This article at mozillaquest.com gives a highlight of their search for a good linux desktop system. Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) finds itself facing off against Xandros. All in all, some good things are to be said for Mandriva. One of their emphasis is that a good desktop linux distribution is one that works well “out of the box”.
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Month: August 2005
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Good linux desktop search
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Get counted at the linux counter
One of the problems with “free software” that can be downloaded and installed on multiple machines without expense or legal recourse, is that it’s sometimes hard to know how many people run it. Yes, sure there are web statistics that might tell you if someone is using a different platform than windows. But what about those machines that don’t get used for web browsing, but sit firewalling or mail serving, or file serving their lives away without even getting to be a statistic in the big scheme of “market share” debates?
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Wireless ethernet security
Flexbeta has an article giving a good primer on the different approaches to wireless security that are currently available and what seems to be on track for the next generation of wireless networking. One thing that is worth noting, if it’s transmitted through the air it can be intercepted. Breaking the code is just a matter of time and computing power.
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Planning for disaster recovery
This covers all operating systems really. What would happen if your hard drive crashed right now? What data would you lose? What about if the server room flooded? What if your mission critical system went down. What data would you lose and how long would it take to be back up and running?
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Google not talking to cnet?
According to the tail end of this article, Google has decided they are not talking to CNET new reporters until July 2006. Yet another good example of why it’s a good thing to have competition in the online search market.
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Server Outage
There is one domain that I host which are on a server that has had some major “issues”, backups are in the process of being reloaded and the current estimate is that they will be back up in about two and a half hours. It appears as though there were some data corruption problems, possibly with the first attempt to restore from backup. It appears that the backup restored will be from midnight the night before the outage.
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Suspicious Emails inderectly leading to virus infection
According to The August 4th entry of the isc.sans.org handlers diary, there are some peculiar emails going around. They claim to be for an article claiming an explosion kills 140 in Iraq. It contains a link to a news article that has been altered from it’s original (140 instead of 14 for instance.) It also contains some nasty surprises for the visitor. There is an exploit that requires no user intervention, A cross-site scripting vulnerability (MS05-001) is exploited which runs ppp.hta from your hard drive, which creates a file called netlog.exe, which is launched by Media Player (??), which then retrieves a copy of win32sba.exe, which is the robobot backdoor.
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Windows 2000 Worm vulnerability
Apparently, there is an unpatched vulnerability in Windows 2000 that could open the door for a network worm. The details have not been released to give Microsoft time to deal with a patch. (Microsoft is drawing down support commitments to 2000, releasing a batch of updates just before their timeline to start phasing out support.)
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Microsoft to release 6 updates Tuesday August 9th
According to this release, expect to see 6 updates coming out from Microsoft Tuesday. One will be tagged critical from what I read. It seems like this is a bit large number this time around, but still it could be worse, prepare for patching.
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Windows Vista virus
I know I saw this yesterday somewhere (The Register?), but….. According to this article, proof of concept viruses have already been written for Monad, which is Microsoft’s next revision of the command shell. Now, there is some hesitance to call these viruses the first that would affect Windows Vista because it’s not known when Monad will ship (it may first ship as part of Exchange 12 server).
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