Hot Trends watch: Air Force portal

There was a cluster of searches for "afpc" and "air force portal" this morning, apparently because the Air Force website was posting a list of 12,514 promotions as part of its "largest ever virtual promotion release." 

The online release ensures, the Air Force said, "timely worldwide access to all Airmen and their families."

Though this is not the most mind-boggling news in the world, the number 12,500 is an interesting, if incomplete, insight into just how many people might need to be searching a term for it to get to the top of Google's Hot Trends. 

Clearly there are more than 12,500 people who are up for promotion, so all we'd need to know is how many candidates there were, compared to the number of slots. If there were five candidates for every slot, on average, that would mean you could've gotten in the neighborhood of 60,000 people searching at the same time. But if there were only two people competing for each slot, you might only have 25,000. 

Still, I'm going to take this as a temporary sign that it takes tens of thousands of simultaneous searches to move a term up the Hot Trends list, rather than hundreds of thousands, or millions.

Bubbling up the Google Hot trends list is the following long search phrase: "men with 33.6 inch waists face fines."  But not to worry, the cops aren't coming yet, fellas. 

As alarming as the phrase is to some of us, it's missing several layers of context.  The fat fines are real, but they're being imposed in Japan, not here. 

Turns out this all comes from this report from a CNN correspondent in Japan. 

Worried about a potential obesity epidemic, the Japanese government has begun a program to measure the waistlines of all employees over age 40. For men, the waist size cutoff for being federally overweight is 33.5 inches; for women it's 35.5.  If employees stay hefty, companies could face "massive fines and increased government health premiums," according to the reporter.

It's precious that the specter of fatness becoming illegal caused a Google micro-hysteria this morning.  Are we that afraid of having to lose weight? Personally, I'm not seeing a problem with Japan's efficient solution. Considering the health benefits and costs savings to the society, you'd think there'd be fat-busting laws in every country. The U.S. should definitely throw its weight behind this.

Check out Google's Hot Trends today (click thumbnail at right for full screenshot). By my count, fully 19 of the HT 100 are references to Comcast's e-mail Web site.  If you count #62 ("what happened") then it's exactly 20%...

A message thread at DSLreports has a chronicle of the problem --which Comcast.net service reps apparently said at first was "routine maintenance." Someone on the forum also posted the following screenshot displaying digital graffiti, which was what users saw when they tried to access the comcast.net home page. This clearly qualifies as a hack.

Comcast has acknowledged the security compromise in a statement, the salient parts of which follow:

“Last night users attempting to access Comcast.net were temporarily redirected to another site by an unauthorized person..."

"We believe that our registration information at the vendor that registers the Comcast.net domain address was altered, which redirected the site and is the root cause of today’s continued issues as well. We have alerted law enforcement authorities and are working in conjunction with them.”

The statements adds that Comcast has "no evidence that any customer account information or data has been lost or compromised."

To translate, this means the locus of the problem was not on Comcast's side per se, but rather with their domain resgistrar -- in this case, Network Solutions. The idea being that someone -- the name of hacker group "kryogenics" was part of the graffiti -- managed to access Comcast's registration account -- the one that controls which server a given address points to, and changed the setting so comcast.net temporarily pointed to the second, renegade site.

At the time of this writing, the site was still having problems -- instead of a graphical page, comcast.net was all text.  Personally, I'll be sticking with my Incredimail account for situation-critical communications.

(image courtesy Joy of Tech)

Checking out today's Hot Trends, one we've figured out, one we haven't.

1. Down at number 93 is "beat Internet filtering," a term whose origin is unclear, but whose meaning we can probably guess. Internet filtering is the practice of using software, hardware, legal means or other obstacles to make certain online information inaccessible. In the U.S., many states have laws mandating that computers in schools or public libraries contain filters. And in an increasing number of countries, China being the best-known case, entire swaths of the Internet are censored for everyone -- in fact, according to this (dry but informative) video from Harvard's OpenNet Initiative, around two dozen countries are now using technical means to filter their population's Internet. Check out this tool from Williamsburger.com that allows you to compare image results from Google China and Google U.S.

To beat filtering, you'd need to "hack" through whatever kind of filtering that's being applied, which is easier said than done. There are many kinds of blocking technologies, and like everything else, they're constantly evolving to stay viable. There are other problems with getting around filters. If you're a Burmese citizen, for instance, you may not know which sites are being blocked in the first place, so how would you know to look for it?

If anyone knows the source for the search term, TV, Radio or otherwise, drop a note...

2. 天安门母亲 -- I didn't know this when I picked this off the list, but this phrase actually translates to Tiananmen Mother. This leads back to the Tiananmen Mothers campaign, a group of family members of victims of the 1989 incident that is challenging the official Chinese version of the student protests there. Yesterday, the group released a series of maps showing the locations of the 175 Tiananmen Square deaths.

Hot Trends watch: Fat men face fines

Bubbling up the Google Hot trends list is the following long search phrase: "men with 33.6 inch waists face fines."  But not to worry, the cops aren't coming yet, fellas. 

As alarming as the phrase is to some of us, it's missing several layers of context.  The fat fines are real, but they're being imposed in Japan, not here. 

Turns out this all comes from this report from a CNN correspondent in Japan. 

Worried about a potential obesity epidemic, the Japanese government has begun a program to measure the waistlines of all employees over age 40. For men, the waist size cutoff for being federally overweight is 33.5 inches; for women it's 35.5.  If employees stay hefty, companies could face "massive fines and increased government health premiums," according to the reporter.

It's precious that the specter of fatness becoming illegal caused a Google micro-hysteria this morning.  Are we that afraid of having to lose weight? Personally, I'm not seeing a problem with Japan's efficient solution. Considering the health benefits and costs savings to the society, you'd think there'd be fat-busting laws in every country. The U.S. should definitely throw its weight behind this.

Check out Google's Hot Trends today (click thumbnail at right for full screenshot). By my count, fully 19 of the HT 100 are references to Comcast's e-mail Web site.  If you count #62 ("what happened") then it's exactly 20%...

A message thread at DSLreports has a chronicle of the problem --which Comcast.net service reps apparently said at first was "routine maintenance." Someone on the forum also posted the following screenshot displaying digital graffiti, which was what users saw when they tried to access the comcast.net home page. This clearly qualifies as a hack.

Comcast has acknowledged the security compromise in a statement, the salient parts of which follow:

“Last night users attempting to access Comcast.net were temporarily redirected to another site by an unauthorized person..."

"We believe that our registration information at the vendor that registers the Comcast.net domain address was altered, which redirected the site and is the root cause of today’s continued issues as well. We have alerted law enforcement authorities and are working in conjunction with them.”

The statements adds that Comcast has "no evidence that any customer account information or data has been lost or compromised."

To translate, this means the locus of the problem was not on Comcast's side per se, but rather with their domain resgistrar -- in this case, Network Solutions. The idea being that someone -- the name of hacker group "kryogenics" was part of the graffiti -- managed to access Comcast's registration account -- the one that controls which server a given address points to, and changed the setting so comcast.net temporarily pointed to the second, renegade site.

At the time of this writing, the site was still having problems -- instead of a graphical page, comcast.net was all text.  Personally, I'll be sticking with my Incredimail account for situation-critical communications.

(image courtesy Joy of Tech)

Checking out today's Hot Trends, one we've figured out, one we haven't.

1. Down at number 93 is "beat Internet filtering," a term whose origin is unclear, but whose meaning we can probably guess. Internet filtering is the practice of using software, hardware, legal means or other obstacles to make certain online information inaccessible. In the U.S., many states have laws mandating that computers in schools or public libraries contain filters. And in an increasing number of countries, China being the best-known case, entire swaths of the Internet are censored for everyone -- in fact, according to this (dry but informative) video from Harvard's OpenNet Initiative, around two dozen countries are now using technical means to filter their population's Internet. Check out this tool from Williamsburger.com that allows you to compare image results from Google China and Google U.S.

To beat filtering, you'd need to "hack" through whatever kind of filtering that's being applied, which is easier said than done. There are many kinds of blocking technologies, and like everything else, they're constantly evolving to stay viable. There are other problems with getting around filters. If you're a Burmese citizen, for instance, you may not know which sites are being blocked in the first place, so how would you know to look for it?

If anyone knows the source for the search term, TV, Radio or otherwise, drop a note...

2. 天安门母亲 -- I didn't know this when I picked this off the list, but this phrase actually translates to Tiananmen Mother. This leads back to the Tiananmen Mothers campaign, a group of family members of victims of the 1989 incident that is challenging the official Chinese version of the student protests there. Yesterday, the group released a series of maps showing the locations of the 175 Tiananmen Square deaths.

Hot Trends watch: Comcast hack questions asked, answered

Check out Google's Hot Trends today (click thumbnail at right for full screenshot). By my count, fully 19 of the HT 100 are references to Comcast's e-mail Web site.  If you count #62 ("what happened") then it's exactly 20%...

A message thread at DSLreports has a chronicle of the problem --which Comcast.net service reps apparently said at first was "routine maintenance." Someone on the forum also posted the following screenshot displaying digital graffiti, which was what users saw when they tried to access the comcast.net home page. This clearly qualifies as a hack.

Comcast has acknowledged the security compromise in a statement, the salient parts of which follow:

“Last night users attempting to access Comcast.net were temporarily redirected to another site by an unauthorized person..."

"We believe that our registration information at the vendor that registers the Comcast.net domain address was altered, which redirected the site and is the root cause of today’s continued issues as well. We have alerted law enforcement authorities and are working in conjunction with them.”

The statements adds that Comcast has "no evidence that any customer account information or data has been lost or compromised."

To translate, this means the locus of the problem was not on Comcast's side per se, but rather with their domain resgistrar -- in this case, Network Solutions. The idea being that someone -- the name of hacker group "kryogenics" was part of the graffiti -- managed to access Comcast's registration account -- the one that controls which server a given address points to, and changed the setting so comcast.net temporarily pointed to the second, renegade site.

At the time of this writing, the site was still having problems -- instead of a graphical page, comcast.net was all text.  Personally, I'll be sticking with my Incredimail account for situation-critical communications.

(image courtesy Joy of Tech)

Checking out today's Hot Trends, one we've figured out, one we haven't.

1. Down at number 93 is "beat Internet filtering," a term whose origin is unclear, but whose meaning we can probably guess. Internet filtering is the practice of using software, hardware, legal means or other obstacles to make certain online information inaccessible. In the U.S., many states have laws mandating that computers in schools or public libraries contain filters. And in an increasing number of countries, China being the best-known case, entire swaths of the Internet are censored for everyone -- in fact, according to this (dry but informative) video from Harvard's OpenNet Initiative, around two dozen countries are now using technical means to filter their population's Internet. Check out this tool from Williamsburger.com that allows you to compare image results from Google China and Google U.S.

To beat filtering, you'd need to "hack" through whatever kind of filtering that's being applied, which is easier said than done. There are many kinds of blocking technologies, and like everything else, they're constantly evolving to stay viable. There are other problems with getting around filters. If you're a Burmese citizen, for instance, you may not know which sites are being blocked in the first place, so how would you know to look for it?

If anyone knows the source for the search term, TV, Radio or otherwise, drop a note...

2. 天安门母亲 -- I didn't know this when I picked this off the list, but this phrase actually translates to Tiananmen Mother. This leads back to the Tiananmen Mothers campaign, a group of family members of victims of the 1989 incident that is challenging the official Chinese version of the student protests there. Yesterday, the group released a series of maps showing the locations of the 175 Tiananmen Square deaths.

Hot Trends watch: beat Internet filtering and 天安门母亲

(image courtesy Joy of Tech)

Checking out today's Hot Trends, one we've figured out, one we haven't.

1. Down at number 93 is "beat Internet filtering," a term whose origin is unclear, but whose meaning we can probably guess. Internet filtering is the practice of using software, hardware, legal means or other obstacles to make certain online information inaccessible. In the U.S., many states have laws mandating that computers in schools or public libraries contain filters. And in an increasing number of countries, China being the best-known case, entire swaths of the Internet are censored for everyone -- in fact, according to this (dry but informative) video from Harvard's OpenNet Initiative, around two dozen countries are now using technical means to filter their population's Internet. Check out this tool from Williamsburger.com that allows you to compare image results from Google China and Google U.S.

To beat filtering, you'd need to "hack" through whatever kind of filtering that's being applied, which is easier said than done. There are many kinds of blocking technologies, and like everything else, they're constantly evolving to stay viable. There are other problems with getting around filters. If you're a Burmese citizen, for instance, you may not know which sites are being blocked in the first place, so how would you know to look for it?

If anyone knows the source for the search term, TV, Radio or otherwise, drop a note...

2. 天安门母亲 -- I didn't know this when I picked this off the list, but this phrase actually translates to Tiananmen Mother. This leads back to the Tiananmen Mothers campaign, a group of family members of victims of the 1989 incident that is challenging the official Chinese version of the student protests there. Yesterday, the group released a series of maps showing the locations of the 175 Tiananmen Square deaths.