It’s hard to believe it’s time for a version 5 of knoppix, but … I guess it is. I was just booting up Knoppix 4 in a qemu session last night and already several days behind 5… Anyway, Knoppix 5 was released on June 2nd. I saw the note the day after the Ubuntu dapper release, but never got to do a post. (It’s actually 5.0.1 available for download – the 5.0 release was released at CeBiT). Anyway, there are DVD and CD iso’s and bittorrent downloads are available. You might look here for a list of torrent download links.
Tag: post
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Firefox 1.5.0.4 RPMS for Mandriva 2006
Just an update to let you know I’ve recompiled the src rpm’s from Cooker for Mozilla 1.5.0.4 (For Mandriva 2006) and am uploading them to a subdirectory in http://www.averyjparker.com/wp-content/downloads/firefox/. (Look for the Mozilla-Firefox-1.5.0.4 subdirectory… thought it would be fairly obvious.) Anyway, I’ve put the src rpm in a subdirectory mysteriously named src… and the devel rpms in their own directory. As always the rpms are without guarantee/warranty expressed or implied. They’ve worked for me (I’m typing this now from 1.5.0.4 under Mandriva…) If you find them useful – great. Updating this and this post to reflect updates.
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Google Site: search issues
This is interesting…. there’s been a lot of frustration among some (myself included) with the current state of Googles site indexing. For a good while I’ve been able to consistently find ANY post on my site using google if I quote a certain amount of text that I know is on the page. Currently, such quoted text searches for pages that show up as “supplemental” in a site:averyjparker.com search… turn up nothing. In theory, the supplemental results SHOULD turn up when there are no others. (If I understand correctly…) I’ve been able to duplicate this with other site’s supplemental results as well, so it doesn’t JUST affect this site. Well, there’s an update at the official sitemaps blog that tells of some interesting issues with the site: search operator. It sounds like there might be a connection….
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Trackback spam and countermeasures like Akismet and trackback validation
As I’ve already commented today…. there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I’ve now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on another two sites. Akismet has been very impressive in defending this attack. Only 1% of the trackbacks slipped through, or about 14 or so across three sites. I’ve looked to see what other measures I can take against trackback spam and found one that looks like it should eliminate the 1% that got through.
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Wow, impressive comment spam storm
But perhaps you are not as powerful as the emporer has foreseen…. I just skimmed the stats and saw an abornmal spike in traffic over the last hour, so being curious…. I checked the server logs and saw trackback post after trackback post, all different Internet Explorer versions. It doesn’t seem to be the same ip address repeating, but several. (Could it be a bot net?) Anyway, not much time here to investigate on that. Fortunately though, the trackback spam defending jedi akismet has been holding it’s own quite well with the onslaught. This is frankly the biggest trackback spam storm I’ve seen EVER which makes me curious as to why I came up on the radar…
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RealVNC 4.1.2 update to patch security vulnerability
A few hours back, I updated My first post on the RealVNC 4.1.1 vulnerability and just saw another story that did not specify WHICH variation of VNC was at risk. TightVNC and UltraVNC seem to be immune according to the discoverer of the flaw. And as far as I’ve seen, there hasn’t been any contradiction of that.
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Media player and video codecs made simple…
The biggest problem with Audio and video content is the variety of different codecs that are supported by different players. On Windows this usually means having Windows Media Player, Realplayer and Quicktime installed, plus who knows what else. I was having a discussion yesterday about some videos that I had given to someone that work fine on my linux desktop, (divx format I believe), however Windows media player fails to find a codec. I told him that I’ve always felt Media Player was a bit “snobbish” with regards to codecs. It’s a great idea to be able to detect and download the codec on demand, but in reality, I didn’t recall seeing xvid/divx being among those that would auto-download (may have changed by know I’m not certain.) Anyway, I suggested mplayer as a good multi-format video player. Mplayer will handle most any video format thrown at it.
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Interesting spyware push download tactic…
Incidents.org has another interesting post about a spyware site. One of the handlers ran across it while doing a search for an educational institution. (They’ve used a wildcard in the dns record so that they can get traffic to {fillinkeyword}.nastydomain.com) Anyway… the main page tries to install WinAntiSpyware2006FreeInstall.cab from WinSoftware Corporation, Inc. It gives the little ActiveX control popdown bar and insists that it must be installed to view the page properly. But that’s not the most interesting part…
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The Vista stories keep coming – Vista bad news for small security companies
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…
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Cleaning out a few draft posts….
I really like a lot of features about WordPress. One is the ability to start a draft post and hang on to it indefinitely. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning out a batch of some of the many draft posts I’ve accumulated over the last few weeks. (Along with some items that are fresh in the last day or two.) What I like about it is an opportunity to do a quick link in a post with a title and be able to retrieve that from any web-accessible computer to follow up on. It acts as a neat reminder or post-it note system as well.