London based human rights group "Privacy International" launches its second  "Stupid Security Competition".

The "Stupid Security Awards" aim to highlight the absurdities of the security industry as "Security has become the smokescreen for incompetent and robotic managers the world over" according Simon Davies PI's director.

The competition closes on October 31st 2006. The award categories are:

• Most Egregiously Stupid Award
• Most Inexplicably Stupid Award
• Most Annoyingly Stupid Award
• Most Flagrantly Intrusive Award
• Most Stupidly Counter Productive Award

The competition is open to anyone from any country & nominations can be sent to stupidsecurity@privacy.org.

I'll will fly to Europe in few days and hope not to meet any future nominate during my trip.

On Speedtest website you can check your upload and download connection speed against 13 differents servers located in 5 differents countries (USA, UK, Nederlands, Australia, New Zealand).

Results including up/down speed, latency & distance can also be shared using preformatted image links.

You have now some data to share with your ISP even if this one will never guarantee a constant end-to-end speed over Internet.

This weekend Microsoft has released the beta version of Windows Live Writer a small desktop application that offer the possibility to create and manage your blog postings offline.

Following features are available:

• WYSIWYG authoring
• Photo publishing
• Map publishing (Windows Live Local)
• Writer SDK
• Spell Check

it's a client for Windows Live Spaces but also works with the following weblogs :

• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• TypePad
• WordPress
• ….

Writer supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability), the Metaweblog API, and the Movable Type API.

Download it here

Will it be better than Qumana ?

A nice applic that shows you with a 10 minutes delay all air traffic around major US airports. Click on the thumbnail to monitor LAX (Los Angeles Intl. Airport).

AirportMonitor is a dynamic, interactive display of air traffic and flight information available on many airport Web sites. AirportMonitor tracks flights from approximately 100 miles from the terminal right down to the runway. View information such as flight origin, destination, aircraft type, altitude, and flight ID. AirportMonitor has a ten minute delay and filtered information for security purposes, but replays with full flight information are available for the previous three months.

Source: Java.com 

Back home after few days in Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh (Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon) the economical capital and largest city of Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh is permanently flooded with very important motobikes & motocycles traffic jams and only few bicycles can still be seen. Driving there is definitively nerves breaking. 

A new gallery is now online with some of the city's key attractions, most of them part of the french colonial architecture. 

may be somethings very limited.