Information, Internet & Technology

About what's been happening in the Internet.. some cool websites, tech news, high-tech stuff, new web technologies will be introduced here, keep urself up with me

Information, Internet & Technology: January 2007

Thursday, January 18, 2007

iCache represents all your cash cards

Instead of having to carry all sort of cash cards with you, isn’t it more convenient that you just bring along a device that represents all your credit cards or debit cards? That device is iCache, which contains the digital replica of “track data” of all your credit cards or debit cards.

How to do that? According to iCache website, it will be available to you from your financial institution or you buy it from iCache retail. Once you received the device, you just get onto iCache website, self register your finger print and all your cards, just a simple process.

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PayPal’s Security Key Protects You From Phishers!

PayPal is one of the most widely accepted payment methods by online stores, eBay and for individuals to transfer cash. Due it to its popularity, it’s also one of those getting most phishing troubles! If you do not know what phishing means, here is a little explanation.

Phishing is by far the most common method used for online fraud. Phishing involves sending out legitimate-looking emails that seem to come from a trustworthy website or institution. Phishers normally would create a fake website, which looks like the homepage of a reputable company, e.g PayPal. Then they send out tons of emails to consumers to lure them to login to thier (PayPal) account, in order to capture thier login information for financial again. Phishing not only causes a big loss of to the consumers and also to the company!

In order to overcome the phishing problem, PayPal has come out with a hardware solution, i.e the PayPal Security Key. This security key generates a unique one-time-use key code every 30 seconds, which you use along with your username and regular password to log into your account.

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Robotic cellphone! A personal ubiquitous companion!

Do you want your cellphone to come to you by itself when someone calls you? Do you want your cellphone to know where to locate its own charger and then charge itself when battery runs out? The Cellular Phone Robot does all these for you.

The Cellular Phone Robot or CPR in short has wheels so that it can move. With RFID tags installed all around your house, it will be able to do the above-mentioned for you! Some more it has motors, used to express the emotions for you about the incoming calls. The CPR uses 3 types of senses to respond to you, they are by touch, smell and visual bahavior!

By touch, the CPR vibrates in 3 distinct patterns to evoke your emotional response. The patterns were based on the rhythms of emotional music.

By smell, it has 12 micronozzles to to emit just the right odor to identify the caller. Would it emit smell of rotton egg for undesirable callers? Of course tested biometrically.

By visual, the CPR does a little dance when someone calls. Happy dance. Stalker dance. All biometrically determined.

This is currently one of the research work produced by the engineers at Soochunhyang University in Korea. It has much much greater features than your iPhone.

Via me TechChee.com

Monday, January 08, 2007

UMPC, what do u know about it?

UMPC or Ultra Mobile PC, which is currently hot! What do you know about it ? Well, just by its title, it shall be small and compact enough and it must fullfill the requirement i.e it’s able to run full Windows OS, i.e either Windows XP or Windows Vista. It means that any Windows applications can run on this small and compact personal computer. It’s a full computer with ultra compact size and you can do everything on it!

Via Me TechChee.com

Thursday, January 04, 2007

3-in-1 useful gadget, it's a USB flash, a stylus and a ball pen

Lighten your pocket. There is no need to carry so many gadgets with you. A 3-in-1 comprises of USB 128MB flash storage, a PDA stylus and a traditional ballpoint pen.

Via Me At TechChee.com

Online tool for checking if your web server still alive

If you are having hard time to access your blog hosted overseas, it'd be hard to tell if it's the country's outgoing Internet backbone or any International backbone is down or your webserver is having problem. (E.g the recent Taiwan's earthquake demaged some submarine cables and causing slow connection over the Asia region and even some websites unaccessible)

I have my blog hosted in the States. My newly setup tech blog, TechChee.com, the blog that I've been telling myself that I wanna make it good and a success. When I found it's hard to access, the first thing in my mind is to lodge a report/ticket to the hosting company's support center, to complain about the server is down. Well, if you simply lodge a report like this, you will probably hit the wall and get kicked back by the support, if the website is found up and running and accessible from thier side.

How do you find out by yourself first to ensure that your web server is running properly before lodging a report ? There are quite a number of the online tools out there, which allow you to trace if the hosting company network routing is up and thier web server is in good shape.

CentralOps.net offers handful of FREE online tools, which you can do a traceroute to check for the network or and HTTP query to check if your webserver is up. I'm currently unable to access my blog TechChee.com, but I can at least pacify myself that my blog is still up and running, as I managed to get a response of status code 200, when I queried using CentralOps's HTTP query tool.

BMW is fooling the world with mistery gadget

On BMW's website, a flash presentation is showing a mistery gadget. Could it be a digital music player, a multimedia-capable or a gadget meant for the car? It's puzzling the world!

Via TechChee.com