Ouch, Dell is recalling 35,000 notebook batteries that were shipped between October 5rd and 13th of this year. They were made in China or Japan and “pose a risk of fire.” There is a web-site setup by Dell on the issue… here.
They also suggest
“Batteries subject to recall should not be used while awaiting a replacement battery pack from Dell, it says.”
Since Google Talk is based on the Jabber protocol (XMPP) it’s been compatible with any jabber client for instant messaging. That was a well and good move. Very welcoming to see a big name use an open protocol that can be implemented by anyone. There were some concerns though that the voice talk features were only supported in the Google Talk client and so, no one else would be able to get in on the voice features.
In what will undoubtedly make Vista a more stable release of Windows… Microsoft will be moving display drivers outside the main kernel and run them in “userland”. Display adapter/driver problems have been one of the greatest source of instability and crashes for some time. That should make for a noticable improvement.
As I type this, I’m downloading a compressed hard drive image from the freeoszoo download page. The download size is about 1.2GB and it’s been BLAZING fast. (286KBps is the top I’ve seen) it’s been going – maybe 20-30 minutes and is 70% through…
Ok, so you’ve got a hardware firewall and you’ve got antivirus. You’re safe right? Well, not entirely. I’ve mentioned the flaws of antivirus. It’s always a step behind. A firewall doesn’t protect against unknown viruses, so what else is there to do? I’m going to tackle this in two steps. The first is to know what software is running on your system. Isn’t there a lot of that? How can I keep up?
Picking up from last time… AVG was failing to install with a peculiar registry error. (Which I didn’t see much reference to online.) OK, so here is another fruit of the online search (so many bugs to identify…)
jawa32.exe is listed as spyware.seekseek in sarc’s database.
OK – let’s see if we can kill of some of these suspects… it’s time for a couple cycles of ctrl-alt-del to remove running processes that look suspect, followed by msconfig – disabling of processes running at boot, reboot, repeat.
This is under the security tab because DRM software protection has proven to be a computer security issue… Spyware Confidential is reporting on artists revolting against the Sony DRM. According to the story…
My Morning Jacket, the artists who recorded the copy protected CD “Z” I mentioned here, are doing more than protesting Sony BMG’s use of DRM spyware. They are revolting. Yesterday I read that My Morning Jacket was doing their own recall of the affected CDs. Now I see they are burning unrestricted copies of their CD and mailing them to users. Hmm… I wonder if they are breaking the law under the DMCA.
OK – copying of the most crucial files are done. It’s time to start the process. First I’ve gathered a list of URPMI sources that I can use from online. No local mirror this time, so it may take a while to pull all the files I need. Second, it’s time to say #urpmi.removemedia -a to clean out our list of software install sources.
I just saw a news article (sorry no link at the moment)… that mentioned that Adobe has announced they will move to a monthly patch cycle. This takes a cue from Microsoft which since October of 2003 has had a predictable monthly patch release. It’s nice to see security patches released in a routine, expected, predictable, orderly way. Now if only we can get the malware writers to stick to a single monthly malware release we’ll be in good shape.
Beta news is reporting on Google Music. They say it will make it easier to find artists, album titles and lyrics. Not too long ago there was a report that the Recording industry was going to wage a war on lyric sites… Apparently Google will also provide links to music downloads if the music is available from paid download services.
Bookmark this site now by pressing Ctrl+D
