It’s October and that means that the Intrepid Ibex will be released soon.  It’s scheduled release is October 30, 2005.  Though I knew what a Fawn was (Fiesty Fawn 7.04), I had to look up what a Gibbon was to be sure (Gutsy Gibbon 7.10).  I knew a Herron was a bird (Hardy Herron 8.04) but I had no clue at all what an Ibex was until I saw on.  Just Google Ibex and you will see a picture.  The thing sure does have some horns, that’s for sure.  In case you don’t already know, Ubuntu has releases that come out in April and October.  The version number is the year 8 in this case and the month 10 in this case or 8.10.  The current version is 8.04.

You can download the Beta and play with it and I will do just that in a couple days when I have some free time.

No, not really, but most people go there for a search.   But because of a flaw in the internet DNS or domain naming service which basically takes a name like crossdotnet.org and turns it into a number could have caused every single website you type in to go to anywhere you didn’t want to go.  It’s called DNS cache poisoning and hopefully this flaw has been corrected as of yesterday.

I had wondered if something like this was happening to me one night. I still don’t know what happened and if anyone can explain, I would be grateful.  I was trying to come up with a domain name for this website and one way I did it was just typed in the domain in firefox and if I got the TRY AGAIN, I figured it was likely that the name was not taken.  This is not full proof because a domain name can be taken and just not have a website or the website may be down at that time.  I don’t recall what I typed in but I got a website.  I typed in a slightly different name, I think with .net instead of .com and I got the same website but the banner at the top had changed.  So I typed in slasdot.org and I got the same website again, filled with ads by the way, with slashdot.org typed in at the top.  No matter what I typed in, I got the same website with that name typed in.  I rebooted my comptuer and tried those names again and got absolutely nothing, except slasdot.org took me to the right website.  That happened one other time as well.  I still don’t know if it was DNS cache poisoning or some other nifty trick.   It was weird though.  Just imagine what this type of flaw would do for phishing sites.
Anyway, to read more about the DNS flaw visit these two websites

Breitbart News Feed

Doxpara Research - This is the blog of the guy that stumbled upon the flaw.  It’s a great geek article too.

Make sure you update your computer so that you are safe from these attacks.

In case you haven’t heard, today is the day Bill Gates will step down as being Microsoft’s chairman.  He and Paul Allen started the company back in the late seventies when they paid some kid $50,000 for a program called DOS, Disk Operating System.  I remember thinking in college that DOS was all that.  But one of my professors informed me that compared to UNIX or DB/2, DOS was small potatoes.  Not even registering on the radar.  But that was back in the days of mainframes and the PC revolution was just beginning.

Bill Gates is a genius, there is no doubt about it.  He built an empire but like all political empires, his computer empire was attacked and it seems may be slowly starting to fade as did the Roman empire.  Google is king in the search engine arena.  Mac and Linux are taking OS market shares and FireFox hands down kicks IE’s butt.

Whoever takes over for Microsoft has some shoes to fill that 12 men could probably not fill.  But they will try and Windows will still be the top selling operating system for now and along with that it will be the most attacked desktop operating system for many more years to come.  Maybe somewhere out there though, there is another pirate in the silicone valley looking for an unsuspecting programmer that he can purchase the next big breakthrough off of with little capital.  Until then, we will continue to love and hate windows.  But as for Bill, love or hate him, he has changed the world with his ideas.  Good Luck Mr. Gates, you’ve certainly earned the early retirement.

Micro$oft’s chief software architect was recently quoted as saying “open source is a bigger threat to the software juggernaut than Google is.“No one knows for sure if he was referring to open source being a threat to Microsoft or to the software development community in general.  The whole essence of the open source movement though is the underlying belief that all software should be free.  It’s working too because if people didn’t want to write something for free, you would not be reading this blog right now because it uses free software from WordPress.

Is open source a threat?  No way.  It’s a wave of the future and right now still a relatively small market share, but hold on.  The days are coming, declares Phil, when Microsoft will start to lose market share and open source will gain it.  It will start with businesses first and trickle down to home users later.  Any home user that sees what Ubuntu with Beryl can do compared to Vista would be wise to consider the switch.  After all there is still Wine out there too for legacy win programs.

Sorry, Ozzie if you feel threatened.  Maybe you will only be able to take four vacations next year instead of five.

Gone are the days of free internet.  Oh wait, it never was free.  But it was always nice to be able to go wherever you wanted and visit whatever site you needed to visit and learn all that you can learn but those days may be coming to an end.  Is it a way for the cable companies to make more money or is it a way to keep the heavy users at bay?  I personally think that like anything else it will hurt the innocent more than it keeps the heavy users at bay.  I am talking about metered internet and oh yeah, it may be coming to a Cable Company near you.

Metering usage is quite common for web hosting providers.  If you are getting lots of hits on a site, the servers will get lots of usage so web hosting sites monitor your usage and charge you extra if you go over your quota.  With a site like this, it’s not likely I will go over my quota however I was considering hosting this site in my home starting next year when my 1 year agreement runs out.  If my cable company meters my usage, I may not be able to do that.

You can see more on this story by clicking here.

I am not usually one for allowing the goverment to control our lives, but I do feel it is time to make Cable a utility and start regulating it like electricity, water, and land based telephone lines.  Perhaps we will all need to contact our congressmen.  But then again, electricity and water are metered too.  Ok, I guess we just have to hope it flops.  Let’s hope for that.

I remember back in 1979 watching in amazement as my uncle, six years older than me, hooked up a device to his television and flipped the switch.  Channel 4 became a video game.  Pong was the start of a new revolution, the video game revolution.  With Wii, Madden 09, Playstation 3 and many flavors of Mario games flooding the market, we sure have come a long way from Pong.

But recently I heard that a guy named Moritz Waldemeyer designed a pong table that uses 2400 LEDs and two touchpads.  When the table, which by the way looks like a normal dinner table, is turned on, it becomes a pong table.  You control your paddle with the touch pad and the ball travels back and forth along the LEDs.  WOW!  It’s not likely this game will make it to market but I am sure there will be many hard core video enthusiasts that will put down Halo 3 for a few minutes just to say they played Pong on a pong table.

I wonder if it makes that annoying sound……Booop…….Booop………..Boop……… Bong……..Score 1-0

Maybe you heard about the recent attempt by Microsoft (AKA big Brother, AKA Mr. Monopoly) to purchase Yahoo.  Thankfully the deal fell through.  I can’t imagine what would have happened to my yahoo mail account if Microsoft would have taken it over.  I bet eventually I would be paying for it or cancelling the account.  Ok, so live.com is free, but it won’t be long.  Microsoft is a greedy company and let’s face it:  They own us.  Why do I say they own us?  Go to circuity city and tell them you would like a PC for under $300 and you want Ubuntu with Beryl on it.  Chances are that the person you are talking to would not even know what Ubuntu is.  And if they did know, they would tell you that they don’t sell Ubuntu on their computers.  They only sell Vista.

Unless you put together your own computer by purchasing the parts from some place like newegg.com, you are not going to get a cheap computer without Windows.  Of course unless you are smart and buy a mac.  But they can be expensive too.  Now that Ubuntu is really starting to make a name for itself in the desktop market and open source is more than just a “Geek” concept, they may have to soon lower their prices to compete.

Have you ever asked yourself why it is that almost anything (Adobe Acrobat, Flash player, etc. excluded) that you install on a PC costs money if you run Windows?  If you are a regular reader here, then you know that I run Ubunutu and I have a ton of software on my computer and I didn’t pay a dime for it.  Try to get a free graphics program with the power of Gimp for Microsoft Windows.  Not gonna happen!

One good thing that may have come out of the merger is that Microsoft would have acquired Zimbra which is an awesome open source program.  Check out their free email demo here.  It’s not known if Microfost would have kept it open source or not.  But it is really ironic to think of Microsoft and open source. It’s almost an oxymoron and since we are dealing with Microsoft, you can put teh emphasis on moron there.

Well this one thing remains. Microsoft has a lot of money and they have to keep up with the hackers that are trying to bring them down.  In the meantime, Linux, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, and companies like this continue to make great strides to help defeat Goliath, I mean Big Brother.

I remember when I was younger, my sister sat in this new thing called a car seat.  It hooked over the front seat which of course was a bench seat and she sat there between mom and dad in this thing that kept her strapped in.  That way if dad got in a wreck, she would not fly off mom’s lap and go through the windshield.

It was new technology and it was wonderful.  Of course nowadays car seats are made differently and they are safer and in most states are required by law.  As technology evolved, people learned how to put that technology to better use.

It’s not much different with computers.  With the advent of Wi-Fi or wireless internet connections and “hot-spots”, hackers have evolved too.  The FBI warned recently that the person sitting next to you at the airport or coffeshop may be a hacker.  They can setup phony networks near known hotspots and when you connect to their network, they can connect to your computer and get loads of information if you have saved it on your computer.  It’s so incredibly easy to steal information from someone’s computer once you get on the same network with that person.  It’s too easy!  Protect yourself.  The best way to protect yourself is to not use Wi-Fi hotspots. Of course, that is just too inconvenient for alot of people.  So the next best thing would be to not use Microsoft Windows.  Of course, that’s not likely to happen with common computer users.  So what can you do if you must use a hot spot and you use windows?

Pray?  Yes, that would help too but basically be smart.  Confirm the connection information with the propietor to be sure you are really on their network.  If you can’t do that, don’t know how or are too shy to ask then at least clear your cache and remove all saved passwords.  If you use IE7 or Firefox 2.2 or above, it should be pretty easy to figure out how to do this.  The first step is click on Tools (firefox) and then clear private data.  Then check your preferences under the edit menu option.  For IE, click on tools and then internet options.  Clear out your personal data and passwords.  But you are still not safe.

Make sure you don’t have personal files on your computer that you don’t want to be seen. If you keep an address book, notes with bank information, email addresses, etc., then don’t use a wi-fi hotspot unless you know it is safe or unless you know how to password protect your documents. But that still isn’t enough.

If you have windows you absolutely must have some sort of internet security with firewall, virus, and spyware protection.  Why? Well if you are on a hacker network, then you will be an easy target without this protection.  If you are on a legitimate network, some hacker may be also.  They don’t need their own networks, they can use the same one you are on and if they can connect to your computer, they can disable your computer in no time.

So what are you to do?  Buy a mac, protect it with the latest mac technology or download a free copy of Ubuntu, do not share anything and when the box comes up that says your password is needed to make changes to your computer, disconnect and get out of there.

Sorry to be such a downer, but I am just looking out for everyone.  Technology is great when it is used properly.  The problem is that too many people don’t use it properly or are not well versed enough to know how to protect themselves.  Also, be sure to see my post about phishing too.

The advent of online storage services was a great step for the PC world.  Users, professional or home-based can store those valuable files, pictures, documents, etc. on someone else’s server so you don’t have to buy extra disk space or spend time with costly backup systems.  But what happens when that online storage system fails?  What then?

Read this PC World article to find out what happend to HP and their new system that went online April 7 and is currently offline for an “isolated technical issue”