SPOTTED: On the PC Authority website, the headline: "Windows Vista arrives with minimal security". No, it’s not an anti-Windows article, although the headline certainly sounds that way. It’s actually talking about how only one anti-virus and anti-spyware program has been released for Windows Vista, despite it being available for businesses to purchase.
Why is it that anti-virus and anti-spyware software is regarded as "security"? It’s like describing antibiotics as an "innoculation"! You only use anti-virus and anti-spyware software AFTER these things actually get into your computer. A prison doesn’t hire guards to find and retrieve prisoners who have escaped back into the community, it hires guards to stop prisoners from getting that far in the first place!
I distrust anti-virus corporations as much as I distrust Microsoft. Windows Vista probably won’t be very secure in reality, but it doesn’t have any viruses yet. McAfee has just released a product that does sweet bugger all! The sheep will still buy it though. People still post to the Ubuntu Forums, asking how to install their anti-virus software on Linux, and Sal once said that he could only get permission to install Ubuntu onto a friend’s computer if he installed AVG too.
I think some people still kinda believe that a computer virus is a micro-organism that can spread to any computer regardless of operating system.
In Copland-related news, I found that the output of sudo fdisk -l is formatted COMPLETELY differently on PowerPC than it is on x86, and that HFS and HFS+ partitions are not distinguished from eachother. I modified my existing automatic fstab adder program to read the fdisk PPC output and allow for the mounting of HFS drives, now I’ve just got to do some real testing of it. I figured out a way to discover whether a partition is HFS or HFS+, thanks to Copland’s default installation of the hfsplus package.
I also tried extracting the Xubuntu Edgy PPC SquashFS image, but on my x86 development machine I only ever got segfaults (the program crashed) the instant I tried. I’ll try extracting it on the iMac using my lovely new USB hard disk, but I don’t know if that’s the real problem. I’ll also try installing squashfs-tools temporarily on an x86 Edgy Live CD, in case version matters.
This is a long post, but I’ve not really updated for a while. As I mentioned, I bought a 250 gigabyte USB hard disk. I went into the store and asked if they had USB hard disks. Upon hearing the answer, I asked if they needed extra drivers to run.
The salesperson said "Are you running XP?" (I assume he was checking because Win 98 doesn’t come with USB Mass Storage drivers)
"No, Linux."
"Well then, as long as you’re running kernel 2.4 or above, and you reformat the drive as Fat32 or Ext3, you’ll be fine"
It seems like all computer-knowlegable people know Linux :-) Except the guy who writes the advice column in the newspaper, but he’s not knowlegable about Linux, only about Windows and Outlook Express.
I also bought a VHS/DVD Recorder. It’s a great machine, with so many brilliant features… but it’s sadly infested with DRM. You can’t copy commercial tapes to DVD if they have the "copy-protected" signal, it supports a form of DRM encoded into TV shows (I don’t think the TV stations down here have it) to prevent those being recorded, and it allows the restricted use of an online DivX movie store.
Otherwise, it’s a brilliant little unit, and it only cost me $369 (staff discount on top of a general markdown). Unfortunately, DRM is like Soviet Russia: It assumes you are guilty, and doesn’t give you the chance to prove your innocence. I was only trying to back up an old Star Trek Voyager tape to DVD, and it wouldn’t let me. Now I’ll have to wait until my video digitiser is replaced under warranty before I’ll be able to back up the video.
Just on that note: The encryption on HD-DVD has been cracked; well, a player key has been discovered. Somebody online said "Right, now you can all back up your HD-DVDs". But I thought the idea of a backup was that the backup would last longer than the original. I have data backups that I made onto CDs back in 2004 that are now unreadable, despite not a photon of light hitting their recording sides in the meanwhile. I haven’t had a DVD writer long enough to find out how long DVD-Rs last, but my guess is that real pressed DVDs will still be working years after the +/-Rs fail.
Entries (RSS)