Webs’ Random Ideas

So there is a new piece of technology that I am writing about because of the implications associated with it. This new technology is called U3; website found here…
From the Belly of the beast:

Imagine carrying your software on the same flash drive that carries your files. That’s what you can do with a U3 smart drive. You can plug it into any PC and work, play a game, message friends, send email, edit photos and more. A U3 smart drive makes any PC your own PC. And when you unplug it, it leaves no personal data behind.

That last part is noted by me. Because this part is the key of why this technology is actually bad. It leaves nothing behind. That means that unless an administrator knows where to look, there will be no sign of anyone even plugging in the USB drives. Meaning that hackers can easily get a hold of this technology and use it to their advantage.

Wait, what’s that? Ahhhh shit they already did.

Yup that’s right, hackers are taking this technology and running with it, why? Here is the comment I left at DOFs site…

Imagine being a hacker and getting a hold of this. Since U3 technology installs in the background, without you knowing, a hacker could do some real damage. They can create a script that installs itself silently on your computer without you knowing. This script puts several files on your computer without you knowing.

This script also deletes any knowledge of the files by editing windows file properties, registry entries, and log files (they can basically have the script do whatever they want). So in a matter of minutes you have evil software installed that shuts down any running virus scanners and spyware checking software, and collects user names, password hashes, previously visited websites, web form data (meaning they have user names and passwords from sites you have visited), and as I stated previously… WHATEVER THEY WANT!

This is certainly dangerous. Smart hackers can take this technology and use it to turn any system into… well they can have complete and utter control of the system if they want. Heck, they can walk into a Best Buy and turn your new laptop your going to buy into a drone for their attack. The possibilities are endless.

While a lot of these threats existed before the advent of U3, U3 just made it ten times easier. And while I agree that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, it is still up to U3 to give us some sort of protection from their technology. I don’t ask for much, but there should be something they can do so that if a U3 drive is trying to run on a system we administrators could know about it, a user could stop things from running, or at least admins could have the option to stop it from running by blocking it through the use of software.

U3 should have a system where Windows pops up saying, U3 is trying to run software, or some security measure. I don’t ask for much and there are plenty of opportunities for solutions.

When you manufacture a new piece of hardware or software you should have some responsibilty. Microsoft realized this and created the Windows Update system. The question is, when is U3 going to recognize their responsibility.

Vista vs. XP.

Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications).

Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors.

There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance. Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics benchmarking suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This is something we expected, and we clearly advise against replacing Windows XP with Windows Vista if you need to run professional graphics applications.

We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP. There aren’t newer versions available, and we don’t see immediate solutions to this issue.

Big dissapointment from M$, that Vista has no application improvement. But then again, neither has any new M$ release…

Look very closely and tell me what you see…
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You might want to click on image for enlargement…

This almost got me because I have an account with Bank of America. What made me know this was a phishing scam. Because they didn’t say contact us. The message said click here. This is a clear indication of Internet BS.

The other thing that gave it away was knowing the fact that companies will never call you or send you an email for account issues. What they do instead is wait for you to sign into your account or contact them, then they notify you of discrepancies.

You have to admit though, the spammers did a damn good job making this email look authentic.

Funny GoDaddy.com Commercial. This commercial was going to be the commercial GoDaddy was going to submit to the Super Bowl, but CBS denied them. Thanks FCC! Thanks for telling us what we can and can’t watch. Thanks for treating us like little children that can’t police ourselves.

The FCC is one of the largest waste of tax dollars ever. How about we take that money and put towards something useful like a health insurance program, money for children living on the streets or those growing up in poverty. There are literally thousands of better uses for that money.

Well this is the last day, and things are winding down. People are slowly trickling in for registration, and my duties at the moment seem less and less.

For me, working this conference was fun. I got a chance to do something different, and it got me thinking about how to do events like this better. But really, I enjoyed the people I was with (5 ladies from conference services) and got a chance to work with different people. The hotel was also nice. The Pere Marquette in Peoria. It’s a really old hotel that has some changes made to make it a little more modern. But it still has a strong old appeal to it.

The only complaint I can make is that my room was about 7 stories above a strip bar. Which like bass heavy music really really loud… go figure! But I was so damn tired from yesterday I easily fell asleep.

For next year I already have a couple ideas, one is to scrap the PeopleWare Pro software conference services has normally used and design a web interface to handle everything. The database would be more robust, but there are many negative issues associated with this, so I am still hesitant. Another idea would be to get better networking equipment and see if that helps, but I can’t say I am completely confident.

Now we will be wrapping up a couple systems and some of the equipment and getting a move on to Normal (actually the name of a town, not part of a saying). I can’t wait to get back to my own bed and sleep, (which, oddly enough, is not next to a strip joint). Then it will be back to my job at EXU and COB where everyday is a journey and/or a learning experience.

How are people who deny global warming still taken seriously? I mean come on, really. How much proof and science do you need before all the nutjobs finally give in.

But what I really find interesting is that evangelical churches around the country are stepping up and telling everyone that we need to do something about this crisis. Sorry I cannot find the link to the PBS program that detailed this extensively, but I am still searching. Why is this? Because they actually sat down skimmed through the bible and found that there is actually nothing in the bible that says anything to the sort of, “Thou shalt not take care of the planet that gave you life!”

… Well maybe not (we all know devote Christians don’t read or care what is in the Bible, they just believe … just kidding), but some actually realized that you don’t have to give up all science and reason just because you choose to have faith. If any fundi’s are reading, stop for a minute and read carefully right here:
God built this planet so your species and many others have a place to live right? What gives you the right to trash it? Or better yet, why do you think God is ok with you trashing it? If God built it for you than this planet is still his right? Would you trash your mother’s home just because she let you live in it?

Hearing people give excuses to global warming reminds me of watching the Illinois State University students trash various parts of the campus. I still have to push in chairs for the College of Business students in the computer lab. It’s like they come to college expecting everyone to wipe their ass. Maybe that’s it, maybe the Evangelicals think God is going to wipe their ass for them, so they don’t need to save the planet…

Washington Post Article Found via Groovy Green (link for Groovy Green is below):

That means that “An Inconvenient Truth” may be shown only with the written permission of a principal — and only when it is balanced by alternative views that are approved by both a principal and the superintendent of schools.

Hardison was pleased.

“I am happy they are giving the kids as much information as possible,” he said.

Is this dipshit on crack? WTF is he thinking? When you take away information from the kids how the hell are you giving them more.

Here is the shinning star of this dipshit though (found via Groovy Green):

“No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation — the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet — for global warming,” Hardiman wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is “one of the signs” of Jesus Christ’s imminent return for Judgment Day.”

What a genius this guy is! Yes, our destruction of a planet that is also causing global warming is in fact the coming of Jesus Christ. Someone who’s existence has yet to be proven. Just as Colbert once said, “We all know reality has a well known liberal bias…”

When it comes to Linux I am a huge fan. So you know its definitely a good friend that sent this…

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Well this post isn’t exactly about not having a digital camera, it’s more of a lump sum of incoherent ramblings.

For my new job I have to provide support for Conference Services of ISU. They provide support to outside organizations that run conferences. Apparently the infamous one of them all is IMEA (Illinois Music Educators Association). So I am writing this from my 11th floor hotel room, but any picture I add will likely suck with my crappy camera.

But lets find out… Nope that failed pretty quick. I can no longer send picks from my phone, so the cool-ass night photos my phone takes are stuck in purgatory. Oh well, I just have to hope that a digital camera falls in my lap… Well I guess I won’t hold my breath on that one.

One a brighter note I had dinner with the other conference services folk at a nice restaurant in Peoria called Rhythm Kitchen. The food was spectacular, the atmosphere was that of a small business owned restaurant, and a local band was setting up as we were leaving. It is a place I will try to get back to, but at a later time in hopes of catching a band. I loved the theme, the food, the atmosphere, and the people I had dinner with. Two of them were DOF and his wife. All in all it was a great night.

I wanted to write about some other topics but my absent mind, horrible memory, and the fact I am pretty tired has allowed me to forget about the other topics. As soon as I remember I will post.

So the geeks in the office have been giving me shit for being so lazy and not posting in awhile. To which I say, that is what happens when you get a new job, have a graduate class, and need to prepare to teach a class in Linux. So to appease the geeks here is a post…

After I went through all the trouble of getting Kubuntu to work, I installed Ubuntu 64bit. KDE and 64bit together on a Linux distro just cause a lot of problems. 64bit alone is enough problems for anyone to handle.

The steps to get full functionality in Ubuntu are very similar to that of Kubuntu, so I will spare you the details. But if anyone has specific questions feel free to ask… you need to be a registered user to comment.

The next thing I need to get working now is dual display functionality. I have been working on this for awhile and cannot find anything that helps. The problem is I have two separate desktops that act independently of each other. Normally this would be fine for me, but I cannot drag windows from one screen to the other, and I cannot open a window on one desktop and then do the same on the other. Such as having Mozilla on both screens. When I solve this I will be sure to post the solution.

Another cool thing I got running, and I know geeks are rolling in their graves for this is Wine. Wine allows you to run almost any Windows apt in Linux. It basically tricks the software into thinking there is a C: drive, when in reality there is just a hidden folder. Now normally getting Wine to run is a simple task. But I am not a simple person. No I have to have the 64bit OS. So I had to do some extra tweaking to get it to work. Here is the skinny on that.

Here is another link just on Wine.

Well I will try to work harder on the posting, and on Linux. My next plan is to install VMWare, or dual boot Ubuntu and SLED 10. Since Suse Enterprise is very popular in the real world, it is important for me to learn it.

Well Linux has arived and it is speeding away on my laptop. In fact this post is coming from Firefox on my new Kubuntu system on my laptop. I just got done installing the AMD64bit version of Kubuntu. And man is it fast. While I do have a gig of memory and a newer Turion 35ml CPU, Windoze still took a good minute, at least to boot. This new Linux system takes a whole whopping 30 seconds. And I am sure if I wanted to tweak it I could bring it down from there.

The hardest part about it was getting the wireless to work. I had two major things working against me.
1. My laptop just happens to have the famed Broadcom 4318 wireless card which is notorious for not playing well with Linux
2. I am using a 64bit Linux OS to take advantage of my CPU
And the first problem hates the second. In other words, I would have been incredibly easy to get the wireless working on the 32bit OS. But I have a NEED FOR SPEED, so I worked through the issues.

To solve the first issue I found this link: Ubuntu Forum - HOWTO: Broadcom 4318 Wireless Cards. In solving the issue I found the second issue wasn’t as big as a problem as I first thought. The only hindrance here is getting an applet to show up in the system tray so I can easily select wireless networks. To solve this issue, until a better solution comes along, I added the Wireless Assistant (wlassistant) to the system tray.

So back to the first issue, I pretty much just followed the directions in the first post and it worked. I had to try a couple other things from the first 5 pages or so, but I pretty much was up and going after that point. I took me longer than it should have only because I wanted the applet functionality.

All in all, I am really happy with everything. I haven’t had a single crash yet. However, I have had a couple programs lock up, but I think I was trying to do too much and just confused the system. At this point things are running perfect. I also got GAIM installed and installed an addon to make the smileys more like the MSN smileys. This can be done by going to this link: HOWTO: MSN Smilies for all GAIM protocols.

The only other thing I want to work on next is getting Beryl to work. I haven’t started this yet, and for those of you that haven’t heard about Beryl, go to YouTube and look it up. Some of the things you can do with it are just insane. Here is the main website for Beryl. Keep in mind, the Beryl website is only showing a very brief glimpse of what Beryl can do.

That’s all for now, but I will keep ya’all posted…