The securityfix has a post on the “dirty little secret” about antivirus. Eugene Kaspersky of Kaspersky antivirus has posted an introspective article on the antivirus industry and it’s current problems. The biggest problem with antivirus is that it’s always one step behind the virus writers. Antivirus software only can prevent you being infected by those viruses that the antivirus software knows about. In other words a quick, fast spreading infection can hit you anywhere between hours-days before your AV vendor has an update.
Month: November 2005
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Microsoft’s unpatched security bugs
George Ou at ZDnet is mystified (as many of us are) at why Microsoft can’t patch ALL their security vulnerabilities. Most of the unpatched vulnerabilities are considered minor (as was the 6 month old bug that in the last week was discovered could be exploited for more than a Denial of Service…) His point is, if small companies (even open source groups) can patch ALL security bugs big and small, then why can’t Microsoft with it’s legions of coders?
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Moving to Open Source quietly
ZDnet UK has another article on how many businesses prefer to make a move to open source software fairly quietly. This should be no surprise really given the news and circus-type feel some of the public “studies” of a large company or other organization moving to linux or replacing Microsoft Office. In many cases, there’ve been “personal visits” from Steve Ballmer to try to keep the organization in the Microsoft camp, lot’s of news articles, outside individuals lobbying one way or the other.
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ZDNET.uk takes a look at linux on the business desktop
It was nice to see linux on the business desktop getting a serious look at zdnet.uk It looks like they give a fair run down of the main business class applications (Office Suite/email/etc.) While pointing out that the installers were something that in a business environment IT staff would be dealing with. They seem to favor the GNOME desktop over KDE as being able to sit down and get right to work in.
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Linux LiveCD for security professionals/penetration testers
I hadn’t heard of this distro before, but read at distrowatch, that Troppix has released version 1.2 of their livecd. It supports many wireless chipsets, is aimed to improve look and feel and include the latest versions of several utilities (nessus, metasploit, aircrack).
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ABC news weighs in on the new browser wars
ABC News has an article weighing in on the renewed browser wars in a comparison of the upcoming release of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Basically, they say that those with little motivation to move from Explorer will have even less after the release of 7 (the user interface will be similar to the others…tabbed browsing, etc.) He does point out that the other browsers aren’t standing still.
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200GB optical storage not enough – try 300GB
InPhase Technologies (lucent spinoff) is readying an optical storage drive that can hold 300GB per disc. It’s expected to read and write 10 times faster than current DVD drives and uses “Tapestry holographic memory technology”. The discs are expected to be a bit thicker than DVD’s and about 13cm (~5.11 inches)
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Keep in shape while playing video games
Couldn’t pass this engadget entry up. It’s a treadmill for first-person shooter games. The idea is that the characters walking/running speed is controlled by the speed of the player walking on the treadmill. Some of the FPS I’ve seen take hours to get through all the levels, or to get “fluent” in. I would think you’d be in pretty good shape going this route.
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Linux won’t boot – corrupt MBR (Master Boot Record) repair tip
How many times have I seen this, a dual-boot system with a sideways Master Boot Record (MBR). This is one of those ways that Windows systems sometimes don’t “play well with others”. This tip at linuxhelp.blogspot.com tells of an unfortunate Windows hibernate that rendered his system unbootable. A linux cd is all it takes to repair the damage.