This is not exactly “new” news, the story came out around the 25th of June, but it’s important enough to warrant a mention here.

This story revolves around a proposed amendment to the copyright laws, one that has far reaching implications.
In short, the idea is that any service or device that can be seen to “induce” copyright violation, can have the manufacturers or providers be held accountable.
That doesn’t sound too bad in theory, but consider the implications, there are many things that can be considered inducements to copyright infringement. Here are some examples:
– Ipod, or any storage based MP3 player.
– All P2P file sharing applications.
– Removable hard drives.
– CD and DVD burners and burning programs.
– Instant Chat and IRC programs.
– Web hosting.
– Internet connection.

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SciTE Text Editor is a very nice text editor for syntax highlighting in many languages.

Cheers

Don

Just a quick note to wish all in the US a happy 4th of July, but remember, celebrate safely! Injuries from Fireworks – NCIPC Tells about injuries from fireworks. As a “survivor” of a pretty good hand blow up in my youth, I can tell you it ain’t pretty. So have fun, but be safe.

cheers

Don

Have you ever read the EULA (End User Licence Agreement) that you agreed to when you signed up for a Hotmail Passport? If you haven’t you should as it makes fascinating reading. You would be surprised (and most likely angry) at what rights to your own information you actually have, or more importantly you’ll be surprised at what rights Micro$oft has over your data. (There was a uproar not that long ago, when Microsoft in their licensing agreement for Passport, basically claimed the right to do anything with any data that passed though a Passport server. That means MSN, Hotmail, MSN Messenger and others. They made some adjustments to the EULA, but its still an outrageously tight license from a users perspective.)

Even more fascinating is the new court of appeals ruling that has declared that it is not illegal to read other peoples e-mails, if they happen to be in the ram of your computer at the time. Apparently a gentleman by the name of Bradford C. Councilman decided to spy on his customers by reading their e-mail from free e-mail accounts he had given them, he used this information to gain a leg up on Amazon by finding out what books people wanted.

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For the second time in as many weeks, Internet Explorer has yet another security flaw that is being actively used to compromise users, and the sole purpose of this one is to steal your banking details.
For the love of god people, why are you still using IE? How many virus’s must you be infected with, and how much spy and malware must your computer get before people come to their senses? IE has only one real purpose now days, and that is to install updates from Windows update. For anything other then that you are asking for trouble and its only a matter of time before you get caught. Get Opera or Firefox or Mozilla, just get something and stop this nonsense please.

Remember people, these particular virus/trojan infections have one purpose, to take money from your pocket, and put it into theirs, and the easiest way to stop that happening, is to NOT use IE.

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gMail is a new concept from Google to provide huge email boxes to people for “free”. Their machines scan the mail content and then provide clearly marked advertisements that appear to be topical in the margin. Welcome Page for gMail.

Currently the only way to get one is to be invited by Google. After the “beta” test, they will supposedly be widely available. The main concern people have is that some “big brother” at Google will be checking their mail. The reality is several fold, first, your email will be machine scanned, not man read. They assure people that they are not reading it. The fact is that all email passes through many random isp’s in transmission anyway. So if you want the convenience, consider giving it a try. It might be very handy for people who need to maintain threads for a long time as it gives threaded output and is searchable.

Here is more about it:
Link to gMail About Page
Franki’s prior post on gMail

cheers

Don

Well, I’ve been pushing Firefox as a far better browser then Internet Explorer for a considerable time now, but recently a whole heap of security people around the world are agreeing with me. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (A United States government department) have recently started telling people to find and use an alternative browser to Internet Explorer. See The Register for the story.

In short, the story is that once again we are up to our eyeballs in M$ security flaws, and in this instance, the culprits are Internet Explorer and M$ Internet Information Services (IIS) Micro$ofts web server software. What it amounts to, is that any site that runs specific versions of IIS, can be infected by a virus of sorts that adds code to all the pages hosted by the site. Anybody then visiting the site in Internet Explorer runs the new code and tries to download a key logger application from a Russian site, presumably they will use it to steal your personal data. (like credit card numbers and such.)
You can read Microsofts take on it here.

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