Computer Tips -Tech Info

What a long journey it’s been and there is progress in the Sony DRM story. The main issue in the Sony controversy was the XCP DRM software (Digital Rights Management) which was made by first4internet. However, as the first rootkit was discovered, questions began about the MediaMax software (made by SunnComm) which was the OTHER DRM method that Sony made use of. As the story developed it was found that there were security flaws in the ActiveX control which was necessary to uninstall both of the DRM packages…. anyway..

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Microsoft has been fined $32 million by South Korea’s fair trade commision. They are calling for Microsoft to either remove the Media Player and Instant Messenger from Windows, or include competing software. Microsoft has said that such changes may require it to “delay offering new versions in South Korea”, or withdraw Windows from the South Korea market entirely.

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There is a good beginners guide to Search engine optimization up at this site.

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There’s a good writeup on what OpenOffice.org could learn from firefox. It raises some interesting points. One of which is that software can be designed to meet the needs of say, 60% of the market, the framework firefox has for extenstions helps that other 40% find a way that the browser can meet their needs.

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The title says most all, it’s reported that Microsoft will release a public beta of Internet Explorer 7 sometime in the first quarter of 2006. It’s unclear if this will be titled Beta 2 (a closed beta has already taken place.) The 2nd beta for Vista will be a public beta as well.

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Think about it: one pc, 3 monitors, 3 keyboards, 3 mice, 3 users all on the same machine at the same time doing different things. Ah yes, some of you are saying terminal clients, been there… Think of a standard whitebox pc powering it and a full graphical user interface and you have what’s known as multiseat X. There’s a mini-howto up at blog.chris.tylers.info on setting this up with XR11 v. R6.9/7.0

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This is for all those people that say to me. “There haven’t been any new viruses lately have there?” It’s really amazing to me that people think if it’s not on the national news it doesn’t happen…. According to Pc Pro, Sophos has reported that 16000 new viruses have been added to their database this year. Along with that comes a flood of 1940 new viruses last month added to Sophos’ virus signatures. (That mark is a record for one month.)

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… and the true reason behind that… is the focus of an article today at freedom-to-tinker.com. Continuing on the whole Sony DRM mess… they take a look at the competing DRM methods, some of the “competition” between companies using different approaches and ultimately come to the conclusion that different DRM methods are used not as a tool against pirates, but as leverage against other media companies.

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This article from enterprise.linux.com is the second on those essential linux command line utilities for system administrators. Covered this time around are netcat, tcpdump, ethereal, nmap, MultiTail, find Xargs, awk and sed, bash and cvs. I’ve never used MultiTail, but it sounds like it’s worth looking at. Nmap is virtually essential in network auditing. Sed is one of those utitilies that it seems you can do most anything with.

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Last week there was word of a bug in Internet Explorer that would allow users of Google Desktop to be vulnerable to having the files on their machine viewed from a malicious website. Today, there is news that Google has made changes on thier site that prevent that flaw from being exploited through their software.

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