, but they exist in small numbers.

Group two is the "webstertainment" group, mostly online to have a good time, meet friends (we used to do that somewhere under the sky back in my younger days) or watch ostensibly funny videos. Average age probably somewhere between 12 and 24. You can meet them at unique locations like studivz.de, where they are linked to on various photos and expose themselves more or less completely.

Somewhere in between lies the group I hope to be a part of, which is : willing to try but not completely air-headed. Although I fear I have a tendency to slide into group two from time to time...

While people keep on moaning about wiretapping and biometric passports, more and more web apps for self exposure emerge. While networking implicitly requires a certain amount of privacy loss, you should be careful not to give away too much about yourself, especially information that can be used against you in any way. Which brings me back to Fire Eagle : I just read the news about this being staged on heise.de, where critics already said it was a welcome gift for housebreakers and burglars. Knowing that the Millers from house number 18 will be in spain for the next three weeks makes scheming somewhat more easy, it is justifiably said.

Definitely, it is time to think about what information you are willing to share about yourself. Always think about the harm the information could cause. And if you want, try Fire Eagle

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Samsung SyncMaster 245B plus - 24" LCD-Display for EUR 309

Seen it in action, and I love it. If only...

hardwareversand.de

anyone out there who wants to donate?