Windows gets installed
Now reboot–again!–again!
Why so many times?
Category: Tech
Getting to “know” spam
There’s just something twisted about porn spam that uses Biblical quotes to distract filters.
Cross-browser Java Spyware
Talk about convoluted. Someone has developed a Java applet that will use one browser to install spyware on another. The applet runs in any browser using the Sun Java Runtime Environment—Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, etc.—and if it can convince you to run the installer, it will install spyware on Internet Explorer. And since you can’t remove Internet Explorer from Windows (you can hide it, but it’s always there…waiting), just using an alternative browser isn’t enough to protect you.
Of course, the obvious solution here is don’t let it install anything. That’s what the Java sandbox is for, after all: applets run in their own little world and can’t touch the rest of your system unless you let them (or they find a hole in the sandbox, which is why you need to keep Java up to date—just like everything else).
Time to emphasize the fact that while Firefox is still safer than IE, it’s not a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet. You can minimize risk, but never eliminate it.
Diversifying Fedora Core
Fedora Core is following the path blazed by the Linux kernel: having started out as primarily an x86-based project (the 32-bit Intel-based processors from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Athlon), it’s branching out. Versions 2 and 3 added support for the AMD-64 chips (basis of the Opteron and Athlon 64), and now, with the first test release of Fedora Core 4, official support for both 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC.
There was a side project already, and most of the pieces that go into a Linux distribution have reached the point where they’re (mostly) platform-independent—all you need to do is recompile them. It takes fine-tuning, of course, and the actual hardware support takes effort. Yellow Dog Linux started out porting Red Hat to the PowerPC so it would run on Macs, and now builds a solid distribution off of Fedora Core, including a high-end server OS targeted for IBM’s PowerPC servers.
It’ll be interesting to compare upcoming versions of Yellow Dog and Fedora Core now that the latter is working on an actual PPC release.
Another honest spammer
Found this in our mail server logs:
relay=OWNED.HACKED.BITE.ME [IP removed], reject=550 5.7.1 No mail accepted from known spam hosts or exploited systems
This was a connection we rejected because the sending IP was on the Spamhaus XBL list of exploited systems. (Everything from reject on is the error message we returned.) Apparently whoever wrote the spam tool decided to advertise that fact when sending mail.
Shuffling across the memetic landscape
Two months later, 12,500 pages mention Apple’s “Do not eat iPod shuffle” joke.
Ironically, one page that doesn’t mention it is the one that started it all. Apple has removed the footnote from its iPod shuffle product page. Sure, the comparison to a pack of gum is still there, but I guess enough people thought it was a stupid-lawyer trick instead of, you know, a joke.
Something I didn’t notice at the time, though: the U.K. version was worded differently: “Do not chew iPod shuffle.” Perhaps reflecting the relative populations, this phrase only pulls 48 hits (soon to be 49, I expect).
Null Notice
When I got in this morning I noticed that Mozilla had announced a Thunderbird 1.0.1 Release Candidate. While I was quite happy in the pre-1.0 days to help out with bug hunting (I can probably claim credit for identifying a number of problems with importing mail from Eudora’s arcane mailbox format, though I wasn’t the one who fixed them), I figured I’d pass on this and wait a few days for the final release.
A few minutes ago, this important notice popped up:
Maybe I should try out that release candidate after all…