Our ISP here was out this afternoon. (Cable and internet) for a bit before I had to run to an appointment, so I got a bit behind in entries. It’s interesting though, Charter has been really pushing their new telephone service lately. Which is all well and good, but I’ve thought many times, if I were to get phone service from Charter how many times a year I’d be without phone service? How would I have called to report the outage today? (Carrier pigeon) – cell phone is the expected answer I’m sure, but….
Tag: internet
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Sunbelt acquiring Kerio Personal Firewall
Kerio Personal firewall will be acquired by Sunbelt according to the sunbeltblog. It looks as though the acquisition will be complete within a month. They hope to offer downloads “within weeks”. There will be a price reduction and discounts for Sunbelt users, and discounts for Kerio users on Sunbelt software. Also it looks like the free edition will continue.
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Worldnic DNS server outage teaches lesson…
Incidents.org has a post on a DNS server outage for Worldnic. Which effects a number of Network Solutions customers. Apparently they’re aware of the problem and are working on a fix. It doesn’t affect EVERY Network Solutions customer, there are some specifics…
To clarify the impact to the casual reader:
Not all customers of Network Solutions are affected.
No root or TLD servers are known to reside on these machines.
It’s “just” individual domains that are affected, but it might be a lot of them.
Only domains that have all their namervers on these machines will have significant impact.
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Leading browser coders get together on internet security
This is one of those stories that you never thought you’d see (especially after the Microsoft-Netscape “wars”)… Developers from four of the most prominent web browsers, Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and Konqueror (much of the foundations for Safari are in the Konqueror codebase)… have got together and talked about different approaches and ideas on improving security while web-browsing…
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Watching Google’s domain registrations
Google has become such a dominant company…. it’s good to know someone is watching where they might be going tomorrow…. searchenginewatch.com has a list of some recent domain name registrations by Google. googlelibrary.org, googlemagazines.com, googlepapers.org, googlemicrofilm.com among others (usually the .net/org/biz variants…) Interesting to see where they may be going. There’s also a list (through the above article) of all domains registered by Google.
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GMail security problem fixed
Google’s not had a great week it would appear (Sony’s had worse… but that’s another story). The Analytics launch was somewhat rocky from most accounts and there is a GMail security bug that’s been announced and fixed. Details on the bug are here, and a writeup is also here.
Apparently a flaw in the authentication method that Google used could allow a user to log in under another account and read messages as well as pose as a legit user.
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Keyloggers a growing problem
It’s interesting some years ago when viruses on Windows machines were SOOOO plentiful it seemed like that’s all I spent my time cleaning up, I thought… “you know, most viruses are prankster-ish programs. They rearrange icons, maybe cause Windows to crash, or send random files out to others, but they could be MUCH worse.” Since then, we’ve seen viruses used as delivery tools for mail relays (so that spammers can have more “safe havens”, we’ve seen viruses bring in spyware, both of the last two for “fun and profit”. I don’t know that we’ve really seen the WORST that a virus could be designed to do. However, I’m afraid we’re getting there.
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Cogent cut takes down major internet backbone
Cogent has suffered a major outage of one of their main internet backbone connections. It appears that this link is having a big affect on the “internet health”. Comcast seems to be relatively hard hit with connectivity issues from this. It appears that the Northeast US and Southeast may have sporadic outages depending on the ISP. I’ve had a few peculiar net experiences this morning, but I’m not sure if this connectivity problem is what I’ve seen.
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Nokia Linux internet tablet pc
It looks as though Nokia has a neat looking tablet pc that runs linux and is designed to be an internet appliance of sorts. Web browser/email/net radio/pdf viewer and a few other software tools you’d expect. An 800×600 screen, wifi and bluetooth. It looks to be priced around $350 It will be titled the 770 Internet Tablet.
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Cheap Linux desktop deployment in Brazil
I found this interesting article over at the KDE dot. Starting next week the Brazilian government is promoting a program to sell relatively cheap computers based on Linux (with KDE as the Desktop Environment.) They are hoping to sell over a half a million machines in the next 4 to 6 months. It looks as though Mandriva may be the base distribution. (24 month low interest loans are one way the idea is being promoted..)