Computer Tips -Tech Info

The last couple days, there’s been a virus spreading making use of yahoo mail’s interface. Usually web mail is considered a fairly safe way to get email, but in this case all that was done was the user clicking on a malicious email and the virus ran. It appears that javascript/AJAX/Web 2.0 applications are going to have to get closer scrutiny. In the Sans diary, they mention that they’ve analyzed javascript from several web applications and there are some that are vulnerable. (They’re contacting vendors.) They also point out web designers should keep this in mind as well..

The current worm could be readily modified to spread across many systems that do not escape javascript when displaying data from a foreign source. Many web developers should reexamine their code, and make sure that display functions do not deliver potentially malicious code.

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After spending about 5 days using wget to resume the download of the vista beta 2 .iso file (which is a bit over 3 GB). I finally gave up seeing as how that 5 days had netted me about 2-3 MB of data. As I started looking around online, I found that Chris Pirillo had got a site up vistatorrent.com where he is hosting a tracker for a bittorrent download of the vista iso. Of course, Microsoft recommends that you order the dvd and wait, but Chris has provided md5sum information so you can check your download. I’m up to 25% done now *(I discovered the torrent about 24 hours ago, although last night I didn’t download.) I let it download part of the afternoon and then remembered to restart this morning. So, it’s making pretty quick progress.

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One of the big linux news stories yesterday was the release of google earth for linux. Essentially the Google earth team has released “release 4” which is a beta version of the next release. It looks like there are greater “user contribution” capabilities with this release. I’ve tried the download for linux and can say that it installs well, the user interface looks fine (it’s not a wine-wrapper application – it’s a true linux port.) It’s not usable yet (for me…)

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As you might recall some time back I talked about the release of vmplayer which is a free virtual machine “player” from vmware. Mostly, I wrote about the problems I had running it on my main desktop which was running Mandrake 10.1 at the time. The error was basically a signal 11 in the log file, which MOST everyone says is a hardware problem (or kernel…) Well, I tested the memory, everything seemed fine. Finally, I was having other issues and an itch for an upgrade, so I upgraded to an AMD64 3000 based system with 1GB of memory and did the upgrade to Mandriva 2006 as well (first with the original kernel, now with the updated kernel.) Vmplayer still refused to run.

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While, I’m still waiting to get the Vista Beta download anyway… I’ve seen the first of what I expect will be many posts out and about complaining about the upcoming OS from Microsoft. Admittedly it’s a beta and after seeing a lot of beta-release candidate – final cycles from open source software, I’m sure much will change. However…. some good points are raised.

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A while back there were rumors of Google Payments, a Paypal competitor on the way. Well, if this is right, it will be named GBuy and will be launched June 28th. Also, it sounds as though there may be no fee for merchants during the test. After that, there will be a percentage fee on each transaction – they’re saying 1.5-2% which is less than paypals rate currently.

Sounds like things could heat up quickly between Ebay/Paypal and Google this summer. Google Base, with an integrated GBuy….

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Wolves in sheeps clothing are the label I give to those rogue antispyware, or antivirus programs that bring pests instead of protect against them, or are otherwise questionable in their tactics. Titan Shield seems to be a new threat on the block in this area, I haven’t seen it first hand yet, but it looks like it is one you’ll want to avoid *(You may want to block antispywarebox(dot)com and titanshield(dot)com if you’re in a position to do such things in your network.)

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According to reuters data on US Nuclear Safety Administration employees (*some 1500) was stolen in a computer cracking incident.

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I mentioned the other day revisiting the qemu site to discover new versions of both qemu and the non-redistributable kernel module kqemu (qemu is now at version 0.8.1 and kqemu is at 1.3.0pre7). There’s also a new startup switch -kernel-kqemu which enables FULL virtualization of both kernel and user code. I could feel a difference in speed, but I wanted to give a test with a stopwatch to see what the numbers were and this is what I found.

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These days, big inventions aren’t entirely new creations, but improvements on an old idea. This latest in a string of interesting science/technology breakthrough stories is about just that. Researchers at MIT (how many sentences have I started like that this week?) have developed a new way of constructing a capacitor. One of the limiting factors with HOW much charge a capacitor stores now is the surface area of the “plates” that hold charge. The greater the surface area, the greater the charge. What they’ve done is laced the surface with nano-tubes, greatly increasing the surface area. One writer compared this to a fuzzy bathroom towel soaking up more water than a flat cloth. Probably not a bad analogy. What makes this significant….

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