House Rejects Net Neutrality Rules. The US House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it. By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others. [OSNews]
Tag Archives | PHP
Microsoft Genuine Advantage phones home daily.
OSNews posts Microsoft Plans Better Disclosures of Tool. “Microsoft acknowledged Wednesday that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker.” Ya think?
The article goes on to quote: “It's kind of a safety switch,” said David Lazar, who directs the Windows Genuine Advantage program.”
Is this Trustworthy Computing?
Microsoft leaps to nearly 30% of web market, Apache down to 3/5ths
OSNews points to Netcraft: Microsoft Continues to Chip Away at Apache's Lead. “Microsoft continues to gain share in the web server market, chipping away at Apache's commanding lead. The number of hostnames on Windows servers grew by 4.5 million, giving Microsoft 29.7% market share, a gain of 4.25% for the month. Apache had a decline of 429K hostnames, and loses 3.5% to 61.25%. Apache's lead over Microsoft, which stood at 48.2% in March, has been narrowed to 31.5%, a shift of 16.7% in just three months.”
Wow! That's a phenomenally large shift in a short time period. Looking at the historical graph, the speed of changing is unprecedented. Even with the large shift of parked domains, there's something interesting going on. Did Windows Server 2003 R2 deliver some new compelling feature that caused several large hosting providers to shift over? Did they get a killer pricing deal?
SANS ISC analyzes a new piece of malware
SANS Internet Storm Center logs a chilling tale of a new piece of maliciousness out there infecting Windows, not yet detected by any virus detectors: A malware jungle, (Tue, Jun 6th). “Detection We got an interesting piece of malware from one of our readers, Robert. Robert detected one …”
Symantec patches AntiVirus Corporate Edition
SANS Internet Storm Center posts Symantec Patch Posted, (Sat, May 27th). “Symantec has just posted patches for the Security Advisory SYM06-010.” Note that these patches seem to be for the Corporate Edition of Symantec’s anti-virus tool. Get patching!
Hacking WordPress with Visual FoxPro
My first attempt at importing blog postings from Radio Userland to WordPress resulted in over seventy categories. Every post with a different combination of categories like “MySQL; LAMP; Technology; Security” created a new category with that exact name, rather than a one-to-many post-to-categories representation. WordPress supports this, as does Radio. The communication breakdown occured between the two, in an export routine I used that created MT-compatible text files.
I could have kept experimenting with different imports, but I’d rather just plow ahead with what I’ve got, so I took a look at the WordPress schema and figured out what I’d need to hack. I used Visual FoxPro to read in the category table, figure out which (multiple) category posts I should have instead of the single, multi-category category, and rewrote the many-to-many file that joins the posts to the categories.
That narrowed it down to 15 categories. I added a new one, “Personal” for notes about politics and personal goings-on. I hope to squash the four, now three “My” categories, which are the old example categories left over from the original Radio install. Stay tuned!
I noted the counts of the number of posts per category was showing zero for several categories. There’s a (denormalized) category_count field in the category table. I popped open phpMyAdmin on the server to poke around and finally issued a “update wp_categories set category_count = (select count(*) from wp_post2cat where category_id = cat_ID)” to get the counts to update. Thirteen rows updated in 0.0635 sec. Darn near as fast as Rushmore.
GROKLAW
GROKLAW quoting a source at Stanford Law, reports: “The Court also held that the website editors were journalists entitled to claim California’s Journalist Shield…” Yes! Freedom of the Press belongs to WordPress, too!
Things You Should Know Before Switching To Mac
OSNews: Things You Should Know Before Switching to Mac. “Macs 'just work' so often, and so well, that I'd rather just use my computer than spend all my time maintaining it. There are already scores of religious fanboy zealots who are going to tell you how great the Mac is, and why you should switch. I'm not going to. I'll let them convince you. But beware. Just because the Mac is an excellent computer, that doesn't mean it's panacea. Here are some things you're going to want to pay attention to as you switch.”
Good article. I am a “user” on the Mac: mail, web browsing, blogging, and terminal into other machines where I work. I've made little effort to learn more than I needed to know to get my mail and make backups. The machine is elegantly easy for that
Microsoft Patches 3 vulnerabilities: Flash (!), Exchange, DTS
InfoWorld reports “Microsoft released one critical security update for its Exchange messaging server and two security updates for Windows on Tuesday, one of which was critical… In Microsoft’s rating system, a critical vulnerability means it could allow unauthorized software to be installed without user action… The third patch released Tuesday fixes two vulnerabilities in Windows rated as “moderate,” Microsoft said… More information and Microsoft’s monthly security bulletin can be found at its Web site“.
Funny, I would not have thought that Adobe Flash was a product MSFT would be responsible for patching, but it appears they shipped it in some of their components. Watch out for the Exchange patch – SANS Internet Storm Center is reporting it cripples Blackberries using the Blackberry Enterprise Server.
MS06-018, 019 and 020 ship this week. It’s the 19th week of the year.
Kubuntu Getting a Higher Profile in the Ubuntu Family
OSNews reports KDE to Become Better Supported on the Ubuntu Platform. “At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.”
Good deal. I’ve been using KDE with Ubuntu for the last couple of versions and I like its responsiveness, especially on some of the slower hardware (PII-266 and -366 laptops) I’m using.