Technology

Internet bidding sites have been spreading like forest mushrooms after a warm rain in late May recently. E-Bay has almost become an afterthought.

It all began when people decided, for example, that to sell a car as a trade-in when buying a spanking new vehicle is shortsighted. The dealer offers you a price. That price will, in the best of cases, cut into the new car's price but, eventually, you'll find out that car dealers aren't in the business for your beautiful (insert colour here) eyes.

This realization (and not only about cars) has led to all kinds of lists and sites that let you sell your older product (or buy one) for prices considerably more to your liking. You're not supporting a dealer's overhead, after all (this brings us back to cars, but only because they're such an easy example).

But the lengths some of the bidding sites go to these days must raise an eyebrow or two.

Walletpop Canada found an interesting video of an iPad being dropped from 100,000 feet.

G-Form launched an iPad clad solely in the company's 6oz Extreme Edge case into space and then let it free-fall back to Earth. It appears the iPad continued to work just fine upon landing.

Okay, we're impressed.

Click below to view the video. Also, check out some other Walletpop iPad stories at the bottom of this post.





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If you thought that signing up for inclusion on the Non-Call List would get you of the telemarketers' hook, you might have found out by now it didn't.

While, granted, offering goods and services over the telephone is a legitimate endeavour, many amongst us view it rather as harassment – especially when the phone rings while you're otherwise engaged, or when it rings and all you hear is silence after you've picked it up. On some occasions, the silence is interrupted after about 30 seconds by a female voice that says, with a certain degree of malevolence, "Good bye," getting your level of adrenaline even higher.

If you can get hold of experts who know how to do this kind of testing, you might find out that many of the calls originate outside of any Canadian government agency's jurisdiction. Some tropical islands seem to be the favourite spots for some telemarketers. None of these islands has anything to do with Canada, except having a phone network that can reach and touch someone north of the 49^th parallel.

Can somebody do something about it?

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It's the teenage girls, rather than teenage boys, who demand their own lines or telephones, any parent will confirm. They can spend hours on end discussing whatever it is that is important to their world. Guys make arrangements as to where to meet for, say, a hockey game, while the girls – making similar arrangements – will debate what to wear, and how this or that girl, a friend of theirs, looked perfectly ugly the last time out.

So, is it any surprise that almost three-quarters of women are keen on using social networks, and only about a half of the men would be bothered?

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Can you imagine, for example, a strange structure right beside a church, tall, adorned with a cross and looking perfectly innocuous? Guess what: it's a cellular telephony antenna under cover.

Unbelievable? If you enter an address of any place anywhere in the neighbourhood of the structure at this cell phone antenna locator, you will find out not only if it actually is a cellular phone antenna, but even which company it belongs to.

In fact, you will be able to locate all cellular telephone and paging installation anywhere in the country.

And this is a serious matter: there have been studies linking exposure to electromagnetic fields emanating from such towers, to a variety of complaints, some of them fatal. Incidence of cancer from using cell phones themselves, compared to these numbers, are perfectly laughable.

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Children (and some adolescents, too, in fact, even some adults) think that life without electronic games isn't worth living.

The basic reaction ought to be: why don't you get a life?

But if you plan to succumb and splurge on such stuff, it might be worth your (and your children's) while if you spent a few minutes checking out the Entertainment Software Rating Board's site.

Here's what you'll find out:

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We've been inundated with advertising telling us this or that communications company offers an application (app for short) to download so we can this or that professional sports event live, and in all of its beauty.

Some went so far as to suggest you can get this or that event only from them.

Shortsighted, as the Bell Corporation found out. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) slapped Bell's wrists with a vengeance.

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Nothing beats predicting the future. There's even a science that does nothing but. It's called prognostication and there exist research institutions that do nothing but.

Some do it better, others, worse. Depends. Those that prognosticate well do so with the perfect knowledge of existing data and experience with the trends those data have gone through during an extended period of time. A British marketing research firm, Intersperience is one such group. The others base their predictions on wishful thinking, called also ideology. There are too many of those and it is safe to ignore them.

Of course, there are some who would ignore any predictions, saying an ancient Mayan calendar predicts the world as we know it is going to end in 2012, anyway, so what's the need? If only they knew that what happened was that the ancient Mayan artisan ran out of space on the rock he used to carve his calendars on, and there was no more raw material handy. When he told a friend of his, the friend had a laughing fit: Someone's going to be scared out of their with by the time the year 2011 rolls around, he prognosticated. And he was right.

Anyhow, what does Intersperience say about the next year?

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We read stories of outrageous thefts from time to time. Used to be we were shocked to hear somebody stole, say, a Mona Lisa painting from the Louvre in Paris. Morons, we used to say, they won't be able to sell the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece to anyone anywhere without being caught.

Rank amateurs, when compared to modern-day thieves. These people do not need to wear gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, and dark mackintoshes so as not to be seen during the night. They don't have to leave their homes to do their dirty deeds.

They're called hackers, and people who tried to steal the Mona Lisa painting from the Louvre wouldn't have a chance, compared to them.

No matter what you do on your computer - buy and sell things, keep in touch with family and friends, play games, or keep up on the latest news and events - you could be exposing your personal information to fraudsters, which can result in identity theft and financial loss.

How does it happen?

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Watch out, says a message that just landed in your e-mail inbox, there's this new outrageously funny video available, here's the link get it, it's perfect, you'll be rolling on the floor laughing, have a look.

The message has come from someone whose name you know, it may even be a family member. So, you trust it and click on the link. You'll land on a page that looks just like your typical YouTube (or Facebook, or any other social media network) page. But wait, first, you have to install an Adobe Flush plug-in. Without it, you're toast, you can't view the video.

If you DO try to download the plug-in, you will be toast within seconds.

Meanwhile, the villain who wrote Koobface is laughing his head off somewhere out there.

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