4th of July with its fireworks, hotdogs and hamburgers, and celebrating the birth of a free nation, gets everybody feeling pretty patriotic. That pride in our independence is making a strong push this year to defend the Free Internet. With SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and other proposed laws under our belts, we must remain vigilant against others that wish to overstep and legislate the … [Read more...]
Archives for 2012
Mozilla gathers allies for a Firefox mobile OS
"You have my bow. You have my axe. And you have my giant eagles that we can just flight straight to Mordor and be back this afternoon." Gathering allies and sharing some details, the Mozilla blog discussed the plan that will introduce a Firefox Mobile OS. Dropping the "Boot-to-Gecko" name, Mozilla will use the popular Firefox brand to push the mobile platform. It will be based … [Read more...]
Upgrading to Windows 8 will cost less than $40 with free Windows Media Center
Microsoft had previously announced an upgrade offer for purchasers of new PCs. They will be able to upgrade to Window 8 for $15 if their purchase is between June 2nd, 2012 and January 31st, 2013. Yesterday, Microsoft announced a broader upgrade program for everybody else. … [Read more...]
Avoid websites that store your password in plaintext
If you forget your password to a website and your 'forgot password' request is answered with your password being emailed to you, there's a problem there. Your password should at least be hashed with one-way encryption and stored in the database securely. Even though it's convenient, it's very bad security. As was exhibited by several database breaches recently, even hashed … [Read more...]
Merge multiple .txt files into a single file through the command line
When working with a lot of data and trying to massage it into usefulness, you never know what form the data will take. I recently wound up with a directory full of text files. In an effort to save some tediousness of the task, I looked for a way to merge all the files into one simple text file. With a single file, I could set to cleaning up the data using find and replace … [Read more...]