Is not having flash a good thing?
If recent reports about malicious flash files being distributed as ads are to be believed, then yes! In this case, Linux users, who typically have trouble installing flash, are far less vulnerable to the attack because flash doesn’t work well (if at all) on many systems (Ubuntu being the exception).
An AI for FO
I have finally reached the point that I need to test my FreeOrion ResourceAI. Yeah! Now if only I could get the stupid thing to compile on Arch! I have all dependencies, but GiGi errors out at the latest revision when I attempt to compile it. I moved back to rev. 639 (from 648 ) and am trying again. It’s been going alot longer, so maybe it will work this time. In the meantime I also made a Pownce profile here.
The New Inquisition
Yeah, it’s been awhile since my last post. Sorry. Anyway, I’ve been reading up on the International Criminal Court. Very interesting stuff. Although, since it has no checks or balances, it has the potential to become a Secular Spanish Inquisition of the Middle Ages. No one could touch it, they could arrest anyone they wanted on whatever charge they wanted and get away with it. As corruption and lust creep into the ICC, this will inevitably happen. It is said that “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” All of the founders of the ICC were doubtless taugh that the cause of the Spanish Inquisition’s reign of terror was religion. It wasn’t. The cause was corruption. This new inquisition will doubtless find itself a tool of corrupt officials.
When the fire goes out
This is a short post. Just a couple of lines. I was reading a series of articles on Why Ubuntu (Still) Sucks and realized something. Peter was right. He said in the last days people would be willfully ignorant. And boy he was right. Mr. Kennedy is willfully ignorant of why MSFT is failing. People don’t want a new computer every two years. Or at least most don’t. My dad does, but he is a tech-inclined guy. I can’t think of any average consumers (aka not programmers) that would like to buy a new computer and set it up every two years. WOW this turned out longer than I expected. And the reason I didn’t defend ubuntu from Mr. Kennedy is because it doesn’t need defending. Why defend water from fire? The water may disappear for a time, but it will come back no matter how many times you throw it on a fire. And eventually the fire goes out.
Should we observe holidays?
Paul wrote to the Galatians that he feared that he had wasted his efforts on them because they were “observing special days and months and seasons and years!” Should we then follow his example and ignore holidays? Or should we observe these ’special days’ like the Galatians? We should not ignore that the holidays exist, but maybe we shouldn’t celebrate them either.
Reaching for Enlightenment
Enlightenment is without a doubt the nicest looking Window Manager available. It’s leagues ahead of KDE, GNOME, Aqua, or Aero even though it’s only been in development for a couple of years. Be careful though, when you get it, make sure you get the DR17 version, and not the DR16 one. Why? The DR17 one is nice, sleek, and powerful. The DR16 one is uglier than Al Gore. I personally use it on an Ubuntu Hardy system. I use a combination of the Carbon14, Fireball, and Zerg themes on it. Too bad GNOME doesn’t integrate into it well. Here is a screen of my desktop:
And here are some videos of it:
Or am I alone?
The internet really needs a total redesign. I mean completely new technology. No longer using the vulerability prone HTML, SQL, JavaScript, etc. that make things so dangerous for the rest of us. I realize that this feat would be very nearly impossible to pull off. The cost would astronomical; the potential for data loss incalculable. But it needs doing. We need another internet revolution.
People are now able to steal information and install malware using legitimate websites. All they need is a browser. Sound like a security risk? It is. Millions of web pages are now known to install malware on your computer using this method. No matter what OS you use, you will doubtless be hit by it eventually. It will keep growing, as this attach is nearly untraceable and can be launched from any computer with an internet connection. If the majority of Windows users migrate to Linux and Mac OS to avoid the attacks, the hackers will just put different malware on the sites that runs on Linux and Mac computers. There are already many like that (although Linux/Mac malware can do very little damage, and can usually be removed relatively easily).
I am not alone in this concern. Or am I? I just hope that slashdot, cnet, and google can avoid this attack (those are the only sites I really use besides wordpress).
View Original Article: Skeleton key unlocks Microsoft SQL servers in latest Web attack | Defense in Depth – computer security, hacking, crime, viruses – CNET News.com
Tags: sql, injection, new, technology, internet, security, risk, malware
The Unbiased’s Bias
I can’t tell you how many ‘unbiased’ comments/reviews I have seen over the past months. First it was over PS3/Xbox360, then Linux/Windows/Mac, and finally Darwin/Design. These reviews are the ones to be ignored. I am working on a greasemonkey script to remove this type of things from yahoo movies and cnet. You should have seen one I read earlier! Somebody on C|Net was bashing one of the bloggers over how they were “biased [in their blog] against Microsoft”! Honestly, we are all biased. Just admit it. This is why there are Republicans and Democrats, Darwinists and Creationists, and OpenSource-junkies and Microsoft-junkies.
Why bother saying that you are ‘unbiased’? It is a sure flag that you can ignore what they say, because they are so biased they don’t see their bias. Jesus said, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in our own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” So I ask, “Why do you look at the small problem with your opponent and pay no attention to the huge problem with yourself?” I am very biased. I am very conservative Republican Creationist OpenSource-junky. So there, who will admit it next?
On the Matter of Dreams…
Last night I had the most frightening dream of my life. I won’t go into details. One thing I will tell, though is that dreams reveal aspects of ourselves we may not like to see. I ran. Despite the fact that those I know and love were in trouble (in my dream) I ran. Humiliating isn’t it? Because our dreams are subconscious, we see the truth about ourselves in them. Often this truth is not what we want to believe. We want to believe that we are, at our cores, noble beings. Unfortunately this is not true. At our cores we are evil, malicious creatures bent on obtaining power at any cost. Many of the greatest men and women of our time only did what they did to dissuade themselves of this fact. Of course I will get lots of flames for this one.
Drupal What?
This week I was surfing around, trying to find a web engine that would allow easy collaboration on projects. I wanted something themeable, customizeable, and, most importantly, free. I came up with Drupal (drupal.org). It won CNet’s webware award last year, so I decided to give it a try. I installed Drupal 6.2 (the latest Stable) and it worked like a charm. The only problem is that the ‘Project’ line of plugins only work up to 5.7 (the previous Stable), and while the Project team is working feverishly to get it update for 6.2, it isn’t there yet. So, I installed 5.7 and am now running it. It works really, really well. I highly recommend for any website, it has blog, forum, news, projects, and many more functionalities. While there aren’t as many modules for it as for WordPress, there are more variety. Anyway, I am going to be working on setting up my computer to be a web server over the next few days, so all my free time is going to go towards that.
