For many years, most of the Internet ran on ASCII, a character set that had a limited number of accents and diacriticals, and which didn’t support non-Roman script at all.
Unicode, a massive, sprawling replacement, has room for all sorts of characters and alphabets, and can be extended with “private use areas” that include support for Klingon. But for all that, I never dreamt that Unicode was so vast as to contain a special character for a “pile of poo.”
Name: PILE OF POO
Block: Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs Category:
Symbol, Other [So] Index entries: POO, PILE OF
Comments: dog dirt
Version: Unicode 6.0.0 (October 2010)
HTML Entity: 💩
Here is “Pile of Poo” in whatever font your browser renders this page in: 💩 Unicode Character ‘PILE OF POO’ (U+1F4A9)
Read this article:
Unicode’s “Pile of Poo” character
Posted in Humor by .
You’ve no doubt seen the split keyboard that iOS 5 brought to the iPad, but it turns out it has a few hidden buttons on the edges. Here’s how they work. My biggest gripe with the split keyboard was that it forced me to type certain letters—like T or Y—with certain hands. Depending on what I'm typing, sometimes I prefer reaching to T with my right hand, or Y with my left.
It turns out, though, that Apple actually lets you do that with the split keyboard—you just don't see the keys. Try it: tap and drag the keyboard key in the bottom right corner to split the keyboard, then tap next to the Y key. It should type the letter T. Now the split keyboard is quite a bit more enticing!
Originally posted here:
The iPad’s Split Keyboard Has a Few Hidden Buttons that Make Typing Easier [Ios Tips]
Posted in Technology by .
“I’m not sure if we’re the only two on right now or not,” says a voice with an American accent. The voice belongs to a man who identifies himself as Bruce, likely an FBI agent, who had just joined a conference call with other law enforcement officials based in the UK.
The irony of hearing Bruce utter those words at the beginning of the call is that, no, they were not the only people listening in. Somehow, members of Anonymous managed to tap into the call , record it and then post it online for all to hear.
The subject of the conversation? Tracking and arresting online activists and hackers, such as those who secretly associate with Anonymous.
After some casual small talk, the call’s participants share details about progress they’ve made tracking various known hackers, some of whose real names are bleeped out of the audio. Members of so-called hacktivist groups like LulzSec and Anonymous are discussed and updates are given about who’s been arrested.
It appears that whoever gained unauthorized access to the call was able to do so because they were privy to an email invitation containing the call-in details. Whether somebody forwarded it to the infiltrator or, more likely, they directly intercepted it themselves, that message was all they needed to join the call and quietly listen to the FBI and UK law enforcement discuss sensitive matters.
Nothing too groundbreaking is revealed in the call, but the mere existence of such a breach suggests that more sensitive information could be exposed, if it hasn’t already been. Not only this is embarrassing for law enforcement, but it ought to send a wake-up call to any other organizations that conduct business via conference call. With many services, all a competitor or other third party would need to get access to the call is a copy of the original email invite.
Go here to see the original:
Anonymous Shows How Easy it is to Intercept FBI Conference Calls
Posted in Hacking by .
With all the talk of 300Mbps broadband and increased national average speeds , it would have been very easy to miss one of the most important points made in Ofcom’s latest research into the UK’s internet connections – that millions are settling for crappy connections for no good reason.
It’s obviously a good thing that the average speed of broadband connections has increased, up from 6.8 to 7.6mbps in a year, but given that those willing to pay for the privilege (and in the right area) can now get 100Mbps it was inevitable that this would tug up the average.
For me, the fact that Ofcom felt the need to highlight its concerns that people were settling for much worse connections when they could upgrade for little or no extra money, was much more important. “More than 4 in 10 broadband consumers remain on packages with speeds of 10Mbps or less even though many of them would be able to get a higher speed at little or no extra cost if they switched package or provider,” said Ofcom's report.
Why choose below average? So the question here is why? Why are people forking out for broadband and getting less than 10Mbps?
First up there’s a huge and very disgruntled group that are geographically disadvantaged; with many rural areas still incapable of achieving anything like 10Mbps. But Ofcom says that ‘many’ would be able to get more bang for their buck, which brings us back to our original question.
Presumably another big group can be excluded because they get bundled services – meaning that their broadband is part of a package of services for things like television. Within that group you have those that just take broadband because it is there and don’t really need fast connections at all and those that don’t want the inconvenience of finding another provider – even if the service is better.
And then you have another group – quite possibly the largest within Ofcom’s ‘many’ – those that simply do not upgrade for no good reason.
Confusion reigns
And that’s where you hit a major issue; a huge swathe of those people won’t even know that their poor internet connection is costing them the same as a better one. A huge swathe of people that have been left confused and bewildered by the frankly ludicrous misdirection and half-truths in the way companies advertise their broadband speeds.
A huge swathe of people who feel that switching their broadband over is likely to be a confusing, difficult and lengthy process involving call centres, canned music and often obtuse service.
A huge swathe of people that should have been helped much more, and much earlier, by the watchdogs that have allowed the ISPs to ride roughshod over what is clearly right and what can be argued in a court of law.
Fair price, fair product
For most of the people who read TechRadar things like what a megabit and megabyte are, the differences between fibre to the cabinet and fibre to the home and what the star next to “unlimited” data really signifies allow us to make good decisions on our broadband.
But for millions of others they just want to pay a fair price for a fair product and not have to worry about the terminology, and that only works when there are safeguards in place. They want to be told the truth without hyperbole or companies hiding behind semantics, they don’t want to be told they could get up to a speed, they want to know speed that will be.
They think that companies should be fair to them, not sticking small print in fair usage policies. And now, ridiculously belatedly, there are: advertising must be clearer and more accurate, data must be more rigorous and companies will have to give more actual, you know, factual information to people who want to sign up.
But for many the damage has been done; broadband didn’t need to be confusing or difficult but companies have made it so and many of the ISPs seem to be genuinely miffed that they are finally being brought to task.
So perhaps the real question is not why people are not getting fair broadband for a fair price, but how they were allowed to reach this state of affairs in the first place.
See the rest here:
Opinion: Years of deliberate broadband confusion are costing UK