Digital Choke Daynotes

 Tuesday, May 10, 2005       mail    link   the story

It's "Patch Tuesday" for Microsoft fans...but only an update for Windows 2000. Of course, you all have your Automatic Updates set, right?

For Firefox users, there are some currently unpatched vulns for version 1.03. And if you haven't upgraded to 1.03, you are not paying attention. Of course, my copy of FireFox doesn't tell me that there is an update. Never have gotten that to work, even though the Automatic Updates is enabled in FF's options. I've had to manually upgrade each version.

On the medical front, minor cold/sore throat here, but not too bad. I did stay home yesterday, though. And got to experience some unusual weather here in the "Cah-pi-tohl". The weather geeks got really excited with the thunderstorms and tornado watches. Bad weather is always a good thing for news ratings, and having bad weather in the middle of 'sweeps' is doubly good.

So the local weather geeks were really excited. One stations' "Weather Center" got an upgrade to "Extreme Weather Center".

There was some justification, though. There were 14 severe thunderstorm alerts, and a couple of tornado watches. There were some funnel clouds, but only category 1 (the weakest), and minimal touch-down time.

The "thunder-boomers" were impressive, though. The Doppler images showed areas of red and purple, which means really heavy rain and hail. At home, I watched the various storms from my back yard, which has a good view to the west. Most of the storms went around me, rather than through me. Although there were a couple of bright flashes quickly followed by loud cracks of thunder. It was then that I thought that standing next to my metal fence, or under the metal patio cover, may not have been the best idea. But no damage in my area.

I took some pictures of the clouds, but nothing really impressive. I was watching for funnel clouds, but there were none in my area.

And through it all, the DirecTV system (and the TiVo) worked just fine. No dropouts, and no commercials on the TiVo'd broadcasts.

 Wednesday, May 11, 2005       mail    link   the story

If it's Wednesday, it must be "Farmer's Market Day" at the park right next to work. Yes, every Wednesday here in sunny California (unless it's not), the local 'certified farmers' bring their wares to sell, ostensibly higher quality (fresher) fruits and vegetables at lower prices.

Usually. There's usually a good selection, and it seems like fresher produce, but with the advances in refrigeration and shipping, you can sometimes find fresher products at the local grocery store, and the prices will be lower.

Still, it was a nice day today (sunny, a bit cool, slight breeze), so I took a short walk over there to pick up some fresh cherries. They are quite good, although there is a concern among the cherry growers that the rains of last week and this week will damage their crop. Ripening cherries and rain don't get along; the rain causes the cherries to split, reducing their quality a bit, and therefore their price.

I picked up a bit over a pound ($2.50/lb) of cherries, and they are pretty good. I prefer the Bings, but they aren't ready yet. The ones I got (don't recall the variety) are not as dark as the Bing, but still quite juicy.

Apologies to those of you that might be in somewhat more hostile climates.

Another nice climate is Florida, I hear. And a great place to be if you are retired, or if you want to be a spammer. (Other than the hurricanes, I guess.) A report in the "Sun Sentinel" (newspaper in south Florida):

Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties are home to more spammers than anywhere else in the nation, and practically the world, Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper reported. "More than a quarter of about 180 hardcore spammers tracked by watchdog group Spamhaus are based in Florida, and most of those are in the tri-county area. The city with the most spammers in the world is Boca Raton," the article said. "Why South Florida? Spammers and anti-spam groups cite a combination of reasons. They include the warm weather and laid-back lifestyle, lenient bankruptcy laws, proximity to Internet data centers, a history of telemarketing and e-mail marketing, and the state's longstanding image as a good place to do dirty business."

How thick with spam could it be, you ask? The paper answers: "South Florida is so notorious that some experts attributed a short-term decline in global spam after last year's hurricanes to the assumption that the storms disrupted spammers' operations."

You can get all the details here, along with a link to one of the big providers of spamming software, lists, and other services. A quick look at their pricing structure shows that, as we know, it's not very expensive to get started as a spammer. An investment of just a couple thousand dollars will get you started. Then send out a million emails, wait for 1/2% response rate, and sell you product to those 5000 people for whatever profit you have set up. A gross profit of $40 will get you $200K, just for one email 'blast'. Even with some returns or chargebacks, you can still make a profitable living with just a couple of email blasts each month.

If you can deal with the moral implications. And keep a low profile. Jerry Pournelle suggest that you could best deal with spammers with some agressive force from your local organized crime boys. Although organized crime is a participant in spamming and identity theft.

The only real way to stop spamming is for everyone to stop clicking and buying products from spammers.

 Thursday, May 12, 2005       mail    link   the story

An update to Firefox (to version 1.04) is now available to fix two 'extremely critical' vulnerabilities. Firefox users should immediately apply the update. You can do this by clicking the 'red arrow' that is displayed (rather obscurely, I think) in the upper right corner of the Firefox window.

For all the excitement about Firefox, I don't think that they properly emphasize the availability of updates. Yeah, there is that little red arrow in the corner, but you have to pay attention to notice it.

There is an choice on the Tools menu to automatically check for updates. But there is no 'automatic' about it. Even with that checkbox enabled, you still don't get notices about the update.

On one of my computers, I use IE with the "Maxthon" add-in. It provides me tabbed browsing, along with 'groups'. (You assign a bunch of web pages to groups, and one click opens all of them in separate tabs.) I really like the tabs thing, and Maxthon opens up all new links in a new tab. In Firefox, you have to hold down the Ctrl key to get a new tab.

And Maxthon alerts me to a new update/patch (when available) each time it starts up. I get a window with an update button that I can click to get the update.

I haven't had any problems using the Maxthon add-in to IE. Even Microsoft pages work with the IE/Maxthon combo.

I also have Firefox on one of my computers, although I don't use it much since Maxthon meets my needs. But I did click on the red update arrow, and updated it to version 1.04. And once again, the update finished and put a shortcut to the update package on my desktop -- without asking. (It did the same thing with the 1.03 update.)

I'd prefer that programs ask me if I want to have a shortcut on my desktop. Sometimes I do, but I want to decide when. Not a big deal to remove the shortcut, although that should not be necessary. If I have installed the update, why is the shortcut to the update still on the desktop?

Anywho, if you want to check out Maxthon, go to http://www.maxthon.com . It's free, although there is the occasional gentle reminder for a donation. Recommended.

 Friday, May 13, 2005       mail    link   the story

So, how are you triskadekaphobics doing today? Laying low? Hang in there, it will be over soon...

Noticed an article in the Wall Street Journal today (also available here) about how some big casinos are putting RFID chips in their plastic gambling chips. Then outfitting their gaming tables with RFID readers that can almost instantly (under one second) analyze how those chips are being played. The casinos can then more accurately monitor a players betting, which helps them decide the level of 'comps' that the bettor gets.

No word whether the playing cards have embedded RFID.

Another article here is about a new nuclear battery that will last for ten or more years. Although "nuclear" can be a scary word, the material they use is easily shielded by as little as a piece of paper. And it doesn't pass through skin, so the battery could be used for implantable devices.

Working a bit late tonight. We're putting a new server on line as our public web server. All the content has been transferred and tested. All I need to do is to disconnect the old server, change the IP address on the new server to match the new server, and then make sure the content is available. With any luck, just a five minute change.

Then it's off to the weekend for me. No big plans, but I am sure that I'll find something to keep me busy.

 Saturday, May 14, 2005       mail    link   the story

A correction to the post about Maxthon; I had a bad link in there. It's fixed now. Thanks to Wayne who took the time to mail me a note about it.

The new web server went online last night without a hitch. There were a few bad links that need to be cleaned up, but the new box will be much better than the old one. It was over three years old, running Windows NT, and had lately not wanted to boot up. We had to make a boot floppy for it to let it start. Next week we'll take a closer look at it. I want to see if it had been "rooted", so it will be a nice test bed for some security auditing before it's retired.

Went over to the mother-in-law's house today to return the big F-250 truck. Her garage door wasn't working; a couple of the rollers were busted. That's not a hard fix; but the two hardware stores I went to didn't have rollers with the correct shaft diameter. I did get the door shut for her, and will take a trip to the "big-box" stores this week to get the right parts.

All quiet on the security front. Some important updates are out there for you, even for Firefox and Linux users. As we've mentioned before, updates are important no matter what flavor of your operating system or programs.

And blogging has gone to the dark side. Witness Darth Vader's blog.