Posts by Stephen

Free Wi-Fi still a goer in San Fran'

Free the Net is unsuable anyway

I live in the Mission district of San Francisco, and while my laptop finds "Free the Net" on a fairly regular basis, I manage to associate with it maybe one time in three: the signal strength is always awful, even though I've tried different locations it is never any good.

On the occasions when I have managed to connect, I've never managed to move a single byte of data over it. I can't tell if it's oversubscribed and just choked, or if it's all a fake and they don't actually provide any internet connection at all, but I have not once in several months of trying succeeded in using it at all.

My experience is shared by those of my friends who have bothered to try it... I kind of wonder what they're spending all this money for. If this is the level of service that they wish to offer, I should have bid for the contract at half the price ;)

Webmail-creating Trojan targets Gmail

"Pick the kitten" doesn't work

A multiple choice option such as "pick the kitten from the puppies" won't work, because the limited number of options makes it worthwhile to guess. If there's one kitten and four puppies, for example, that's a 1 in 5 chance of success - it's trivial for a trojan to keep trying until it guesses correctly.

More importantly, there are already WAY too many pictures of kittens on the internet, so we don't need anything that would make the situation worse.