I know, you’ve seen the ads – make $6000 a week in your spare time!! Make money doing the things you do ANYWAY, like reading email, browsing the web. The last week or so as things have been slow (and technically I was still “on vacation” until the 3rd of January). I had plenty of time to test out a few of these ideas. It seems that entrepreneurial-ism is a progressive disease – you find yourself many times thinking, hmmmm…. it seems like there should be a way to make a small profit by….. Anyway, many of these ideas are MORE trouble than they’re worth. REALLY. But one, that I signed up for just last night is actually looking very promising…. bux.to….
Tag: REALLY
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Windows web editor
I’ve been looking for a simple windows based web editor to recommend for someone. I use quanta plus on linux and would really have a hard time LEAVING it, but… there’s of course dreamweaver and frontpage… but I’ve also found kompozer which is based on nvu – although I still REALLY wish quanta plus were available for windows. (Of course, if they want the nice toys, maybe they should just think about switching or dual booting…) I’ll leave comments on in case anybody knows of a good windows based, web editor that has some of the similar capabilities of quanta plus.
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Black backgrounds use less power?
At least that’s the theory…. someone has done a google sponsored search with a black background thinking they’ll save 750 megawatt hours a year. Blackle.com is the site. Of course, I don’t know if there REALLY would be that significant a difference in consumption (margin of error in observation equipment?) I REALLY would like to know how long they estimated traffic stays at google as that would make the result vary widely anyway. If the average house used 24kwh per day (I have NO idea, just a number that seems like a decent baseline… that’s 8Mwh/year… so that would be the equivalent of less than 100 houses power consumption… of course, these are just off the cuff estimates as well (just like theirs.)
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Microsoft Internet Explorer patches for unsupported OS versions (Windows 98 and ME)
For starters, if you’re using Windows 98 or ME still in a production system, you REALLY need to be looking at migration options and you should realize that the architecture of those systems is NOT conducive to a good secure platform. No XP isn’t perfect, but it is an improvement in many areas. That much said, if you don’t have too many choices and are wondering how you can protect the old system against the recent Windows Internet Explorer vulnerabilities…. here you go. The zero-day emergency response team has released a version of the VML vulnerability patch for older versions of Windows. So, if you REALLY need to patch an old windows 98 or ME install, you can give that a try. (No guarantees.)
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Public CWSandbox (es)…
Around the time of this latest IE exploit hitting the web, there was also mention of some publicly available CWSandbox sites for the submission of malware. It’s an analysis tool that can give you a report of how the malware behaves and what it would do if run in a “non-sandboxed” environment. There are a couple up now it seems. One incidents.org reported is https://luigi.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/submit.php, Sunbelt has one at http://research.sunbelt-software.com/submit.aspx and they have alternate URLS….
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Recovering lost files
There’s an article at linux.com that gives a good overview of using testdisk and PhotoRec. Testdisk should be able to recover at the partition level and PhotoRec should be able to just pull the files out of a damaged partition. Truth is Hard drives fail in a number of different ways and some of those can give the same error messages. Not too long ago my brother had a laptop hard drive failure, it gave a “no partition found” kind of error message. We talked about a utility such as ghost4linux (g4l) which includes dd_rescue which does a remarkable job with failing disks.
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Vista’s fatal flaw?
Backwards compatibility. It’s something that many vendors strive for and Microsoft is certainly one that has placed a value on making things backwards compatible for third party software. According to this story at Sci-Tech Today, Symantec thinks this eagerness to be backwards compatible may be a big issue for Vista’s security. They expect several “privilige escalation” vulnerabilities to be found and say that if those such vulnerabilities are discovered in the prompt for user consent…. well essentially all of the systems security precautions could be undermined. The whitepaper on the details talks about several issues that have been patched at this stage in the Vista development process, but the main question is how many are out there?
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Banks and Web security
George Ou has a good post on Banks cheating their way to meet web security guidelines. Many of the observations that he notes come from the Between the Lines column here and are SPOT ON. The biggest I see is related to “multifactor authentication”….
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Camcorder shopping and a reminder of caution
The last few days I’ve been heavily researching the purchase of a camcorder. I guess I can’t just go out and pick something, I have to research at a number of levels. (Editorial reviews, user reviews, pricing, media, computer compatability, quality, etc. all of these come into play.) So, after several days of researching the product itself I was VERY close to going ahead with one place that had a fantastic price. But then I wondered, how come, this one place had a price that was a clear $100 lower than most anywhere else?
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The spammers win a round
There is a company (well, unfortunately, WAS a company) called Blue Security. They had an innovative approach to stopping spam. A small download essentially sent opt-out return emails that were junk back to the REAL spam sender (clever concept huh? bouncing to the person that REALLY sent the message… Of course what was clever here was that they were coordinating the responses of all their users – herding a “white hat” network of sorts.) Anyway, it was a successful concept at getting several of the top 10 to clean their mailing lists.It looks as though 6 of the top 10 agreed to clean up their mailing lists. Unfortunately, they were the subject of a Massive DDOS. They managed to recover and come back, but the dDos took out other sites as well and there were threats of more it seems.