VuNet has an article today on the coming of Vista and the imminent doom of the smaller security companies. The hardest hit will be anti-spyware and personal firewall vendors they say. It may well be true, it does sound like a different approach to user permissions (limited priviliges by default?) IE7 running in a sandbox, i.e. no permission to touch anything else …. which should cut down on the spread of browser exploits turning machines into spyware infested bots…
Category: General Web/Tech
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Sky falls – bugs exist in the Linux kernel….
There have been several articles in the last few days breathlessly heralding the news The linux kernel is too buggy… Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer has said in the last week that the 2.6 kernel has gotten a bit out of hand with too many new features and too few fixed bugs. Of course, he’s probably right…. Linux founder Linus Torvalds agrees that a “bugfix only” cycle of kernel development would be a good idea.
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Vista’s rocky road….
Microsoft hasn’t got a lot of positive free publicity about Vista that I’ve seen. I read about a Gartner Group suggesting that it wouldn’t be available until 2nd quarter 2007. (Which was shortly after Microsoft said they wouldn’t make 4th quarter 2006 if I recall…) I’ve seen a lot of analysts talking about how the really big features they were excited about have been shelved to get it out the door. And, well… of course, I don’t expect a positive, rah-rah Microsoft article from the Register… but they’re reporting on a Yankee Group analysis of the upcoming OS…
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The problem with earbuds…..
This isn’t exactly “high tech”…. but earbuds are one of the ways we “interface” with high tech devices… A couple weeks ago I had the annoyance of my long time pair of earbuds failing to work. At first I thought my right ear was stopped up from allergies, but in swapping ears (well… buds) I discovered that one of the buds was failing and it sounded like a loose wire connection. Unfortunately, they’re too small to try to repair, so I thought I’ll have to get a new pair. I didn’t realize it would be quite the quest it turned out to be.
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More Google weirdness – Google results in flux again?
I was just skimming a couple articles after noticing two sites that I had reported to google as having WRONG cache information had disappeared. It looks as though there is a certain amount of flux going on in the Google results (more than I would expect just a usual churn.) For instance, this site has 70 pages available from one datacenter and over 1000 pages if I search at another datacenter.
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Time to start cleaning out sites – the internet’s getting too full….
Or at least Google may be…. stories here and here. The way the Register puts it is that Google is in an arms race with blog spammers, with tools out that can create 100 blogs in 24 minutes and shops that can provide mass numbers of private label articles, they contend that google is drowning in the spam so to speak. I can’t help but connect it (as they do) with the changes related to the Big Daddy update which really seemed to mark a drastic change in search rangings for some of the pages on this site. Search terms that had for a time done quite well for me (page 1) dropped an average of 3-4 pages almost overnight (literally over two nights).
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Translating web pages
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before here, but languages are one of the things that fascinate me. I’ve studied Spanish, German and French. Although right now I would barely be able to recognize a handful of words in German and French. Of late, spanish has been the language I’ve focused on *(3 1/2 years at this point.) My goal was to spend at least 5 years reading/listening to *just* one language (in addition to my native English…) anyway, I’m at a point where I feel like I have a very good understanding of written spanish, pretty good understanding of much spoken spanish (depends on the accent/pace/pronunciation of the speaker, but in some cases I feel that way with English as well…….) From time to time though, I’ve used web tools to automatically translate a page or a bit of text to see how well I’m understanding….
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Google Calendar escapes into public use..
There have been rumors for (years?) a long time at least, that google was preparing something known as cl2 which would be a calendar with full gmail integration. There were screenshots, many of which were photoshopped from another web calendar, but there were others that were more convincing… well, as of late yesterday Google Calendar has escaped in to public view. http://www.google.com/calendar. I first tried logging in through my gmail account thinking I might see info there, but I didn’t, so I went to the above link and answered a question about what time zone I’m in, then got to see the main interface.
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The do-not-do business with list….
I found an interesting link through The Sunbeltblog on the “do not do business with” list… I don’t think this is a NEW thing really, for years there have been government policies against doing business with certain individuals, etc… but…. anyway Bruce Schneier has done an article on it which gives some interesting points that you probably aren’t aware of.
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OK – just fresh off the 5 wordpress install updates and now clamav…
So, I spent the better part of the evening doing WordPress updates to get 5 blogs up to v. 2.0.2 and now….. clamav has multiple vulnerabilities …………… oi…. now it’s time to rebuild clamav to install on 2 machines……