Daily Archives:February 24th, 2008

Achilles’ Insignia

It’s nice to think that if Paris had just taken a few photos of Helen back to Troy, rather than the girl herself, the city might have been spared a great deal of inconvenience.

If, however, he had also chosen to jump into his chariot and pop off to the nearest Best Buy to get a digital photo frame (onto which he could load the photos from his Olympus), things might not have gone so well. Last month, customers started hectoring the store – am I pushing this too far? – when it was reported that the USB-connecting Insignia frames came pre-installed with a nasty ‘trojan horse’ virus.

Now it appears that some of these frames have several other nasties on them… or at least remnants which would indicate that PCs used in their manufacture needed much better quarantining.

The ease with which USB storage can be embedded into almost anything these days allows for some wonderful things to be done. But we shouldn’t forget that something that we don’t even think of as a storage device may look completely harmless, yet may be concealing something rather less so.

I’m just wondering what nasty surprises could be in store if they ever make a USB-configurable My Little Pony

Watching your favourite magazine

A great post by Michael Rosenblum about how print journalists are rather good at becoming video journalists.

Thanks to John for the link, both to this and to Sean Smith’s amazing “Inside the Surge” footage from Iraq

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser