Another sony lawsuit? (The DRM that stole Christmas for Sony?)

Monday, December 12th, 2005

Now it appears that the Illionois Attorney General is also investigating Sony in relation to the recent DRM software debacle related to their XCP Digital Rights Management software. her office has requested information from the company regarding anti-piracy software it included on music CDs that experts have shown exposes Microsoft Windows users to security holes […]

Another interesting spyaxe note

Saturday, December 10th, 2005

Incidents.org has a note on a recently noted trojan.spaxe.exe, that when on a system will mimic the windows notification dialogue “bubble” near the system tray with the following text. “Your computer is infected! Windows has detected spyware infection. It is recommended to use special antispyware tools to prevent data loss. Windows will now download and […]

Sunncomm/Mediamax software fix FLAWED

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

Once more in the continuing story…. According to freedom-to-tinker, the “fix” released today for the SunnComm/Mediamax DRM software (the “other” DRM software on sony/bmg discs). Is fatally flawed. The problem the software initially poses is much worse than the company lets on in their release and their advise is…. 1) don’t play a mediamax protected […]

Multiseat X under linux

Tuesday, December 6th, 2005

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 […]

Barcode Scam to get $4.99 iPod

Sunday, December 4th, 2005

A Colorado University student was arrested for a barcode scam after trying to buy an iPod for $4.99 (with a fake barcode) at a Colorado Target store. Apparently the scam was successful once and he came back a second time. Basically he used a barcode printing program to duplicate the barcode for a cheap item, […]

Non-public database abuse

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

There is an interesting story at the SecurityFix on an individual who has been sentenced for using access to non-public LexisNexis searching to do background checks on, among other’s police who she though was investigating her for prostitution.    Send article as PDF   

The letters keep coming…

Thursday, December 1st, 2005

I really don’t know how a SMALL operation can do any kind of software scanning with all the…. legal challenges to have to answer to. Of course, I suppose some don’t, they just cave and their scanners suffer in effectiveness. Anyway, Sunbelt Software blogs about ANOTHER cease and desist letter they’ve received from the makers […]

Mandriva 2006 slow KDE performance

Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

Somewhere along the line, there was a review up of Mandriva 2006 where the reviewer mentioned extremely slow performance in KDE, but on loading GNome instead, things were just fine. I’ve seen some slow KDE performance on the laptop that I upgraded and thought I’d pass along some of what I’ve done to help the […]

The virus arms race? is locking down systems the key?

Monday, November 28th, 2005

The securityfix has a post on the “dirty little secret” about antivirus. Eugene Kaspersky of Kaspersky antivirus has posted an introspective article on the antivirus industry and it’s current problems. The biggest problem with antivirus is that it’s always one step behind the virus writers. Antivirus software only can prevent you being infected by those […]

Ultravnc for remote computer support

Friday, November 25th, 2005

A little while back I talked some about TightVNC which for a long time has been my favorite implementation of a remote framebuffer, or remote desktop viewing protocol known as VNC (Virtual Network Computing.) The original VNC (now realvnc) came out of AT&T research labs in the UK and has developed quite a following as […]

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