It’s not too hard to pick out the military complex [...]]]> There’s a big stir in the UK – probably an unwisely public stir – about the fact that Google Earth now shows the location of the SAS’s secret base in the English countryside. Armed with the information therein, your correspondent did a little virtual fly-by hissownself.

It’s not too hard to pick out the military complex hard alongside a bucolic village.

On the other hand, you will search in vain for streetside views of a certain Neapolitan neighborhood:

Today, you can see on your computer screen, so realistically that you might almost be there, the streets of the Bronx, the bainlieues of Paris, Amsterdam’s red light district or even Tepito, the stronghold of Mexico City’s drug trade. But you can’t see the Scampia district of Naples, Italy. Like Medellin, home of the Colombian narcos, the casbah of Algiers and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the Scampia district of Naples with its ugly high-rise housing, round-the-clock drug dealing and the last of the turf wars, between the Di Lauro gang and the “Secessionists”, is off-limits for Google Street View, the service that has put the rest of the planet just a mouse click away.

Some places you just don’t go.

Truth be told, I think that as a phone, the iPhone is merely adequate. But as a portable personal computing platform that also enables telephony, it’s top notch.

As marketing goes, it’s pretty fricken’ cool.

We’ll see what delivers.

PS, she asked me: You miss it, don’t you?

Yeah. Yeah, I do.

(The) Mariposa botnet was principally geared towards stealing online login credentials for banks, email services and the like [...]]]> Spain and the FBI cooperated to shut down a botnet that had taken control of 12 million infected PCs, arresting ringleaders who had used a trivially advanced hacking skillset to siphon financial information and passwords from unsuspecting users:

(The) Mariposa botnet was principally geared towards stealing online login credentials for banks, email services and the like from compromised Windows PCs. The malware infected an estimated 12.7 million computers in more than 190 countries…

Mariposa (Spanish for butterfly) botnet malware spread through P2P networks, infected USB drives, and via MSN links that directed surfers to infected websites. Once infected by the Mariposa bot client, compromised machines would have various strains of malware installed (advanced keyloggers, banking trojans like Zeus, remote access trojans, etc) by the hackers to obtain greater control of infected systems.

The botmasters made money by selling parts of the botnet to other cybercrooks, installing pay-per-install toolbars, selling stolen credentials for online services and laundering stolen bank login credentials and credit card details via an international network of money mules. Search engine manipulation and serving pop-up ads was also part of the illegal business model behind the botnet.

Security through obscurity?

Sure, whatever it takes.

There are pdf applications for Amazon.com’s Kindle that allow assiduous aviators to download airport diagrams, departure procedures, arrivals and approach plates, but from everything I’ve [...]]]> The grotesquely named Apple iPad – which apparently broke the internets – has great potential as an electronic flight bag, and may well end up a category killer for legacy equipment.

There are pdf applications for Amazon.com’s Kindle that allow assiduous aviators to download airport diagrams, departure procedures, arrivals and approach plates, but from everything I’ve heard the navigation is klunky, and the Kindle has a tendency to go dim on you, just when you’re over the middle marker.

Apple’s iPhone already has a couple of cool features just waiting to be ported over. On my phone I have Aero Weather, Flight Plan (with DUATS), AOPA’s Airports and Foreflight, as well as the well-intentioned but ultimately unusable WingX, which – theoretically – combines all of the other features with GPS terrain avoidance.

Which would almost be enough to get me flying at night again, if it weren’t for the fact that GPS service is sketchy and the mountains so very unyielding.

All of them are pretty good for different applications on the ground, but not quite the thing for dependable use in flight: The iPhone’s screen is too small for the presbyopic among us, it’s rather slippery when you’ve got one hand on the yoke (or stick) and the other on the throttle and the battery saver puts you in a do-loop when you least expect it.

Garmin’s top-of-the-line handheld/bolt-on is the GPSMAP 696 model, with weather, moving maps, approach procedures and terrain avoidance – but it retails for nearly $3000, while the iPad starts at $500.

Which is, oh – wait: A whole lot less.

There’s no technical reason why the iPad – I really hate that name – can’t do all the tasks of an EFB while providing GPS tracking, live weather updates and terrain avoidance. Once you’ve landed on your cross country, you can email home, browse the web, read a book or work on your presentation. Which, just try that with your MX20.

Build it, developers. We will come.

Now if we can just get the bad guys to leave them laying about in plain sight.