There are many-a people who would like to see Internet Explorer 6 bludgeoned and beaten quit gruesomely to its death, but there is another group (less than 10.2% of web users) that would like to see IE6 continue lumbering on. Instead, IE6 will be quietly put to rest in a somber funeral service on March 4th, 2010. The funeral will be held in Denver, CO and you can RSVP and leave memory notes through the site IE6Funeral.com. From that site:
If you have more than one person using a computer, things can get a little bit frustrating when preferences, bookmarks, and software might be different between people and accounts. The standard way of dealing with this is to use Windows accounts to log in under your own account or ’switch users’. I’m not a big fan of this approach because it can potentially leave a lot of stuff running in the background and the time to log out of one account and into another can be annoying. With that in mind, I came up with a few other tricks to let somebody have their own preferences without logging out.
I hate it when I download something and it tries to install more stuff than what I asked for. Thus I composed this Directory of Bloatware comprised of software that I’ve encountered recently that try to install more than what was listed.
I know a lot of companies use these additional installations as their revenue stream in order to provide free software, but the ‘bloat’ label is still accurate. It unnecessarily increases the size of the installer I’m downloading and the amount of software installed on my computer if I just go through the default install. A bigger installed software footprint means there are more applications that need to be kept up-to-date or could potentially have system-compromising vulnerabilities. I would like to see an industry standard where tag-along software must be listed along with the download link.
Perhaps you were the romantic last weekend and popped the big question on Valentine’s Day or maybe you were the one asked. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a few tech solutions to ease some of the stresses and worries of planning a wedding?
My wife is amazing! I mean, not only does she put up with me on a regular basis, but she also came up with a ton of great ways to reduce some of the stress that comes with planning a wedding. She deserves a lot of credit for providing the knowledge about these services, sites, and traditions (and explaining them to me) so that I can publish them here for you. I also may have contributed a few of these ideas to the list… There has to be some benefit to marrying a geek like myself.
A working group has formed to move towards establishing official language and terminology for describing malware to assist communicating and fighting malware. The working group is trying to establish the Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization (MAEC) language. There are a number of benefits to establishing a common malware terminology: eliminating innacuracy in describing malware, reduced duplication of efforts, improved awareness of malware, and decreased response time.
The Introduction to MAEC white paper was released yesterday and offers a promising start. From the abstract:
Since not everyone has their own in-house librarian, Aardvark is a service that may be of interest to you. Publicly launched in October 2009, Aardvark didn’t take long to get a lot of attention and was just acquired by Google this month. Aardvark, found at vark.com, is a social search engine that doesn’t seek to return pages but instead responses from people with knowledge in that area. Essentially, Aardvark takes the typical question and answer service like Yahoo! Answers but moves it into real-time and across multiple mediums, like IM, e-mail, and web. In the company’s own words:
I got a lot of positive feedback on my article Is Your Firefox Genuine? Phishing at its Phinest! where I identified a site that had repackaged Mozilla Firefox and wrapped it up in a bunch of malware. The site was getting a decent amount of traffic, I suspect, because it was advertising itself well and was often the top sponsored result for Firefox-related searches on Bing. I tried multiple times to get a hold of Microsoft’s advertisement group to request that they drop the advertisement, but they were unreachable “for reasons beyond [their] control.” Little did I know, there was an easier way to prevent people from installing this malware all along…
There has certainly been plenty of articles making the rounds of tech news sites covering Google Buzz, so I don’t feel like I need to cover the topic of what it is and what its purpose is. More interesting to me, however, is the privacy concerns, security issues, and backlash that Google is receiving. After all the hype of Google Wave died down and resulted in a hardly used, clunky service, Google Buzz may be headed the same direction. I wouldn’t describe myself as a vested interest as I disabled Buzz shortly after investigating it and being annoyed by its lack of customization and frequent messages. More like Google BuZzz… Amirite? So let’s get back to the more interesting security and privacy matters that others are concerned about and you might have reason to interested in as well.
