Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Computers

  • Microsoft Genuine Advantage phones home daily

    Microsoft says they need to do a better job about disclosing this, but the Genuine Advantage tool contacts Microsoft daily. It doesn’t do this to track your browsing or downloading habits, but to check and see if it’s ok that it’s still running. According to this article, they have some concern that it might not work properly and wanted to be able to tell it to shut down if there were widescale problems with the proof of legitimate windows copy. I did glean a few more details from the article that correct an assumption that I made a week ago.

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  • Big trouble – you don’t have any viruses….

    You know, I’ve seen soooo many antivirus vendors that are somewhat ethically challanged claim that cookie files are a big threat, or in worse cases files that the “free” antivirus test downloaded are dangerous “you should be glad we got here in time – where’s our $30 to fix things…” kind of message, but from a mainline, well known antivirus vendor you expect better…. Over at Spyware Confidential, after an online scan at a leading AV vendor, they’ve received a couple of emails explaining the great danger their computer is in after the scan turned up 0 viruses and 0 infected files.

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  • 2,000 year old computer?

    The Register had an interesting article on the analysis of what may get classified as the worlds oldest computer (2000 years old – Greek.) Apparently it’s been known for a while (discovered in an old shipwreck around 1900). It’s been called the “Antikythera Mechanism” and has more than 30 dials and wheels. Anyway, it’s currently been undergoing detailed imaging analysis which has uncovered some new clues which may reinforce a theory that it was designed to track/predict planetary locations (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were known to the ancient Greeks.)

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  • New malware sightings

    Incidents.org had an entry in the last couple days on a malware infestation that was interesting and showed a couple things. 1) You can’t bet on antivirus to keep you safe (the initial installer was not detected by most AV vendors – suspicious by 1.) (If you think about it, this makes perfect sense – antivirus is reactionary and needs to have seen a bug once to recognize it again.) 2) Malware, once in the system, can bring all their friends.

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  • Microsoft should use a /home partition….

    I saw this yesterday or day before… George Ou has said that Microsoft should move user data to it’s own volume (or partition). He is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. I think these days the default install for any modern operating system ought to assume you care enough about your data to seperate it from the main OS. I find myself slightly annoyed at linux distributions that DON’T do this by default, although most will at least let you make changes to the partitioning in the install process. I had got to just assume this was the way things were since Mandrake always defaulted to seperate home and root partitions.

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  • Qemu 0.8.1 (with kqemu 1.3.0pre7)

    While I was testing out the “single cut and paste” linux vnc remote desktop sharing script and x11vnc binary…. I spent a fair amount of time booting up livecd’s n qemu to test various distributions/ages of linux setups to see how compatible things were. I had not checked in at the qemu site in quite a while (a few months), but there was a new version out… in fact, I think 0.7.1 is what I was running previously, so I missed 0.7.2 and 0.8.0… Anyway, I’m running 0.8.1 now and I compiled kqemu as well (now at 1.3.0pre7)…. wow qemu has made great strides (with kqemu) since 0.7.1 ….

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  • Remote tech support with anything – would I do it?

    I’ve tried to ask myself if I’d trust someone enough to let them run a remote session on my own desktop to solve a problem. I think the answer is “it depends”. If you think about it, I do tech support for home users quite a bit and they let me come into their homes. If I were weighing someone coming into my house, or onto my computer desktop, I think I’d choose my desktop. …

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  • x11vnc slow internet initial-connection performance – identd timeout

    So, I had the script all ready, I’ve got my x11vnc custom compiled to be as widely compatible as possible, I’ve tested thoroughly on the internal network. The next step was to test my x11vnc “one cut and paste” script over the internet. So, I visited my parents pc which dual-boots Windows XP and Mandrake 10.0…. I did the cut and paste into the “run command…” menu and waited and waited and waited. dropped to a console and started again, but checked that x11vnc was already running. I didn’t know what could be taking so long. I tried again and the FIRST connection gave the prompt.

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