I’ve run across a couple of interesting things. The first was linked to from the second one I’ll mention. I know, some time back, I visited a publicly available Google Adsense tool a few months back and at that time found an interesting tool that gave you keyword suggestions based on a term or keyword that you supplied. Interesting and very likely it gave results that you might not have thought of without the tool. However, I don’t recall being able to get quite as much information as it appears they give now…
Tag: time
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Microsoft fixes security fix….
Well, for the second month in a row (I don’t recall one in March..) Microsoft has re-released a patch for Windows. This time it’s the Flash patch (which really falls under 3rd party software). They’ve re-worked the version detection of the update in an attempt to solve all the problems that people have run into with this update. The MS Security blog information is here.
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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.
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Google Adwords traffic estimator
For a long time, the only way to play around with Google advertising possibilities was to join Adwords and then you could choose different keywords, see search volume information, estimate the ad position, clicks per day, etc…. I’ve been tempted many times to look into Adwords (which is the flip side of AdSense…) Many times. In fact, I still may, but today the Inside Adwords blog has announced the standalone traffic estimator that can be used without logging into your adwords account.
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Net nuetrality and the changing of the web as we know it
Not too long ago I had an article about an ISP/telecom executive that floated the idea of charging some BIG web sites to make sure they had a fast connection/delivery to the ISP’s customers. In effect, they would prioritize traffic for the bigger websites that were able to pay for the added benefit. Those that didn’t pay would have slower access by the ISP’s customers. One of the questions I floated at the time is what if someone has a politically unpopular site, and no money, are they dropped into the slow lane/ How slow? Maybe a political candidate…? This has potentially bad implications…
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Ubuntu Center – web control for your ubuntu machine
I ran across ubuntucenter today, which aims to be a web based control panel for any ubuntu based machine, providing file access, etc. Here’s their summary…
Ubuntu Center is a web based interface for accessing all kinds of information that’s being stored on your computer running Ubuntu Breezy, Kubuntu, XUbuntu, or even nUbuntu box. Ubuntu Center accomplishes all of this by integrating PHP software licensed under the GPL license in one giant package suitable for use on a Ubuntu computer. This release adds tons of new features and bug fixes and is suitable for everyday use.
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Sandbox your browser on a linux system
While I was reading about browser sandboxing coming up in Vista and musing about how easy or difficult it would be to sandbox OTHER 3rd party applications, I found a comment on a ZDNet post that I think I’ll just copy directly (of course, giving credit to the poster…) Of course, with the user seperation under linux, individual users have NO access to other users folders by default. ONLY the administrator can access individual user folders. So, you obviously don’t want to run a web browser as the administrator (root), but you could setup another user account to run your web browser under if you’re particularly concerned about isolating it from NOT just the system files, but YOUR files as well.
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Here’s a bookmark for your NOC (Network Operations Center)… Talisker Computer Network Defense Operational Picture
Sometime during the winter, I recall President Bush visited the NSA headquarters if I’m not mistaken and there was some press footage of him shaking hands in a very important looking techy monitoring room. A network operations center of some sort. I think they called it the Threat Operations Center. There was one backdrop that was quite impressive and made the rounds in some of the photos of the visit. There was the ISC threat meter, dshield, a square showing updates of exploit tools and vulnerabilities, viruses, intrusion detection signature updates, etc… all packed into a nice size screen.
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Merging PDF documents in linux
Recently I had a dillemma of sorts. I had a document that had printed to pdf…. each page to it’s own pdf. I didnt’ have time to spend figuring out how to make the document print to one multi-page pdf and so it seemed like it should be pretty easy to attach multiple pdfs into one big multi-page file. Fortunately it is fairly easy (at the linux command line). There are windows tools to do the same, but today this is a linux tip….