I’ve got a slew of articles open that I’ve been holding to post about. I’ve also got a few other things to post, so this may be a busy posting afternoon. There’s quite a bit going on here, but things are RELATIVELY quiet out on the internet it looks like. A flurry of typing going on….
Category: Uncategorized
-
Collection company….
I’m quite frustrated this evening. Another long day of computer problems and tonight I come in to around the tenth call from a collection agency. The kicker in this case is that it’s not for me, but for someone I’ve never heard of. Over the years we’ve had a fair amount of credit card debt and have worked our way to within about one payment of being out from under. All with no defaults, no collection agencies, etc. We’ve followed the rules in other words. And the last 2 weeks we’ve been harrassed by a collection agency looking for someone that we’ve never met that I can only assume gave our phone number. The collection agency is….
-
Federal Long Distance tax ends….
I think at one point I’ve said that once taxes are put in place they tend NEVER to go away. Well, I must admit I’m wrong. 108 years ago in an effort to help finance the Spanish American War, long distance telephone taxes went into place. The tax will no longer be in effect as of July 31, 2006. Supposedly, we will be able to file for a refund of our last three years worth of long-distance taxes for land/cell phones in the 2006 tax returns. I stand corrected… once taxes are put in place they ALMOST Never go away (and if it’s for a specific purpose, it may hang around long after that purpose is completed.)
-
Clickbot – new bot tactic…
There is a new twist on the bot networks that have been the plague of computing in recent years. This one is called ClickBot. The story is from Incidents.org Many sites, (like this one) use adsense to “monetize their content”. The idea is that advertisers bid on “clicks”. So, if I wanted to advertise on the keywords “asheville computer repair” I might bid 5 cents for every click on one of my ads. The problem is many content owners are less than scrupulous.
-
Federal requirement to disclose database security breaches?
Fines and prison time are among the penalties envisioned under a proposed house bill. The requirement would be that businesses with database holding information on more than 10,000 people (or federal employees) would have to inform either the Secret Service or the FBI of a data security breach. (The maximum sentence would be five years.) Now, on my first read of this, I thought, well sure – any company should disclose the possible loss, theft, or breach of a database holding customer data. I still think that… but I don’t know that the focus of penalty is on the right shoulders.
-
How to escape from the deluge of credit card offers…..
This isn’t necessarily tech related, but modern life related I guess. I can’t count how many credit card offers we receive in the mail each month. I have visions of a few acres of forest land somewhere being tagged with our name and the subtitle… “credit card offers”. I’ve never followed up on an unsolicited card offer that I recall and as I was tearing one up recently, I noticed a little not at the bottom….
“You can choose to stop receiving “prescreened” offers of credit from us and other companies by calling toll-free 1.888.5.OPT.OUT. For more information about prescreened offers, please see the PRESCREEN & OPT-OUT NOTICES in the Terms and Conditions section of this offer.”
-
Apache2 not starting because of ssl_scache file
I mentioned this a while back, but I didn’t go into much detail on a long term solution. Let me re-set the situation. Linux server running apache2. It’s Mandrake (now Mandriva) (an older version.) When the system has suffered abrupt outage (power loss). Everything starts up normally with the exception of httpd2. It claims that it’s running but gives an error message. (For reference here’s the old article. Basically when you try to manually restart you see..
Cannot allocate shared memory: (17)File exists apache
-
Oracle updates
I normally don’t follow updates for Oracle, as I don’t have an installation running Oracle to support. Right now, I’m quite glad of that… The Security Fix is talking about the 82 patches they released Tuesday in their quarterly patch release. The fact that they released 82 patches is not what’s disturbing though. According to the article, Oracle claims that 75% of their patches come from internally reported vulnerabilities….
-
Disable or turn off hotkeys under Windows XP
Since this is a simple tip I’m including it in the basics category. I ran across a pc with a Dell Multimedia Keyboard and they wanted to disable the hotkeys (sound mixer was always popping up because the key was in the way.) Anyway, on older systems, there would be a standalone program running to monitor the extra keys from the keyboard. (Calculator, email, web shortcut keys as well as sound control keys.)
-
Cleaning up after WMF exploit third party boot disc
At this point, I needed to rename or delete some files that windows would not let me touch. I had this winlogon.exe running from a suspect directory c:\windows\inet20001 and windows wouldn’t let me kill it, or remove it’s start entry in the registry. So, I booted my image from a dsl linux cd and opted for command line only. Once booted, I navigated to mount the windows partition and cd’d to /mnt/hda1/windows/inet20001