Computer Tips -Tech Info

ADTMAG.com has an interesting article talking of the convergance of spyware and more sophisticated phishing attacks. They talk about the convergance of viruses and spam engines that happened in 2003 as a real shift in the dynamic of WHERE junk mail was coming from. Today botnets account for about 90% of the spam online, and […]

It’s quite a dilemma when a software product is billed as more secure than another…. several days back when Mozilla Firefox released v. 1.5.0.4 which fixed a number of security issues, I saw someone comment “I thought firefox was supposed to be secure.” I think there’s a misunderstanding when it comes to software. I think […]

Yes, this is legitimate and officially sanctioned. Microsoft is releasing the beta version of Vista Ultimate for download. This page gives details on the download. It is also possible to request a dvd. (The download is a dvd iso – a bit over 3 GB). It will expire June 1, 2007 (I assume Vista will […]

Google has released a new plugin for firefox that synchronizes various settings from one pc to another making use of a google account. Essentially, it saves certain preferences from your browser to your Google account, then when the browser is launched again it retrieves any changes from the Google Account. This sounds like a great […]

Microsoft says they need to do a better job about disclosing this, but the Genuine Advantage tool contacts Microsoft daily. It doesn’t do this to track your browsing or downloading habits, but to check and see if it’s ok that it’s still running. According to this article, they have some concern that it might not […]

You know, I’ve seen soooo many antivirus vendors that are somewhat ethically challanged claim that cookie files are a big threat, or in worse cases files that the “free” antivirus test downloaded are dangerous “you should be glad we got here in time – where’s our $30 to fix things…” kind of message, but from […]

The Register had an interesting article on the analysis of what may get classified as the worlds oldest computer (2000 years old – Greek.) Apparently it’s been known for a while (discovered in an old shipwreck around 1900). It’s been called the “Antikythera Mechanism” and has more than 30 dials and wheels. Anyway, it’s currently […]

Incidents.org had an entry in the last couple days on a malware infestation that was interesting and showed a couple things. 1) You can’t bet on antivirus to keep you safe (the initial installer was not detected by most AV vendors – suspicious by 1.) (If you think about it, this makes perfect sense – […]

I saw this yesterday or day before… George Ou has said that Microsoft should move user data to it’s own volume (or partition). He is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. I think these days the default install for any modern operating system ought to assume you care enough about your data to seperate it from the main OS. […]

While I was testing out the “single cut and paste” linux vnc remote desktop sharing script and x11vnc binary…. I spent a fair amount of time booting up livecd’s n qemu to test various distributions/ages of linux setups to see how compatible things were. I had not checked in at the qemu site in quite […]