Computer Tips -Tech Info

Month: April 2011

  • Kindle With Special Offers Debuts at $114

    So, today there is an advertising supported kindle that sells for $25 less than its cheapest cousin which is the kindle wifi. What will it look like? The screensavers are one place that ads will show up. Also at the bottom of the home page. (It appears that you won’t have ads in the middle of your book.) I’m wondering if a $25 discount is enough to encourage someone to go for this version over the wifi?

    It’s hard for me to say since I went ahead and sprung for the 3g version at $189. From their descriptions the advertising support seems relatively unobtrusive. (Much less so than google ads…. I could see them setting aside a part of EACH page of a text to put ads which would be annoying.)

    So what do you think – will the $25 discount make for more sales?

    Is any kind of advertising too much on this kind of device?

  • The Great Lizamoon SQL Injection Attack – March-April 2011

    Well – Friday things started getting interesting on tech news sites. Most sites were running phony April fools stories and a few including websense was running with a major attack going on against many SQL based websites. Details were sketchy – people were told to look for ur.php files in their web directory (which isn’t exactly a good test to see if your site has been infected by this SQL injection…) “<script src=http://lizamoon.com/ur.php”> is an example of the code that is inserted into sql databases and what it basically does is force visitors to visit a scareware site where malware may be installed onto their computer that claims they have a virus…. (how many of those have we seen in the last 5-10 years?)

    One of my annoyances with tech news (and especially virus news) coverage is that when a story gets big enough to be covered by the big media, they never do it justice. I want information. What is this attacking? What programs are vulnerable, is there a pattern?

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