The Register is reporting on Ernst & Young’s loss of a laptop which had information on around 243,000 hotels.com customers. Apparently Hotels.com was notified on May 3rd. Apparently the laptop made use of a password as the only security measure. From the article….
Category: Computers
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Wiping data from hard drives
How often do I get to talk about this? Yahoo News has an article on a couple who, a year ago, took their PC to Best Buy to have the hard drive swapped. Best Buy assured them that the drive would be destroyed…. Recently they got a call from a guy in Chicago that had bought a hard drive at a flea market. It had their data on it and he wondered if they wanted it or if he should wipe the data. OK – there’s this really good utility Dariks Boot and Nuke (DBAN) that can thoroughly wipe a hard drive. I know the couple in this article had taken their drive to someone else, but….
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Windows Automatic Updates now checking Genuine Advantage…
According to ibnlive.com started today (June 1st) Microsoft will be utilizing their Genuine Advantage check through the Automatic Update feature. Up until now, you have only been prompted for the Genuine Advantage check when visiting the Windows update site directly. (I can only assume the Genuine Advantage check is the method the article speaks of to verify if you have a licensed copy of windows.) Essentially, they say they will not be taking details like name/address, but they will nag you that you have a pirated copy of Windows and updates will not be available.
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Ubuntu 6.06 LTS release
Probably the biggest news so far today, at least in linux circles is the official release of the Dapper Drake…. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) (and kubuntu and edubuntu all…). I’ve been playing with an install based on the Release Candidate (and now upgraded to even include KDE 3.5.3….. I’m really impressed that there were kde 3.5.3 packages available for Dapper Drake 1) before the official release which only officially includes 3.5.2 and 2) almost simultaneous to the KDE announcement. Anyway…. (Almost all links are to the US mirrors…) Kubuntu download images are avialable as is the shipit free cds for kubuntu and shipit free cds for ubuntu and the various ubuntu cd image downloads………….
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Kubuntu Free CD’s
One of the things I’ve really admired about the Ubuntu project is that they will MAIL you REAL cds of their product for free. That can give a much more professional look for redistribution than a hand burned cd with handwritten green ink saying ubuntu linux 5.10…. Well, Ubuntu has done this for quite a while, NOW the “Shipit” service is available for Kubuntu. You’ll basically need a Launchpad account first. Also, Edubuntu now will ship free cds as well.
According to the FAQ… “All CDs currently contain version 6.06 LTS, development codename “Dapper Drake”. For every CD you order, we will send you one package that contains a single CD (live CD installer) in a cardboard wallet. This is true for all architectures.”
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Konqueror and Google Maps
After I did my “Kiosk” upgrade to KDE 3.5.2 I was really interested to see if Konqueror would finally work with Google Maps, of course, the problem isn’t with Konqueror it’s with the browser detection. Konqueror uses something called khtml to render web pages. It’s really a fairly good/standards compliant ACID test passing engine. So much so that Apple thought they would base Safari on it. The problem is that some websites recognize “Safari” in the User agent and say, “sorry, we don’t support you” if the browser user agent claims Konqueror….
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Mandriva Kiosk
Some time back I had seen a quick reference to Mandriva Kiosk as some new Mandriva version of the “Click and Run” repository of Linspire. I finally got a chance to give it a try with the upgrade of KDE to 3.5.2 (Mandriva 2006 had shipped with the 3.4.x series of KDE.) Anyway, I found the process to make it work fairly straightforward. I installed the 4 required packages (new versions could only be found on the kiosk webpage – none of the urpmi sources, even updates new about the newest version of mdkonline, or urpmi/gurpmi…) Once those were done and konqueror restarted, I gave a click at installing kde 3.5.2 and off it went.
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Symantec Antivirus Remotely Exploitable Vulnerability
This is bad – whose defending the defender? eEye security has a bulletin announced that regards a remotely exploitable vulnerability in Symantec Antivirus 10.x and Symantec Client Security 3.x They say other versions MAY be vulnerable they’re waiting for information from Symantec. Now, Symantec is probably the biggest selling antivirus package out there. It looks as though, from Symantec’s advisory, that the Norton Antivirus product line is not affected, ONLY “Symantec Client Security 3.1” and “Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition 10.1”
They have released IDS updates to try to detect attempted exploits of this….
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Google Picasa for Linux
One of the big stories out today… Google has released an “early beta” version of Picasa for linux. I first saw the news from the ZDNet Googling Google blog. There are deb, rpm and bin downloads available. The Official Google blog gives a few more details, for instance… this “magic” is made possible by a “carefully tested version of wine”. Also, they solicit feedback in the Google Labs Picasa for Linux group. I think this is very good news for linux users.
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Mozilla Firefox 1.0x series end of life….
The Mozilla Firefox 1.0.x series will no longer be supported with security updates. IF you use Firefox as your web browser, make sure you’re using the current version in the 1.5 series (currently 1.5.0.3). You can find what your current version is by going to Help, “About Mozilla Firefox”. The 1.5 series automatically downloads and installs updates and periodically checks for updates for the installed extensions.