Tibet, China & the Olympics [fvter.Rant]

I don't like to rant much on politics, but the recent world-wide noise about the upcoming Olympic games, Tibet and China has shaken my neurons a bit! Let's face it the issue is not that the athletes should boycott the games but more on how does the world protest strongly enough to make their disagreement known. Here are my thoughts! Let's get the audience to boycott watching the games and hit them where it hurts... the money through the publicity and sponsorships! The expected outcome is that hundreds of millions of viewers will watch the games and be attracted by the pitches from the sponsors; however and if only 10% of that viewership actually occurs than it will make the games a disaster and hurt both the CIO and China more!

Anti-fraude ou Fraude des Méthodes Peu Secure

sorry this post is in French as it concerns something that happened to me here in France. I'll post a quick translation in the comments.
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J’ai récemment été identifié par le système de FAI-NET pour une vérification ou contrôle, on va dire, d’identité bancaire. La société FAI-Net fournit un service de tiers de confiance a fin de sécurisé les achats sur Internet à la fois pour le commerçant et pour l’acheteur.
Donc en effet suite à un achat sur le site grosbill.com, j’ai reçu un e-mail de la part de FIA-NET me demandant de valider mon achat. C’est à ce moment que je commence à avoir des problèmes ! En lisant le message la première fois, j’étais très sceptique et je pensais que c’était un e-mail de type «phishing scam». D’autant plus que le même message m’a été renvoyé à renvoyer à plusieurs reprise.
En effet, ma casquette d’architecte sécurité en informatique a pris le dessus ! Le problème ? Eh bien l’e-mail en question avait plein d’inconsistance et avait les éléments douteux suivant :

• L’e-mail est émis par une adresse en fia-net.fr mais leur site et les conditions de vente sont tous attribuées à fia-net.com - dont on peut questionner la validité de l’émission de l’e-mail ;
• L’e-mail n’est pas certifié, c.a.d il n’y a aucune sécurité associé à cet e-mail, ce qui est important pour un e-mail demandant vos informations bancaire – de nos jours il n’est pas difficile d’envoyer un e-mail au moins signé !
• Ils disent avoir essayé de m’appeler par téléphone pour valider la commande – je n’ai jamais reçu d’appel téléphonique de leur part au moins pas sur les numéros inscrite dans ma commande sur grosbill.com ;
• L’e-mail me demande d’envoyer une copie de ma carte d’identité et mon RIB – attention ! il n’y aucun garantie que l’e-mail va vraiment à FIA-NET ou que l’e-mail ne sera pas intercepté ! Vous imaginez ce qui pourrait ce passez si …

J’ai donc décidé de faire connaître ma pensé sur cet e-mail et ma désapprobation de la méthode à FIA-NET. J’ai donc visité leur site. À fin de pouvoir communiquer avec FIA-NET, il faut d’abord s’inscrire. Et paf encore un problème : Après inscription, FIA-NET vous renvoie par e-mail votre nom d’utilisateur et puis votre mot-de-passe en clair ! Je dits NON ! Ce ne sont pas des pratiques dignes de nos jours avec touts les problèmes de sécurité associé à des pratiques telles que celles-ci !
Pour une société qui agit en temps que tiers de confiance et qui lutte contre la fraude sur Internet, il y a un sérieux manque de protocole et de sécurisation de leur méthodologies ! C’est tous que j’ai à dire !
J’ai finalement envoyé mes informations en PDF sécurisé (non copiable et non imprimable) avec les informations (signature, etc) importantes sécurisé par des dégradations d’image et watermarking. Ce qui m'a valu de recevoir mon achat avec une semaine de retard! Quel bordel...

Most Interesting Operation Yet!

Yesterday, Thursday 3rd April, was my operation day. I have been back in the hospital since Wednesday to have the hardware, that was put in Dec.06, removed from my left ankle area. The operation in itself turned out to be one of the coolest I have had in a long while. Note that this is my 10th or so operation on my left leg.

The operation started with a local anesthesia. I thought that like previous times, it would be an epidural too numb the lower half of my body. It was in fact a left leg nerve block. Nerve blocks are strange. They start by sticking an electrified needle into the main nerves in your backside and then upper calf. At that moment your leg starts to twitch and move by itself - a strange feeling- which is followed by the injection of the anesthetic. Your leg then slowly starts to become numb... you know that pins and needles feeling you get if you sit on your arm for a long time. They started operating when I could basically no longer move my leg as it felt like a ton of gold bars and I could no longer feel any sense of temperature (those where the tests they carried out to see if it was ready).

The surgeon then began to operate! I felt, smelt and heard everything that was going on! The nerve block in fact only kills the pain sensor...you still feel and touch, etc. I won't recount the whole operation as it was a long 2.5 hours but here are some of the highlights:

• They used a laser scalp to cut through the flesh - smelt the searing meat


• To remove the screws and plate, they had to chisel away and use a hammer to pry the screws loose


• They scrapped away some set-in arthritis and irrigated my ankle

The advantage of having had the operation this way was less down time as you don't suffer the secondary effects of the anesthetics from a GA.

Off to the Hospital

For those following my blog, you may remember that back in December 2006 I broke my left leg. Tomorrow I go back to the Hospital, to be precise the C.H.U Henri Mondor in Creteil.

My angle is still swollen and I am still in pain. The Doctor said that it might be a good idea to remove the screws and plate. He thinks that it will reduce my pain but it in most likelihood would not completely alleviate it. So as I said it is time to go back to the hospital and on thursday the doctor will take out the metal and wash out (irrigate) my angle (to reduce any arthritis that may be settling in).

I will keep you informed...

Moving to Geotagging & Auto-Publishing Flickr to Blog

Being on vacation this week in a very nice part of France (Savoie and the Tarentaise to be precise), I decided to delve a little deeper into geotagging my moblog photos. This is in fact very simple with the HTC P3600(Trinity) as the built-in camera can link itself to the GPS module effectively putting the exact GPS location information in the EXIF data of the photo.
My initial problem was trying to figure out how to get Flickr to auto-process this information and map the photos directly (with-out it, you need to manually place them on the map and of course the Flickr map interface doesn't search GPS coordinates... bahhhhh). This is possible through an option in the «Privacy & Permissions» section of Your Account. The results are available on my Flickr page or through this geoTag Flickr feed.
I also decided to see what would happen with the direct to blog option that is provided in the extend Flickr options. So expect to see some moblog entries here soon.
So what's next! Well as I use Shozu for uploading my photos from the mobile device, I want to see if I can play with more intelligent tagging before it ends up in Flickr.
I am also considering joining Twitxr which seems to be some form of geotagged moblog network...