The Motley Fool: “The software king’s embarrassing infection points to greater security issues.”
Archive | January, 2003
Paid Up at Last
I took advantage of Radio’s offer for a free 30-day trial, and have enjoyed the system. While I’ve still got a lot to learn, I can see that it will supply my needs for some time to come, so I paid up today.
Be on the lookout for Xupiter
Wired News reports: Sneaky Toolbar Hijacks Browsers “Internet users are mystified by a tricky browser add-on that installs itself without permission and defies attempts to remove it. Some are calling the program the most insidious thing on the Web.” By Michelle Delio. Slashdot follows up World’s Most Annoying IE Toolbar. I still think this is an issue where we expect too much from consumers. The SlashDot crowd does its usual rants of “People ought to know better than to leave the IE default security settings in place” or “Mozilla is better” or “IE is a security nightmare” without facing the reality that people accept the machine they are given. Maybe the ‘default’ radio that comes with your car isn’t the best, but you don’t have to worry about it hijacking you.
The Tao of Programming
Saw a SlashDot posting for The Tao of Programming [Edit: updated URL]. A printed copy of the book has an honored place on the bookshelf.
802.11g update
Son Steve, who’s earning internship credits from NHTI working on connecting his dad’s company to the Internet, spent a couple hours this weekend swapping out the cable’s older LinkSys router to be used for the new DSL drop, and swapping in LinkSys’ new WRT64G 802.11g router/WAP combo box. After a few false starts, we were up and running: 3 wireless laptops, one wireless desktop, three wired boxes, port forwarding, 128-bit WEP, MAC filtering, and the whole nine yards. The WRT54G doesn’t have the ability to write out logs like the older BEFSR41 does, but I’m looking forward to testing out LinkLogger on the DSL line.
Red Hat ‘End of Life’ Decision Explained by Red Hat
With phrases like “it’s become clear that this one size fits all productization of open source technologies no longer addresses these markets effectively.” and “As we worked on Red Hat Linux 8.0 we realized that Red Hat Linux’s lifecycle no longer made much sense” I’m afraid this response from Jeremy Hogan of Red Hat may confuse and inflame rather than clarify. RH 7/x was a great leap forward, to coin a phrase, and 8.0 rocks – solid, simple, clean – but to assume from the last three data points that everyone is now going to abandon the Linux way and completely rev their machines each year is brain-dead.
Cringely: SBC Wants Your Money
Robert X. Cringely, the person not the trademark, reports that SBC is considering following up on a patent which claims to be the original concept of having a static element linked to dynamic content. Um, I suppose that isn’t explcitly what a hyperlink is, but I can’t believe there isn’t prior art…
Oops.
Microsoft fails Slammer’s security test. Internal memos show that the software giant hadn’t patched its own network against the Slammer worm, causing many of its services to fail. [CNET News.com]
"A lot of people see this as a wake-up call"
MacWhispers: Apple’s Microsoft Word Killer. There may be some truth to this; one of my sources has revealed that Keynote is only one in a line of apps. [Hack the Planet]
"A lot of people see this as a wake-up call"
Red Hat intros 12 month only support on ‘consumer’ OSes. Surely not a ‘switch to Advanced Server’ stick, people? [The Register]