I had a chance today to start the upgrade process for Mandriva 2006 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000). Now, let’s see…. a bit of background. Mandriva (Mandrive/Mandrake) has been my favorite distro since converting to linux several years back (around Mandrake 8.1 or 8.2) I’ve had it running on the laptop since then and was up to 10.1 official (if I remember correctly). The last upgrade I did, I just setup the install sources in urpmi and did urpmi –auto-select –auto from the command line and off it went. In short order I had a fresh upgraded system. Today was not to be so smooth.
Author: Avery
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Running UltraVNC viewer under wine
I talked in the last entry about using UltraVNC and UltraVNC Single Click (ultravnc sc) as a means of doing remote desktop support. The idea is that you (the technical support person), setup vncviewer to listen for connections, then the end user with pc problems can download your customized ultravnc server that will connect to your viewer through firewalls/etc. This has a lot of things going for it. 1) ease of use by the end user 2) only one network to make firewall configuration changes on, 3) small quick download. The biggest downside I see is that the ultravnc viewer doesn’t run on linux.
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Ultravnc for remote computer support
A little while back I talked some about TightVNC which for a long time has been my favorite implementation of a remote framebuffer, or remote desktop viewing protocol known as VNC (Virtual Network Computing.) The original VNC (now realvnc) came out of AT&T research labs in the UK and has developed quite a following as a pcanywhere alternative depending on what you need to do. Now, tightvnc has been a favorite of mine for a couple reasons. 1) it’s well supported under linux which is a must for me…, 2) it excels at slower speed connections. Which is also fairly important to me.
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FBI / CIA virus
Well… the media has taken the drab name of w32sober.X@mm or w32sober.x or w32sober.y, W32/Sober.AD-mm or any of those other drab names that we’ve been looking at the last week and dubbed the latest big virus, the FBI/CIA virus…. and it’s gotten a lot of press the last few days. I suspect as people head back to work from Thanksgiving, we may see a slight bump in traffic. (Bringing infected laptops into the network maybe? or just home/office users getting back to work…)
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Sneaky TorrentSpy bundling…
Sunbeltblog is talking about torrentspy, which has licensed their own version of Rufus, a bittorrent client. All well and good, but… they’ve decided to bundle WhenU SaveNow *(adware) with THEIR version of Rufus. This has ticked off the writers of Rufus among others.
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Another wolf in sheeps clothing
I did an article a while back on “wolves in sheeps clothing” software that poses as security software but will usually turn around and bite you. Sunbeltblog has a post on another fake security center site. Keep an eye peeled for these, information is power in protecting yourself against this kind of stuff. This site is at www.updateyoursystem.com
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XBox 360 launch and problems
I’ve not been big into console games. The last computer we had that directly connected to the TV all the time was an old Atari 400. (Which I occassionaly wax nostalgic for…) Anyway, the XBox 360 is the recently released big new upgrade to the XBox from Microsoft and there are a couple of interesting reports out about it today. For one, Business Week is reporting on the likely loss that Microsoft is taking on each unit (they seel for $399), they’ve looked and think that MS is losing a bit over $100 on each one. The goal of course, is to make money off the games. There is worse news though for some XBox 360 new owners.
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How effective is the MediaMax copy protection?
One of the sub-stories in all the Sony DRM mess of the last month with the XCP copy protection was that it was really an ineffective way of preventing copying of music anyway. In other words, you could press shift while inserting the cd to avoid the installer, then other programs could access the cd/allow copying without the software installed, other OS’s could access the disc and rip the tracks. In other words it wasn’t very useful toward it’s objective of preventing copying…
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New Beagle/Bagle variant?
So, I submitted the suspicious attachment I received to virustotal (scan@virustotal.com with SCAN in the subject and suspicious file as attachment.) What follows below is the report I received. It looks like some of the big names (Symantec, McAfee are not finding anything wrong with it at this point, with the hodge-podge of names it will take me a bit to investigate and see if the other vendors are tagging it as new.)
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Serving up web ads to users with javascript disabled
Well, with all the news on the Explorer bug, I started wondering what affect this would have on people browsing sites with adsense. I mean, adsense relies on javascript, so if it’s disabled, no adsense right? Right… Of course, adsense is not the only advertising program that uses javascript. (Of course, there are a number of other things, web counters like google analytics, etc….)