Published: Sunday, October 12, 2008
Technology Notebook
Endure ads with the pain at your dentist's office
Talk about your captive audience.
Advertising is coming to the dentist's chair in the form of video goggles that patients wear while getting their cleaning or root canal.
The company behind InChairTV figures advertisers for toothpaste, toothbrushes, mouthwash and other dental products will be willing to pay higher rates to reach people seeking a diversion from dental procedures. Companies selling travel packages and other stress-relief services might also find the dentist's chair prime time to make their pitches.
Willing patients put on a special headset to watch movies or television shows licensed from The Walt Disney Co. and its ABC network. The programs and infomercials are sent to dentists on DVDs, but soon they will be downloadable over the Internet.
MySpace, HP hook up on photo printing
Among all the profiles on MySpace, the social networking site's users have uploaded almost 4 billion photos. Now through an agreement with Hewlett-Packard Co., MySpace hopes people will increasingly print these images and, eventually, buy photo-embellished merchandise, too.
MySpace and HP said this week that they are starting a business relationship that will put Web-based printing software from HP into the photo sections of MySpace.
This means MySpace pages will display HP-branded click-to-print buttons. The buttons are meant to make it easier for users to print content stored on their MySpace profiles -- like photos and blog postings -- than it would be to do so through their Web browsers.
The buttons are expected to appear in November on MySpace in the U.S., Australia, Western Europe and Canada.
Cyber-peril lurks in fake YouTube pages
Savvy Internet users know that downloading unsolicited computer programs is one of the most dangerous things you can do online. It puts you at great risk for a virus or another time bomb from a hacker.
But even some sophisticated surfers could get snookered by a sneaky new attack in which criminals create fake YouTube pages -- dead-on replicas of the real site -- to push their malicious software and make it look like it's safe stuff coming from a trusted source.
A program circulating online helps hackers build those fake pages. Users who follow an e-mail pointing them to one of the pages would see an error message that claims the video they want won't play without installing new software first. That error message includes a link the hacker has provided to a malicious program, which delivers a virus.
Even worse: once the computer is infected, it's simple for the hacker to silently redirect the victims to a real YouTube page to see videos they were hoping to see -- and hide the crime.
"It's spot-on accurate, and that is scary," said Jamz Yaneza, threat research manager for security software company Trend Micro Inc. "If I were watching YouTube videos all day I would probably click on this one."
The Associated Press
Advertising is coming to the dentist's chair in the form of video goggles that patients wear while getting their cleaning or root canal.
The company behind InChairTV figures advertisers for toothpaste, toothbrushes, mouthwash and other dental products will be willing to pay higher rates to reach people seeking a diversion from dental procedures. Companies selling travel packages and other stress-relief services might also find the dentist's chair prime time to make their pitches.
Willing patients put on a special headset to watch movies or television shows licensed from The Walt Disney Co. and its ABC network. The programs and infomercials are sent to dentists on DVDs, but soon they will be downloadable over the Internet.
MySpace, HP hook up on photo printing
Among all the profiles on MySpace, the social networking site's users have uploaded almost 4 billion photos. Now through an agreement with Hewlett-Packard Co., MySpace hopes people will increasingly print these images and, eventually, buy photo-embellished merchandise, too.
MySpace and HP said this week that they are starting a business relationship that will put Web-based printing software from HP into the photo sections of MySpace.
This means MySpace pages will display HP-branded click-to-print buttons. The buttons are meant to make it easier for users to print content stored on their MySpace profiles -- like photos and blog postings -- than it would be to do so through their Web browsers.
The buttons are expected to appear in November on MySpace in the U.S., Australia, Western Europe and Canada.
Cyber-peril lurks in fake YouTube pages
Savvy Internet users know that downloading unsolicited computer programs is one of the most dangerous things you can do online. It puts you at great risk for a virus or another time bomb from a hacker.
But even some sophisticated surfers could get snookered by a sneaky new attack in which criminals create fake YouTube pages -- dead-on replicas of the real site -- to push their malicious software and make it look like it's safe stuff coming from a trusted source.
A program circulating online helps hackers build those fake pages. Users who follow an e-mail pointing them to one of the pages would see an error message that claims the video they want won't play without installing new software first. That error message includes a link the hacker has provided to a malicious program, which delivers a virus.
Even worse: once the computer is infected, it's simple for the hacker to silently redirect the victims to a real YouTube page to see videos they were hoping to see -- and hide the crime.
"It's spot-on accurate, and that is scary," said Jamz Yaneza, threat research manager for security software company Trend Micro Inc. "If I were watching YouTube videos all day I would probably click on this one."
The Associated Press
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