Recent Posts
In the SANS – Internet Storm Center Handler’s Diary on December 29th 2006 they describe the troubles that can occur when a user innocently chooses a likely search result from a popular search engine in “Pain reliever with serious side effects.” A chilling story. The moral of the story: anti-virus and anti-malware and firewalls aren’t [...]
It’s a slow week in the tech world, nestled between Christmas and New Years, with nothing to read but insipid the-year-that-was technical review rehashes and pundits pontificating their predictions. But wait! A newsflash! Microsoft is trying to influence their unpaid champions, by slipping a couple of loaded laptops out there for “review,” no strings attached. [...]
Eric S. Raymond posts World Domination 201, the second part (here’s the first) of the Free/Open Source Software/GNU/Linux cabal’s plan to take over the world. I don’t find this anywhere near as scary as the Halloween Documents. I would like a set of codecs to legitimately play my legitimately owned/viewed Quicktime, MP3, and DVD collections. [...]
I’m switching my laptop machine from Ubuntu 6.06 to Fedora Core 6, at least temporarily. The two are both eminently usable; differences are more with fit and finish and where they hide things than major functionality issues, imo. Mostly, I suspect it will be a matter of learning my way around and Googling the correct [...]
A favorite Saturday radio show is Michael Feldman’s “Whad’YaKnow” with its predictable lineup of standup, quiz shows, interviews and yes, the Disclaimers. Since it seems I’m not a lucky winner of an Acer Ferrarri for all the nice things I’ve said about Vista, I want to take a stand here and say that I’m not [...]
Over at Scripting News: 12/21/2006, Dave Winer blogs, “Today I received a link to a patent granted to Microsoft, where they claim to have invented all this stuff. Presumably they’re eventually going to charge us to use it. This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS.”
I’m no patent [...]
Security is a process and not a feature. One of the easier tasks is keeping up with updates. FireFox (2.0 and 1.5) and Thunderbird each have security updates coming. They should automatically notice the new versions and offer to update it, but you may need to force it manually if you've somehow disabled updates, or [...]
SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green reports “Skype 'worm' whinnies…, (Tue, Dec 19th). It appears that the possible Skype “worm” that we reported on yesterday is actually more of a Trojan Horse…”
One more time: an attachment, whether it shows up in email, IM, Skype, floppy disk, USB tab or in the transporter room, is from [...]
Perhaps it's not your imagination. Over at eWeek, Larry Selzer asks “Who's Behind the Spam Surge?”. “As I discussed several weeks ago, everyone's seen that there has been a massive surge in spam over the last couple of months. More researchers are weighing in on what's behind it.”
Slashdot posting: Vista Zero-Day Exploit For Sale. Snakepit Bit writes “Underground hackers are hawking a zero-day exploit for Windows Vista at $50,000 a pop, according to computer security researchers at Trend Micro.”
I wouldn't pay for it. I hear if you wait a while, it'll show up on your Vista machines, free.
