It sounds like Microsoft Windows Vista will not support old DVD drives when it ships. By old, I’m talking about drives that don’t support the region selection limits that newer drives have. (In other words, they won’t support old drives that are effectively region free.) Supposedly this is because they lack the older drives to test.
Computers can communicate over networks. (Surprise!) That’s how you’re reading this post. The machine that this site is hosted on is listening for requests for connection. When it receives a request it answers back with a web page. In fact, computers can listen for a great many different kinds of connection at the same time. In networking we talk about a computer listening on a given “port”. The web server for this site (and most web sites) listens on what’s called port 80. There are 65535 possible network ports that a computer can listen for incoming connections on.
OK, this is an ambitious idea, but the two articles on Titan Rain and the lack of IT security training has planted a bug under the saddle so to speak…. I don’t know how many parts will be in this series. In fact, I may add to it from time to time even after an initial series. This is intended as a “crash course” in the essentials of network security. It’s aimed at the home users and managers of small networks (small business owners?) that haven’t thought about network security before and maybe will be a reference of some value even to those that are more intermediate. The essentials of network security will be covered in the first few posts.
Earlier this year there was an article or two about a rumored “hack attack” that was ongoing against US Government (and contractor) computer systems. The stories claimed that the attacks seemed to be coming from China. Today I’m seeing a couple of articles on the topic. First up is an AFP story on the problem it sounds as though little attention has been paid to hardening systems. There is speculation that the Chinese military is involved in the breakins. One incident was very neatly and methodically done, planting a backdoor in 30 minutes.
In another move that will frustrate millions… The recording industry is set to take on sites that provide lyrics (or scores) of licensed songs. I know I’ve searched for song lyrics many times because I couldn’t make out what the words were by listening to the song (and the label was too cheap to give lyrics in the packaging (or the type was small enough to require a scanning electron microscope…)) Anyway guitar tab sites are under the microscope as well. Don’t expect just fines and a site takedown either…..
Linuxgangster.org (??) has a good article up on the powerful grep command. GREP is one of the most useful command line tools in linux (really, there are so many it’s hard to choose, but this is one I use more frequently than most others…) grep can stand on it’s own to look for a term in many files (for example)
grep soughtafterterm *.txt
it will display which line numbers and which files it appears in.
Good luck Jim… this message will self destruct in 40 seconds… A UK mobile (cell) company says it’s developed self-destructing text messages. In the spring they hope to introduce self destructing email/photo and voice messages. The recipient receives a link to the message and once viewed the message “self destructs” in 40 seconds. The good things they claim from this…
ultimately no one will ever have to worry about their messages or pictures ending up in the wrong hands ever again,
This is the first of a few articles that will highlight some of the tools/gadgets/gizmos that I find useful. I’m starting off with one that’s almost essential. External USB hard drive adapter. Recently, I’ve been looking for something a bit leaner than your typical usb -> hard drive converter. Yes, I’ve carried something like this for large (3.5″) hard drives to appointments. The idea is if you need to transfer data from an old pc to a new one, put the old drive in an external adapter and copy away.
This may not be useful to many people, but I thought it was interesting. If you do web design and use css you’ll probably like this… I found this post at leftjustified.net about a neat way to “reset” the padding and margin css information which can help for designing sites to display the same when using CSS. Unfortunately, many browsers have little quirks in displaying css, maybe they have strange default settings which cause css placement to look, well, strange, from one browser to another… in comes this little trick…
I know it’s not an ipod… but I’m looking forward to hearing some word when Fronteir Labs releases their “Nexblack”. For background…. the nexblack is priced at around $89 (at the frontier labs store), but I’ve found $69 here. It’s a portable mp3/wma/wma with drm/ogg player (according to the spec sheet.) It uses AA batteries (2), has built-in recording, uses compactflash cards and according to the spec sheet will have a line-in (line-in recording as well). It also will have fm radio functions.
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