October 2005

Shameless Self Promotion

If you are a news and information hound like myself you probably visit the same collection of sites on a regular basis: network news, newspaper online editions, in depth weather sites, a collection of search engines, etc. Many moons ago I threw together a simple page for use on my local machine and have since then (1996) twiddled with it now and again. It works for me and you may find it handy. It is here: http://www.bibliosearch.ca.

Is your printer spying on you II?

The first entry is herefrom July 25th, 2005. For an updated list of the effected printers go here.

Skype Users Upgrade Now

All the details about which versions need upgrades here: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/#00000688.

Fishy Research OR Never Throw ANYTHING Out

http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2005/10/24/fish-menus051024.html

World Of Warcraft = Spyware

It seems the company the produces the popular game World of Warcraft, Blizzard, has been caught reading the processes on users PC's. Now, even though the EULA states this is happening and users could decline it's still a massive invasion of privacy. Read the story here: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004076.php and check out the way to "spy on the spy" here: http://www.rootkit.com/newsread_print.php?newsid=371.

VMware

VMware has released a new free player. This allows for the safe evaluating of beta software or other software distributed in virtual machineswithout any installation or configuration issues. Download the player at: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

Flock You !

Flock is a new variant of Firefox. In this case the idea is to stuff it full of "social software" such as Flickr and del.icio.us. It also has RSS integration that makes posting to popular browser-based blogs such as Wordpress and Blogger very easy. It looks interesting but as this is the first public beta release it is apt to come crashing down so it sure won't be the default browser right away. Download it from http://www.flock.com/developer/ and provide some feedback to the developers so this puppy improves.