This Flash map is pulling RSS data from the Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) onto a Google Map of Victoria.
Note that it can only show fires that the CFA are reporting via their RSS feeds, long running fires may not appear until they are updated in their database and pushed out to the feed.
Oh well, so much for the dream, this was on the Kogan blog this afternoon:
I’m disappointed to have to tell you that the Kogan Agora has to be delayed indefinitely. This delay comes due to potential future interoperability issues.
Sounds like this was partly due to wanting to keep the device compatible with future Android versions needing better screens:
One of the potential issues is the screen size and resolution. It seems developers will be creating applications that are a higher resolution than the Agora is currently capable of handling. […] In order to fully appreciate the feature-rich applications Android developers will be creating in coming months and years, the Agora must be redesigned.
I hope that whatever they come up with still has a real keyboard..
The PR company for Kogan has put a YouTube video up of a production sample of the Kogan Agora Android phone that I pre-ordered on New Years Day. Looks quite snappy from what you can see, but it’s not the worlds best produced video. 😉
Via Andy, who emailed me a link to this blog which in turn linked to the original Gizmodo post..
Now this is, umm, interesting..
We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites. As a proof of concept we executed a practical attack scenario and successfully created a rogue Certification Authority (CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers. This certificate allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol.
Trust no one..
(Via)
Kogan, an Australian company who usually specialise in LCD’s, are making a mobile handset (the Agora) for Google Android (which uses the Linux kernel) with 3G, quad band GSM, GPS, wifi, Bluetooth, etc… It’s due to start shipping at the end of January and I’ve just pre-ordered mine to hopefully provide a more functional open source phone and let me hack more with my OpenMoko phone without having to worry about not having a working phone.
Wow, this is really impressive. After reading this LWN article about Hv3, a Tk/Tcl based web browser I decided to give it a go and it’s just great. Lightweight and blindingly fast!
Now this is a browser that’s still in alpha, so expect odd behaviour and bugs, but it’s still remarkably useable. The biggest issue I’ve had with it in a few minutes of playing has been that it doesn’t support HTTP authentication but that just stops me testing it on a couple of sites at work.
Well done folks, keep up the good work!
Oh joy, the BBC is reporting…
Users of the world’s most common web browser have been advised to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.
It’s yet another security hole in Internet Exploder, this time a heap overflow that works against IE 7 as well as IE 6 and the betas of IE8.
It’s being actively exploited too (again from the Beeb):
As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since last week to take advantage of the security flow (sic), said antivirus software maker Trend Micro.
I’m pretty sure the writer meant flaw, not flow.. 🙂
For those who feel strongly about the brain dead government plan to break Australian Internet access through censorship and security theatre rather than following existing effective law enforcement methods GetUp is running a campaign against the proposed mandatory filtering of Internet access.
…not in a malicious way, but in a rather amusing and potentially destructive one.. 🙂
It seems as though there is a /system/sbin/sh running in the background with
/dev/console as stdin. That could explain why typing “reboot” and then enter (in
ConnectBot or otherwise) will reboot your phone. If you type “telnetd”, telnet into
your phone, and look at the /proc/XX/fd tree for the /system/sbin/sh process, you can
see it clearly.
Until you’ve grabbed the RC30 update that fixes this it’s probably best not to do much sysadmin work from one, especially if that involves rm -rf foo.. 😉 This was via LWN, which has the priceless comment:
I wonder how many android phones were running at half speed after someone replied “yes” to someone…
🙂
So it appears there will be no way to escape from being blocked from seeing sites that are false positives due to buggy & broken filters or incorrectly classified, etc.. 🙁
Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.
According to preliminary trials, the best Internet content filters would incorrectly block about 10,000 Web pages from one million.
I guess if John Howard was still around he’d want us to be blocked from seeing un-American content too.