The Open Source blog at zdnet has an article today on the Wikipedia. “Is Wikipedia a threat or a menace?” is the title… (which doesn’t give leeway for it to be a good thing I guess…) Anyway it raises an interesting point. Over the last few days there was a lot of press about (from the article above) “John Siegenthaler, a former Kennedy aide who found that his own entry falsely called him a suspect in his boss’ murder.” Now the Wikipedia is an online collaborated encyclopedia. Anyone can sign up and start editing whether it’s fact or not. There is a great responsibility to this…
Author: Avery
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Microsoft touts Windows vista restart manager
Okay – here we go…. Microsoft is talking about a new feature of Vista that allows you to …
update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine.
If that works as advertised that’s great. Update something related to networking, just restart networking *(kind of like what unix based systems do “service network stop/start/restart…)
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AMD comes out on top in Dual Core CPU showdown
ZDnet has a showdown between AMD and Intel dual core processors. It looks as though AMD has won in every comparison. This is not the only good news for AMD lately as summarized here. Intel’s overwhelming dominance is not what it used to be.
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Non-public database abuse
There is an interesting story at the SecurityFix on an individual who has been sentenced for using access to non-public LexisNexis searching to do background checks on, among other’s police who she though was investigating her for prostitution.
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Spyware’s likely suspect sites.
Spyware Confidential is writing of complaints from Wrestling fans of several wrestling related sites that have become sources of unsolicited spyware and adware installs. Some of them are aware of the spyware and encourage users to sign up for the ad-free service (pay) to avoid the problem. The spyware in many cases are installs that start without user intervention (or consent.)
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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.