Month: December 2005

  • GMail vulnerability on Atom feed?

    I don’t know about this, and will be curious to see what the answer is…. barrapunto.com had the link to a post from a Gmail user who notes… Gmail has the capability to have a feed of your new messages in Atom format. (We’re talking rss feeds here.) That’s all well and good. He went to bloglines though and tried to setup viewing of his feed…. and saw tons of email – NOT HIS.

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  • The DMCA exemption process…

    Another entry from the “how do the good guys keep from getting their pants sued off…” files. Freedom-to-tinker has an entry on their application for a DMCA waiver. (The DMCA (among other things) makes it against the law to circumvent copy protection (or to communicate ways of circumvention)) It sounds like the exemption process is slanted towards not issuing exemptions, but they’re trying. There are some interesting notes from their application.

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  • Another Google analytics update

    It still looks like Google Analytics may be adding those that requested to be emailed when signups were available. I’ve noticed the last couple days the stats are MUCH more recent. It’s currently 20:00 hours “Google time” on December 1, 2005 and I see stats for my site through 15:00 “google time” in the analytics summary. So that’s pretty good, if it can be within 6 or so hours I’d say they’re doing pretty well.

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  • Great space picture of the Crab nebula

    Off topic – Space pictures have always held a special fascination for me and today when I ran across this one I couldn’t resist mentioning it. Maybe it’s all the space-related movies growing up, or just the amazing mix and blend of colors on a black background that the composite images give us.

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  • Gmail Virus scanning and more

    I saw a link yesterday about Gmail adding virus scanning to their featureset. It’s very good to see, they have very good junk filtering at this point and had a blanket policy that .exe’s were banned (which would stop a good percentage of the bugs.) Anyway, it’s good to see this is added. (I wouldn’t mind if there were a config switch to opt out, to help send samples to virustotal or wherever, but there are other ways to do that so it’s not a big deal and probably better that it’s not optionally disabled.) Article (brief) here.

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  • How much is it worth to you to have a responsive website?

    How can I say this…. this is one of the worst ideas I think I’ve heard this week from an ISP. (Maybe in a long time, but I’d have to think on that a few minutes.) An executive at Bellsouth thinks that ISP’s ought to be able to charge certain websites/companies to ensure responsiveness for that ISP’s users. In other words, they would want to charge say… Yahoo $xxxxx to make sure that the yahoo site is faster than the Google site for Bellsouth customers.

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  • Linksys changing WRT54G wireless router

    Linux devices has a story on the Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. The WRT54G has been known for quite a while to be running linux and a community has sprouted up with customized software to add many neat features to the access points. However, Linksys is moving to VxWorks as the operating system for the routers in a move that will cut memory and flash sizes installed. (VxWorks is more of an embedded OS and many other network hardware makers have made the move.)

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  • Home Linux terrabyte backup system

    This is something I’ve wanted to build for some time. I hadn’t actually thought about a terrabyte of storage, but… linux journal has the article on making your own home network backup storage solution using an old pc, linux and relatively cheap discs. The concept of any backup system is redundancy so that a single failure doesn’t take out your data.

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  • The letters keep coming…

    I really don’t know how a SMALL operation can do any kind of software scanning with all the…. legal challenges to have to answer to. Of course, I suppose some don’t, they just cave and their scanners suffer in effectiveness. Anyway, Sunbelt Software blogs about ANOTHER cease and desist letter they’ve received from the makers of CasinoontheNet, Cassava. I still think there should be class action suits against spyware/malware/difficult to remove-ware/makers that use deceptive practices to get their software installed/make it a nightmare for an end-user to remove and generally wind up COSTING end-users money having their pc’s cleaned.

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  • Sunbelt acquiring Kerio Personal Firewall

    Kerio Personal firewall will be acquired by Sunbelt according to the sunbeltblog. It looks as though the acquisition will be complete within a month. They hope to offer downloads “within weeks”. There will be a price reduction and discounts for Sunbelt users, and discounts for Kerio users on Sunbelt software. Also it looks like the free edition will continue.

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