David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
And speaking of duds, it looks like HP has one on their hands in their Web OS-based tablets.
Best Buy has about a quarter-million unsold tablets in their warehouse and has only managed to sell 25,000 of them. And when Woot ran a special on them, selling them for $120 off, they sold a whopping 612 of them.
And now it looks like HP is just going to discontinue Web OS altogether.
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I said Tuesday that it’s a bad idea to download and view PDF (Adobe Acrobat/Adobe Reader) documents from questionable sources, but I didn’t really elaborate on why, nor did I tell you how to view questionable PDFs safely.
The reason is that pretty much anybody with a little bit of determination and the ability to follow a recipe can plant a trap in a PDF file and use it to gain access to your computer. Adobe Reader is extremely prone to these kinds of attacks, and don’t think you’re safe if you don’t run Windows. There are toolkits that will inject traps that work on Macintoshes and Linux too.
Yes, your antivirus software should catch it. But most antivirus software doesn’t dig deeply enough into PDF files to find it.
Scared yet? You should be. You do have some options.
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PC Magazine presented a list of 12 computer duds, and while I agree with most of them, my old friend the Commodore 128 makes an appearance. Commodore released several duds over the years, but calling the 128 one of them doesn’t seem fair.
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Firefox 6 came out sooner than expected, and yet, I can’t find anyone who’s excited about it. Probably because, under last year’s conditions, this probably would be called Firefox 4.2 or perhaps Firefox 4.5 or 4.6, something like that.
Yeah, I’ll be installing it, if only because it’s the security update for Firefox 5. But it sure feels anticlimactic. When Firefox 3 and Firefox 4 came out, I felt excited. Maybe that means something’s wrong with me. But there was something compelling, something tangible about those new releases. I don’t think either of them let me do something I couldn’t do before, but they at least held the promise of letting me do those things faster.
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In searching for the abstract of my book, I found more than I expected: What appeared to be a pirated PDF copy of the book in its entirety. What’s worse is that it appeared #1 in Google’s search. Numbers 2 and 3 were various pages on my site, #4 was my Wikipedia profile page, #5 was O’Reilly’s page, and #6 was Amazon’s page. So it’s easier to download a pirated copy of my book than it is to buy it. (It’s $2.03 at Amazon right now. Maybe I should buy some copies.)
I’m having trouble deciding whether that bothers me. The likelihood of me ever making another 25 cents off that book is slim. There was some talk at one time of releasing the book under some kind of Creative Commons license, but I never received the paperwork so I guess they changed their mind. As far as I know, it’s still under copyright.
And the copyright doesn’t belong to me, so ultimately it’s not up to me. I wrote it, but O’Reilly owns the copyright. So I e-mailed O’Reilly to ask them if they care.
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So your Outlook mailbox says it’s full, but is not? If you have a problem with phantom e-mail in Outlook, resulting in an Outlook mailbox full even after deleting a pile of messages, you can fix it. I did, and it was chewing up all my Exchange server space. Here’s how I fixed it.
I run Outlook connected to an Exchange server at work, and I’m constantly running out of mailbox space. When I go into Mailbox Cleanup, click View Mailbox size, and click on the Server Data tab, I see lots of space in my outbox–54 megabytes in this case–with no way to clean it out from inside Outlook. Yet when I look in my Outbox, there’s nothing in it. I’ve run Scanpst, which is the usual cure for Outlook maladies, but that didn’t eliminate the invisible messages either.
When the amount of space you can see doesn’t match the amount of space you’re actually using, go into Outlook Web Access and empty it.
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I was shocked to read today that Google went out and plunked down $12.5 billion for Motorola. I’m sure that other Android phone makers aren’t exactly happy about it–it means Google is going to be competing with them, unless Google just bought Motorola for patents–but I don’t really see how Google had much choice.
Google risks alienating its partners, but…. More on that in a minute.
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Over at Rabbit-Hole, a commenter posted that my low-tier VPN is unnecessary if you’re using SSL. He’s wrong.
Perhaps I should have titled this “When SSL isn’t foolproof security,” but it’s too late now. Oh well.
When you’re sitting on a strange network (not your home or work network), SSL is vulnerable to a classic man-in-the-middle attack. If you’re paying attention, you should know if your session is being hijacked. But who’s paying attention?
I’ve resisted the pull to AMD64, for a variety of reasons. I’ve had other priorities, like lowering debt, fixing up a house, kids in diapers… But eventually the limitations of living with 2003-era technology caught up with me. Last week I broke down and bought an AMD Phenom II 560 and an Asus M4N68T-M v2 motherboard. Entry-level stuff by today’s standards. But wow.
If you can get one, an AMD Phenom II x4 840 is a better choice, but those are getting hard to find. And if you can’t afford a $100 CPU there are bargains at the very low end too: A Sempron 145 costs less than $45, and a dual-core Athlon II x2 250 costs $60. The second core is worth the money.
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In honor of the IBM PC turning 30, I thought I’d tell some stories about my experiences with the operating system introduced with it, PC DOS (aka MS-DOS).
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