December 2003

Linux users, listen up! The Debian site was compromised a little while back due to an exposure in the kernel. Secunia has issued this security advisory but it’s very recent (as in, dated December 2) against kernels older than 2.4.23. Gentoo, SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware — as near as I can tell, all of the Linux “vendors” have the problem and are addressing it.

You should also update your rsync package while you’re at it.

Saw this in a TechTV newsletter but, for the life of me, I can’t find it anymore. Anyway, MoreStuff4Less is in weblog format. It joins eCost and TechBargains on my list of sites to visit for good deals.

Saw a reference to MobileWhack in Dan Gillmor’s December 6, 2003 weblog. Great site for information about mobile phones, organizers, etc. This is a tech-heavy site.

I mentioned Super Elf Bowling a few entries ago. Yeah, that’s fun but the game I keep coming back to is Santa Balls 2 from KewlBox.com. I thought the elf in this game was eerily similar to the elves in the bowling games. Well, apparently these guys are the authors of the original bowling games over at NStorm which, word has, they sold back in ’99 and started up KewlBox.com. I gotta try some of the others: Adventure Elf and Spank the Frank to name two.

(Thanks, Dan!)

The San Jose Mercury News yesterday had this opinion column on the new Mirra personal backup server. For $399 you get a file server with an 80G disk that, according to the “review” is incredibly easy to setup. There’s an app you must install on your target machines and then click to select the files you want backed up. Mirra backs those files up and constantly monitors them for changes, backing up the changes once you’ve made them. You can access the files stored there through the installed app and you can make them available over the Internet, again through the app. A good rundown of its features is available on the Mirra site. Langberg’s opinion column seems to be more of an “oh boy, someone’s finally done it!” rah-rah than a serious review. He doesn’t seem to view the need for the app, for instance, as a stumbling block, maybe because Mirra’s promised to remove the need for it in the future. I’m also not too sure that sharing the files over the Internet is actually a good selling point. Opening up your firewall and exposing your most valuable files isn’t something that should be taken lightly, SSL and authentication notwithstanding.

A friend sent me a reference from today’s Standard Edition LangaList — he’d apparently just discovered the Daily Rotation. Well, check out my weblog entry from June 24, 2003 with the title “News, news and more news and updates and news and …”

I didn’t realize I was that far ahead of some folks.

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

The San Jose Mercury News had a story today that LinkedIn purchased a patent, 6,175,831 that was filed by six degrees, inc. back in 1997. Unfortunately, the article didn’t go into any detail of the patent itself. With the above reference, you can see for yourself.

Just came across freewebs.com today. Looks interesting. I’ll have to check it out and report back.

I’ve first encountered Cygwin back in 1995. It’s now a nearly complete Unix environment that runs on a Windows machine without replacing Windows or dual-booting. You can install a complete X11 server (XFree86), SSH, shells like bash and zsh, telnet … pretty much whatever you might need. If you need Unix capabilities on a Windows machine it would be worth your time to check it out.

Today I received announcement of a 3270 emulator, suite3270. For those that don’t know, 3270s are CRT devices that are often used on mainframes. They typically consist of a keyboard and a monitor — no mouse. For old mainframe jockeys like myself, 3270s were a godsend, allowing us to break away from punch cards.

Secunia reports this flaw here. It’s another failure that’s related to use of an ActiveX component. Secunia’s advice: remove the offending DLL.