Month: August 2005

  • Titan Rain – China attempting to crack US computers?

    According to an article at the Washington Post, it appears that there are a large number of attacks against Defense related non-classified computers coming from (at least in the last hop) computers residing in China. It’s unclear whether these attacks are REALLY originating from China or if crackers are using Chinese machines as a convenient haven before making the attack on Defense related US machines.

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  • Developergo linux Livecd review

    The thing I love about linux livecd’s is the ability to try before you make much of a commitment. You can boot, test, evaluate, and then reboot and be back at your usual desktop as if nothing has happened. (With emulators like QEMU and VMWare you don’t even have to reboot the PC.) There are a lot of Developer tools under linux, but until now I haven’t been aware of a distribution (livecd or otherwise) that is emphasizing those.

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  • Mandrive Linux 2006 Beta 3

    Looks like Mandriva has released beta 3 in the release cycle for their 2006 release. There is a full review of the beta with plenty of screenshots and the changelog detailed at distroreviews.com. The news is just being posted on the main mandrivalinux site.

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  • W3C registers comment with Copyright office

    As I mentioned a couple weeks back, the US Copyright office had a notice that the new pre-registration system MAY not support browsers other than Internet Explorer. (This news update at the Register claims Netscape as well. The W3C has registered a comment with the US Copyright Office and that is reported in the link above.

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  • New protocol to identify location of access point users?

    Intel has developed a new technology that will more precisely identify where a wireless user is. The previous approach has used signal strength to more than one access point as a guage. This new approach uses a time-stamped packet from two access points. The difference between the packet stamp and the arrival time will give a more precise measure of where the mobile user is.

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  • Power breakthrough for mobile devices?

    I’ve seen a reference to UltraCell which has announced a new product which is essentially a small portable fuel cell capable of providing 25 Watts of power using hot-swappable methanol canisters. It looks as though they’ve got a military joint project for the development of portable power systems. From reading the product brochures for the ultracell25 and ultracellxx90 (which provides 45 watts of output) it looks fairly promising.

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  • Google Mail now open for signups

    Google Mail (GMail) has up until now been open to signups by invitation only. It seems they’ve opened up their process a bit and if you have a mobile phone, you can signup using that. It’s interesting I was reading last night how the invitation process was perhaps a clever way to keep the spammers out.

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  • Google news rss feeds update

    I was just at google news and noticed that they’ve apparently fixed the headers of their pages so that the “Add live feed” button automatically displays at the bottom of the firefox browser window when you browse their page. (I’m currently browsing it for a search.) Nice work Google…. I know when it was first announced this feature was not working which left me feeling as though it was slightly limited in it’s usefulness.

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  • Western North Carolina Earthquake

    We had a slight earthquake around here in the last half hour. It sounds like Buncombe and Madison Counties felt it. The summary from USGS which I’ll include at the end seems to say it was 3.8 on the Richter Scale and centered near Hot Springs. We don’t get too many quakes in the Western NC area, but there is the Brevard fault that runs through the area.

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  • Porn Spam indictments…

    The Security Fix is reporting that the Justice department will imminently indict four people accused of sending large volumes of porn spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM act which requires explicit junkmail to be specifically labeled “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” in the subject line.

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