Since it’s related to the web, I’ll post it here. According to The Times Online (UK), tens of websites linked to Al-Qaeda have abruptly vanished from the web. Apparently, it’s suspected that British Intelligence has had something to do with the closing of the sites which, among other things provided information on building and using biological weapons and “how to strike a european city”.
Author: Avery
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User agent spoofing
According to this article, the Opera web browser has been reporting itself to web sites with a user-agent that includes Internet explorer. As of the next release it appears that will be dropped by default *(although the capability of changing the user-agent will still be there.)
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Data Security
One of the things that apparently is commonly overlooked in the area of computer security is what happens to the data on your hard drive when you get a new computer.
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TCP/IP networking strange problem
This is a weird one and I’m posting this mostly for my own reference so I can recall this when I run across it again. About 6-10 months ago a client of mine was having problems accessing web login pages like yahoo and ebay. I tested from various Windows machines on their network and verified and pulled my hair out for a bit before coming across a tip to check into the MTU setting for the firewall. (more…)
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The biggest computer security vulnerability ever
I talk quite a bit about computer viruses and computer security on this site. It’s probably one of the bigger problems that I grapple with for my customers. Today I’m going to talk about the biggest computer security vulnerability there is. (more…)
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Preventing web crawlers from indexing everything
Ok, so we’ve seen how to password protect directories to keep the web crawlers out, but I don’t want to go through that. I want to keep the page open, but I don’t want it spidered and indexed by the bots. (more…)
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New Featured Books section
I just thought I’d do a quick post to mention that I’ve added a new category called “featured books” and it’s a place where, (more…)
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Browser Statistics reaction
OK – someone has a sense of humor. In the hour after the browser statistics article where I said that on this site, Internet Explorer was being used by less than 50% of the viewers I saw an interesting thing happen. In the span of 2 minutes, 1 single IP address pulled EVERY link on the site, claiming to be browsing with IE 5.5 for a total of about 450 hits. Initially I thought, OK it’s either a search crawler masquerading as IE in the “User Agent” field, or somebody wanted to play with my stats. (more…)
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Web browser statistics
In the last week or two, I’ve been playing around with a slightly different stat package for the individual sites, North Carolina Genealogy, South Carolina Genealogy and this site. Since it’s a new stat package, I’ve spent a good amount of time checking the stats to see just what browsers visitors are coming from, which ip blocks (local/distant), which search terms they’ve used to get here, etc. etc. One of the things that has surprised me is (more…)
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KDE 3.4.2 release (Linux desktop environment)
Along about the time I mentioned a beta review of KDE 3.5 it looks as though the latest in the stable line, KDE 3.4.2 was released. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, KDE is one of many graphical user interface environments (desktop environments) in the Linux and *nix family of operating systems. It’s essentially a bugfix release, what really caught my attention in the announcement was (more…)