Blog is one of the “top ten” words being looked up and has been added to the dictionary. I am not sure if that is necessarily a good thing, and I am not sure the definition is even accurate at this point as many blogs are no longer simply personal (ours being a perfect example). I was reading the other day about the “blogoshere” and I see that is now on the verge of being a word as well. Is there just one blogosphere (as the article I was reading suggested) or are there many blogospheres (more like biomes or ecosystems)?

In the BBC breakfast new was some advice on how to deal with the latest scam in which a computer user’s Internet dialler is diverted to a premium rate or international number.

Amongst the list of advice was to consider changing your web browser and that a popular new browser is Firefox, which is less susceptible to security threats than Internet Explorer!

Also pointing out that Firefox uses a pop-up blocker with will prevent most rogue diallers from loading. So Firefox is getting noticed.

Hazel

A reader on the YahooGroups Clips List was wondering how to open files in Irfanview via a NoteTab Clip. I proposed the following two solutions:
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Breaking records is usually a good thing, but not in the case of Windows. New data indicates that it now takes only 4 minutes for a Windows XP SP1 machine to be compromised by a remote exploit (Virus/Trojan/Worm etc). The tests included both Linux and Mac desktop machines, but only the Windows box’s were compromised.

The only questions are: “Is anybody really surprised” and “does anyone still believe Microsoft’s claim that Windows is really more secure?”

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In an interesting twist, AOL have just released a beta browser that can use either the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, or Internet Explorer’s engine. It’s certainly a novel idea, but I can’t help wondering if they are creating a browser that will suffer from IE security flaws, and then in addition any that show up in the Mozilla code.

My personal opinion at this point, is that I’ll stick with Firefox and my choice of a dozen or so extensions, if for not other reason then that I’m happy with what I have and can’t see any benefit in the extra complexity. That and I have still not forgiven AOL for the hundreds of “join AOL” CD’s I’ve received over the years. 🙂

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SCO, the company that anyone into free software hates, has suffered something of a hack attack. Somebody has made their unofficial motto official by cracking their website and replacing their banner logo with an improved version containing the words “SCO, We own all your code. Pay us all your money”. I doubt the perpetrators were real Linux geeks, had they been, it would no doubt have read “All your code are belong to us” (if you don’t understand that don’t worry about it, some of you will.)

I don’t approve of any form of unauthorised cracking, however I find myself unable to shed any tears for the once great UNIX company that has become nothing but a litigation company trying to use lawyers to reap in money from companies like IBM that support Linux.

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This clip will take a selection of data contained in a comma separated file (without quotes) and reorder those fields in a random fashion.

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