This one caught my eye as I’ve spent many long hours playing different variations on the old strategy board game Risk. It appears that using Google Maps, a group has managed to write an API that let’s you Play Risk with Google maps as the backdrop.
Month: November 2005
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Mozilla Firefox birthday
According to spreadfirefox.com, a year ago today was the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0
Firefox was released prior to November 9th, 2004 in preview releases and early betas, but the official 1.0 came out a year ago today, hard to believe. According to some sources it has as much as 10% of the web market share, although that’s tough to gauge (varies by site content.) It shipped originally with support for “17 languages and on 5 platforms”.
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It’s a story of a Dell Laptop, named the Inspiron 5150 and it’s full of problems
About a week ago, when I was in the midst of several crises, I had a Dell Inspiron 5150 left with me to look at. I had seen it once before to replace the keyboard (I remembered that it had a nice design to allow easy access to swap a keyboard – something that is usually hit or miss with laptop design.) Anyway, this time it was blue screening before it would let you log in to Windows XP. I booted it up and saw the Welcome screen and before my mouse pointer made it to the username I saw the bluescreen.
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Phpbb include vulnerability scanning
Incidents.org is reporting scanning for phpbb include vulnerabilities through Google. Apparently there is an IRC botnet being “cultivated”. They are scanning for versions of phpBB prior to 2.0.10, the current release is 2.0.18.
The new IRC bot scans for vulnerable systems using Google, when successful it announces that “oopz and sirh0t and Aleks g0t pwned u!”, and has UDP flooding and UDP/ICMP/TCP scanning capabilities.
The file phpbb_patch was found on exploited systems.
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More Sony DRM news
It looks like a list of Sony Music titles with the recent onerous DRM “rootkit” is being gathered. The Sunbelt blog has links to several lists. The EFF has a list here, there are two others though out there, here and here.
Among other things, another post mentions the stupid things Sony-BMG leadership has had to say on the matter…
“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”
and, it’s also noted the installer can be bypassed by pressing the shift key when loading the cd (to skip autorun.) (Does telling this actually violate the DMCA – spreading information on circumventing copy protection?)
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Motorola investing in Fuel Cell tech for small devices
It looks like Motorola is investing in a company that develops fuel cell technology for small devices.
According to the article the cells provide…
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New List of Open Source software for Windows
In an effort to educate more people on the value of open source software, there is the Looplist. The Looplist was highlighted in desktoplinux.com today. It’s essentially a user-collaborated WIKI listing Open Source applications which run on Windows based systems.
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Apple on Intel by January?
It sounds as though the first Apple x86 based systems may show up as early as January of 2006. This means interesting things for those that write open source software. I’ve seen discussions that when the move to x86 happens it will make it easier to port such projects as wine to the Apple platform.
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Microsoft taking a name…
Slashdot has an interesting story up about the background of the selection of Windows Defender. It seems that an Australian software developer had a product called Windows Defender which protected Windows users from malicious websites. Well a short while back he got a call from lawyers associated with Microsoft about trademark infringement over the use of Windows. As part of the deal he would quit using that name and turn over all rights to that name to Microsoft.
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Windows cleanmgr takes too long at compress old files
Here’s a quick fix for Windows 2000 and XP when using cleanmgr to clean out temporary files. I’ve run across many systems that it just freezes (or takes way too long) calculating space saved by compressing old files, or hangs just saying “compress old files”. Well, here’s one way to skip that step.