* Gearhead: The quest for the Holy Remote * Backspin: Of rootkits and personal responsibility * The past 7 days on Gibbsblog
Gearhead: The quest for the Holy Remote
Unless you really planned your home-theater setup, your collection of gear – your television, VCR, DVD player, amplifier and TV tuner – will usually come from a number of manufacturers. Herein lies the problem at the heart of this week’s episode of Gearhead.
To read Gearhead in its entirety, click here.
Backspin: Of rootkits and personal responsibility
Network World’s front page last week featured a story titled “Are all rootkits evil?” What triggered this question was the court-ordered settlement handed down the week before that requires Sony BMG Music Entertainment to compensate consumers who purchased Sony audio CDs that installed a rootkit when they were played on a PC. The compensation amounts to $7.50 and a free album download from Sony’s catalog for each CD purchased.
To read Backspin in its entirety, click here.
The past 7 days on Gibbsblog
Backspin This Week: Global warming, a hot time for IT (Followup)
I got a nice note from whoever it is who runs the poorcodes.com blog to alert me to their thoughts on my thoughts in Backspin this week.
I’ve already had some feedback (a selected item can be found here) but poorcodes’ comments are rather more measured.
Poorcodes argues that reducing electricity consumption is not the issue but reducing the production of eletricity from fossil fuels. Indeed, there is no argument that that is the goal but what Poorcodes misses is the time required to wean ourselves off fossil fuel driven power stations. We’re not talking about years, we’re talking about decades and solar energy plants will not come on-line fast enough to make a serious dent.
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Time Sink # 13: Easily Mispronounced Domain Names
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Vonage IPO Update #3
Things just get worse over at Vonage — Interesting TechDirt article: “With its stock price tanking following its IPO, the news that made the rounds yesterday that Vonage indemnified its underwriters and would cover the cost of shares allocated to customers … Vonage has moved to make it clear that isn’t the case …”
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Everybody’s got Gadgets (But not Everyone Can See ‘Em)
Over the weekend Microsoft launched their new gallery that provides downloads of their version of “widgets” (mini-applications made popular with Apple’s OS X Dashboard and Yahoo!’s Widgets) called Gadgets that work with the forthcoming Windows Vista Beta 2 release.
There are a few problems …
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Naive Geeks or Phishers of Men
I just received a load of spam from some outfit called Linux-Security Group (http://www.linux-security.us) apparently a German outfit despite their .us domain.
Let’s see: The messages aren’t CAN SPM complaint, the messages are sent in bulk to random marginally targetted addresses, the grammar in the messages is poor (“A bad configured server can result in a high risk for your business. You can prevent this risk by calling us to apply the necessary preventing measures.”), the Web site is really slow, the Web content is lame … these are either incredibly naive geeks or hackers out phishing. Anyone know which it is?
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Backspin This Week: Global warming, a hot time for IT
In Backspin this week, I suggest that “It is now official; global warming is real. When I write ‘official’ I don’t mean that scientists have finally agreed. By official, I mean President George W. Bush has finally, and one might note grudgingly, admitted that global warming is fact.”
