As I was searching for some things today using Google, I noticed that more and more websites were coming up erroneously as “Malware Sites” as determined by Google. In fact, after a few minutes, EVERY site came up with “This site may harm your computer”. Check out the screenshot (notice that it says that google.com is in the list of websites that may harm your computer):

Anyway, what’s up with that? Did Google itself get hacked, or have some kind of huge server meltdown? Whatever is going on, it essentially makes Google unusable. I never thought that Google could get taken down, but it looks like they sure did. I just wonder if anyone will ever publicly acknowledge this happened.

Edit: looks like about 45 minutes later, Google is back to normal. I wonder who’s going to get fired over this little mishap?

I was thinking about getting a radio receiver lately (probably the Icom PCR1500) and I stumbled onto a couple of neat sites.

The first one is called “HamSphere”, and it’s an interesting program that turns your computer into a Ham Radio without any extra hardware. You could also think about it as being a kind of simulator. While it doesn’t transmit any RF (what’s the fun in that, you might ask?) I still think it’s pretty cool in that you can talk with other Hams and using all the lingo that you’re supposed to, with real shortwave propagation simulation.

It is a java program, meaning it will work on Windows, Linux, and Mac. You don’t need to have a Ham license to use this radio.

The next thing I found was also pretty neat – it’s called Globaltuners and it allows you to not only listen, but actively change settings on other peoples’ radios around the world. You can, for example, listen to air traffic in England or a radio station in Australia – all you need to know is the frequency you want (and make sure no one else is listening in at the moment). Unfortunately, there are only a small number of radio stations that you can tune yourself (13 at the moment). But the idea is pretty cool!