Computer Tips -Tech Info

Shouldn’tthis and this get more news coverage? US Commerce Department computers (specifically a bureau responsible for export licenses) is under cyber attack from hackers based in China. The Bureau in question is the Bureau of Industry and Security…. which handles “U.S. exports which have both commercial and military applications”…. They’ve been targetted by various rootkits […]

Betanews is reporting that Samsung’s site has been hacked and is currently serving up malware in some areas. user intervention is required for it to run on the users pc, but be cautious. Samsung has been notified, but as of Friday morning (according to the report) the trojan horse is still there. I really wonder […]

According to this story, there has been another compromise of a debian project server. (Is this the third in the last year?)… the Alioth webserver was offline most of the 5th of September… It was simply stopped because we discovered that some script kiddies were running an IRC proxy. After thorough investigation, we discovered that […]

I just noticed over the weekend that Project Gutenberg has updated their downloadable DVD/CD of free etexts. (Tracker at this link.) The last update of the dvd has been a few years (as far as I can tell (2003?)) It should be noted that you can now create your own image of selected works through […]

I saw this over the weekend and saw it as marginally more useful than traditional package tracking…. This is called packagemapping.com and is a mashup of package tracking and google maps. I don’t know, I mean, when I read that a package is in Cincinnati, I have a pretty good idea of WHERE that is, […]

I remember several years back I tried out gocr which is an open source character recognition engine. I wasn’t thoroughly impressed, but it sort of worked. Yesterday, I saw the news that Google has released Tesseract as an open source Optical Character Recognition engine. It was originally developed by HP and has been shelved for […]

I’ve been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as “Internet explorer cannot display the webpage.” The error page goes on to suggest a number of connectivity or availability problems. I […]

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 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 […]

Over the last couple weeks I’ve gotten persistent and annoying spams from a place that is currently at broadcastemailcompany.com (although they have had variations on their domain during that time.) broadcastemailgroupcom and broadcastemailcorporation.com are some of their other recent aliases. They claim in the email that their offer is only for non-profit groups and to […]