Computer Tips -Tech Info

It’s really good to see one chalked up against a botnet operator. Friday, a former botnet operator was sentenced to 37 months in prison for breaking into 100’s of thousands of computers. There NEED to be more stories like this. Unfortunately though, with a possible benefit of making $6,000-10,000 per month being a botnet herder…. […]

I’ve got to admit, I hadn’t caught the notice of this until it was at incidents.org. I don’t currently administer sendmail on any machines, but…. Sendmail released version 8.13.8 on August 9th to address several issues (including a DoS vulnerability). It was possible for a specially crafted email to trigger the problem.    Send article […]

This incidents.org article the other day caught my eye. It talked of a utility calledliveview that could take a hard drive (or image of a drive) and make it into a virtual machine for use in vmware (saving all changes to a temporary file so the original structure of the disk/drive image is not touched.) […]

I’ve seen several news reports picking up this story from yesterday. SpiralFrog will provide an advertising supported, free music download service and is expected to launch in time for Christmas 2006. There is an agreement with the Universal Music Group and SpiralFrog and the concept is that users must agree to watch advertising before downloading […]

I had a frustrating morning last week. I had setup a new pc, transferred data and gotten everything in fairly nice shape. I had got the old printer attached and setup (HP Deskjet 5550). In fact I had done a test page through the printers software at the end of the install process (Some sort […]

One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one of the formats that it can recognize from. I have a number of things in PDF format that I wanted to […]

Macromedia Flash player 9 running on linux? Impossible? No… many things that seem impossible, well… aren’t This morning there’s a good writeup at how-to-forge about installing flash player 9 on linux. It involves wine and the how-to is specific to Ubuntu. However, the first two steps (sudo apt-get install wine and sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts) […]

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 […]

A couple weeks back, there was a pretty important security update for the Intel Proset Wireless driver. The big problem is that the update was a memory hog and caused porblems. Sans has info on the update to the update, also George Ou is encouraging everyone to make sure they’ve got things updated. It’s possible […]

I NEVER knew you could use screen for this…. Let multiple users connect to the same Console (command shell/bash shell) session simultaneously. I’ve looked at screen before. It’s a great *nix utility that’s available for most linux distributions. The primary use I’ve seen for it is to be able to have a shell open, and […]