Of course the thoughts and prayers of the nation and indeed the world are with those in the Gulf Coast area of the U.S. and particularly the situation in New Orleans. I ran across an amazing story of a webhost that is based in New Orleans and their datacenter is still running. They are keeping a blog of the goings on there.
Category: General Web/Tech
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Get paid for the mistakes you make….
It seems that some companies are fortunate enough to be able to make money even from their faults. The Monterey Herald details an account of a woman who was informed by Choicepoint that crooks had accessed some of her personal information. This was apparently due to a lapse in security at Choicepoint. They then offered to sell her access to her own information to see what might have been compromised.
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Virtual Server 2005 R2 to support Linux
Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2 will be supporting both Linux and Solaris as guest operating systems in the coming release. The coming release of Virtual Server 2005 R2 will also include 64-bit support.
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Titan Rain – China attempting to crack US computers?
According to an article at the Washington Post, it appears that there are a large number of attacks against Defense related non-classified computers coming from (at least in the last hop) computers residing in China. It’s unclear whether these attacks are REALLY originating from China or if crackers are using Chinese machines as a convenient haven before making the attack on Defense related US machines.
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W3C registers comment with Copyright office
As I mentioned a couple weeks back, the US Copyright office had a notice that the new pre-registration system MAY not support browsers other than Internet Explorer. (This news update at the Register claims Netscape as well. The W3C has registered a comment with the US Copyright Office and that is reported in the link above.
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Power breakthrough for mobile devices?
I’ve seen a reference to UltraCell which has announced a new product which is essentially a small portable fuel cell capable of providing 25 Watts of power using hot-swappable methanol canisters. It looks as though they’ve got a military joint project for the development of portable power systems. From reading the product brochures for the ultracell25 and ultracellxx90 (which provides 45 watts of output) it looks fairly promising.
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Google Mail now open for signups
Google Mail (GMail) has up until now been open to signups by invitation only. It seems they’ve opened up their process a bit and if you have a mobile phone, you can signup using that. It’s interesting I was reading last night how the invitation process was perhaps a clever way to keep the spammers out.
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Google news rss feeds update
I was just at google news and noticed that they’ve apparently fixed the headers of their pages so that the “Add live feed” button automatically displays at the bottom of the firefox browser window when you browse their page. (I’m currently browsing it for a search.) Nice work Google…. I know when it was first announced this feature was not working which left me feeling as though it was slightly limited in it’s usefulness.
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Porn Spam indictments…
The Security Fix is reporting that the Justice department will imminently indict four people accused of sending large volumes of porn spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM act which requires explicit junkmail to be specifically labeled “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” in the subject line.
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Google to acquire evil from Microsoft?
I’ve seen this article referenced a few places today, but there is a piece at the New York Times, essentially the piece says that Microsoft can relax, it’s time for Google to be the villain. There’s a joke that went around sometime back (maybe at April fools?), joking about Microsoft about to buy exclusive rights to evil from the devil. That supposed article interviewed the devil and had him recounting what a good offer Microsoft had made for the rights…. anyway…