The Null Device

2009/10/10

The New South Wales Police's Computer Crime Investigation Unit has some advice for people who do their banking online: don't use Windows.

The first rule, he said, was to never click on hyperlinks to the banking site and the second was to avoid Microsoft Windows.
"If you are using the internet for a commercial transaction, use a Linux boot up disk - such as Ubuntu or some of the other flavours. Puppylinux is a nice small distribution that boots up fairly quickly.
"It gives you an operating system which is perfectly clean and operates only in the memory of the computer and is a perfectly safe way of doing internet banking," van der Graaf said.
Meanwhile, one of the people chosen to have a Windows 7 launch party, is putting the party kit Microsoft sent him on eBay. He's keeping the copy of Windows 7, but in its place, adding a list of the excuses that all the people whom he invited gave for not being able to show up:
Chris: Found out Windows 7 not available on 5.25" floppy.
Kevin: I'll be over as soon as I shut down my laptop. XP still has 72 updates to go.
Mike: I was going to come to your launch party but then a girl called.
Ira: Sorry, my guild has a raid.

ebay fail microsoft security windows 0

Simon Reynolds has a piece in the Graun about the history of synthpop in 1980s Britain:

In some ways the crucial word in synth-pop isn't "synth" but "pop". The British groups who took over the charts at the dawn of the 80s were catchy and concise. Here they followed the lead of Kraftwerk, who were not only the first group to make a whole conceptual package/weltanschauung out of the electronic age, but were sublime tunesmiths. It's righteous that Kraftwerk's long-awaited remastered catalogue is getting reissued at almost the same time as the long-awaited remastered catalogue of the Beatles, because Hütter & Co rival the Fab Four for both their transformative impact on pop and their melodic genius... Equally inspiring to the synth-pop artists was Kraftwerk's formality: their grey suits and short hair stood out at a time of jeans and beards and straggly locks, heralding a European future for pop, a decisive break with America and rock'n'roll.
Synth-pop went through two distinct phases. The first was all about dehumanisation chic. That didn't mean the music was emotionless (the standard accusation of the synthphobic rocker), but that the emotions were bleak: isolation, urban anomie, feeling cold and hollow inside, paranoia... The second phase of synth-pop reacted against the first. Electronic sounds now suggested jaunty optimism and the gregariousness of the dancefloor, they evoked a bright, clean future just round the corner rather than JG Ballard's desolate 70s cityscapes. And the subject matter for songs mostly reverted to traditional pop territory: love and romance, escapism and aspiration. The prime movers behind synth-pop's rehumanisation were appropriately enough the Human League (just check their song titles: Open Your Heart, Love Action, These Are The Things That Dreams Are Made Of).
"Electro" in the early-90s meant cutting-edge, the future-now; nowadays "electro" refers to the kind of sounds that lit up hipster bars in east London through this past decade and then went mainstream this year with La Roux and Lady Gaga, which is to say synthetic pop that doesn't use the full capacity of the latest digital technology, and is therefore almost as quaint as if it were made using a harpsichord.
The article ties in with a BBC4 documentary titled Synth Britannia, which airs next week.

culture electronica kraftwerk music simon reynolds synthpop uk 2