the oracle

Lefty, it’s only supposed to work on the most expensive versions of Windows 7(Professional, Ultimate), but there are work-arounds for other versions. Not supported, of course, but stable.

19 hours, 31 minutes ago onWordpress in www.lockergnome.com

Napolitano was still against legalization to give the government better control over supplying the demand in it’s own country. News of the NY ad needs to go viral in the Internet and mainstream broadcast media. The escalation of violence just across the border in Mexico is the true measure of success of cannabis prohibition, not annual surveys and not drug tests at the time of arrest. People lie on surveys left and right because someone might be able to mark the papers or get fingerprints. They can use an iodine process to get the fingerprints off the paper to find out who filled out the survey. Handwriting can be identified, and cards are marked for the cheater to identify.

I’m telling you prohibitionists now to wake up and smell the coffee. Do you know where continued cannabis prohibition can lead? There is such a thing as peak oil, and by the same token there is such a thing as peak prohibition as measured by monetary cost and deaths.

U.S. citizens have become death statistics on the Mexican side. When the spillover onto the U.S. side gets worse, it will be just one more splash over. The latest splashes indicate how much more powerful the Mexican cartels have become recently. There will be enormous outrage when we pass the peak cannabis prohibition line, and the Feds have to negotiate with Mexican cartel bosses for the release of kidnap victims and to negotiate ceasefire. The border is that line of sand that just can’t get crossed.

The American people won’t put up with it.

Americans will be screaming bloody murder. Ness would never have negotiated with Capone! Feds don’t do that. Nobody wants a clone of the FARQ on our southern border.

Now I’m telling nicely to wake up and smell the coffee.

When it gets worse, I’ll be saying

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3 days, 12 hours ago onWordpress in blog.norml.org

I am writing this from the area around the general area of Prescott, Arizona, as I am visiting a friend from California that moved here recently. To say it is a culture shock would be major understatement.

I arrived in Phoenix to find that in the 30 years since I have visited the area it has grown immensely, but the other areas of Arizona don’t seem to have kept pace. I am seeing that living in California has major benefits for the technology geek. For example, there seems to be no fiber buildout in the northern Arizona area {Perhaps a few more cities should follow the lead of Topeka, Kansas, and change the city name, or perhaps dedicate some land to the memory of the first hugely successful search engine. It might make a difference, you never know – Google might want to start building out from two or more areas}.

The outlook for high speed internet access in this area is pretty dismal unless someone comes in with a great last-mile solution. In this area, it looks as though there are many last miles because of the low population density.

On the plus side, the air is very clear, and I have not been in anyplace this quiet since I was a child.

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Technorati Tags: tech wasteland,Nortern Arizona,FiOS free zone,Google,Topeka,last-mile solutions,clean air,low population density•

Opera 10.5, the world’s fastest browser!

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1 week ago onWordpress in www.lockergnome.com

The most attacked software seems to be from the company called Adobe. The problem is the extensions to the capabilities of the first versions of the Reader have made it a target on many fronts. Again we are reminded that other than Internet Exploder and its many updates, the patches we apply, or code we fully replace is from Adobe, either the (PDF) Reader or the Flash player.

It has become a routine for many, and those that it has not are being targetted for problems.

ComputerWorld shows that security firm F-Secure, and Microsoft, are ganging up on Adobe, and possibly pushing more users to abandon the software for better secured, or simply less attacked, workalikes.

Hackers adore Adobe Reader, and have pushed it into first place as the software most often exploited in targeted attacks, a Finnish security company said today.

Helsinki-based F-Secure also urged users to update to the newest version of Reader to protect themselves against new attacks taking advantage of a vulnerability patched just three weeks ago.

According to F-Secure, 61% of the nearly 900 targeted attacks it’s tracked in the first two months of 2010 exploited a vulnerability in Reader, Adobe’s popular PDF viewer. By comparison, Microsoft’s Word was exploited in just 24% of the attacks, and bugs in its Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation maker were leveraged only a combined 14% of the time.

Reader’s slice of the targeted attack “market” climbed from 29% in 2008 to almost 50% last year, but at its pace so far this year, exploits aimed at Adobe’s software are on track to account for nearly two out of every three attacks.

Microsoft’s portion of targeted attack exploits, meanwhile, has steadily declined. Last year, for example, Word, Excel and PowerPoint exploits accounted for approximately 51% of attacks aimed at specific individuals or organizations. In 2008, exploits of those three Microsoft Office applications made up 71% of all targeted attacks.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint accounted for only 39% of all attacks so far this year, F-Secure said.

Targeted attacks can be disastrous to victimized companies and organizations. Google, for instance, was one of scores of Western corporations hit late last year and early this year by targeted attacks thought to originate from China. In Google’s case, the attacks, which exploited a then-unpatched bug in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), made off with company secrets. Intel was also attacked in January, but the chip maker has denied any connection between what hit its network and the Google-China attacks.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said that hackers stole more than $120 million in just three months from small businesses’ banking accounts, in some cases using malware carried by targeted attacks.

Adobe said it wasn’t surprised at F-Secure’s data. “Given the relative ubiquity and cross-platform reach of many of our products, Adobe has attracted — and will likely continue to attract — increasing attention from attackers,” said spokeswoman Wiebke Lips in an e-mail.

She also urged users to update to the newest versions of Reader and other Adobe products. “The majority of attacks we are seeing are exploiting software installations that are not up-to-date on the latest security updates,” she said.

F-Secure and Microsoft echoed Lips’ recommendation, as both have discovered in-the-wild attacks exploiting a vulnerability Adobe patched less than a month ago.

On Feb. 16, Adobe issued an emergency update for Reader and Acrobat to patch a pair of flaws, including one tagged as CVE-2010-0188 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. Microsoft reported that bug to Adobe via its Microsoft Vulnerability Research Program (MSVR), where the company’s security researchers submit flaws they find in third-party software to the programs’ makers.

F-Secure’s claim that Reader leads the exploit pack isn’t the first time that a security company has awarded Adobe dubious honors. Last month, ScanSafe of San Bruno, Calif. said that malicious PDF files comprised 80% of all exploits at the end of last year.

The most up-to-date editions of Adobe Reader, 9.3.1 and 8.2.1, can be downloaded using links on Adobe’s security site.

Good news for Microsoft, bad news for Adobe. It would be really nice, in all of my reading, to see what work-alike of Acrobat Reader was the least sensitive to these attacks, but none of the comparisons i have seen do that comparison. In this day of heavy applications, and fast processors, who cares if Foxit is a bit faster to start, or fits better on a thumbdrive (with thumbdrives in the GB range, a few megabytes is no big deal). The ubiquity of PDF files means that something will be needed, but a secure something would be just the ticket.

Perhaps a file check similar to what Word files have would be in order. It would add some baggage to the Reader, but so what? It would also be interesting to see if anything was happening on other platforms. If nothing is problematic on Linux/Unix/OS X, then the file check only needs to be in the Windows version of Reader.

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Technorati Tags: hacker targets, Microsoft products down, Adobe a favorite, updates now available, F-Secure identifies Adobe as prime target, MSVR, CVE, Foxit, built in file check•

There is always someone out there that is trying to mess things up. The Simon bar Sinisters of the world will probably always be there, doing their best to make your day a bit worse.

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1 week, 1 day ago onWordpress in www.lockergnome.com

I think Curry’s hitting that famous rookie wall.

There’s a lot more games to play in the NBA than in college. Most rookies hit that fatigue wall sooner or later if they’re playing major minutes.

1 week, 1 day ago onWordpress in blogs.mercurynews.com

I really like Curry. And some suggest since we’ve got Curry we have our PG and we pick another player even if we get #1.

But if we get #1, we take Wall. Period.

And then we figure out what to do with Curry and/or Monta and where to play them. Or who to trade them for.

1 week, 2 days ago onWordpress in blogs.mercurynews.com

Al Oha dropping Sara Smile lyrics on us.

1 week, 2 days ago onWordpress in blogs.mercurynews.com

Sorry, She’s Gone lyrics. Mixed up my Hall & Oates songs

1 week, 2 days ago onWordpress in blogs.mercurynews.com

Despite the many recent articles to the contrary, Windows XP is far from out of life just yet. A study shown in ComputerWorld states that though many IT pros will be guiding their departments through deployments of Windows 7, some by bringing them out of the desert that is Vista, a full 40 percent will be sticking with Windows XP until 2014.

This time, IT organizations say, it looks like Microsoft has finally delivered the goods. And just in time. About 80 percent of IT organizations didn’t move forward with Vista, according to Gartner Inc. Instead, the vast majority of enterprise users remain on Windows XP, an outdated, eight-and-a-half-year-old operating system that should have passed into the high tech-fossil record long ago.

Computerworld surveyed 285 IT professionals to gauge their attitudes and intentions with regard to Windows 7. Overall, 72 percent said they plan to migrate to Windows 7, with 70 percent saying they will implement it within a year or that they already are installing the new OS.

The No. 1 reason cited for upgrading: to get off the aging Windows XP platform. That said, however, almost 40 percent of survey respondents will take XP support to the end — April 2014 — before they install Windows 7 on all their Windows machines.

Which version of Windows is currently running in your IT operation?

Windows XP: 93 percent

Windows Vista: 35 percent

Windows 2000: 15 percent

Windows 98: 3 percent

Windows 95: 2 percent

Source: Computerworld online survey; 205 respondents

Those willing to wait that long, however, are in the minority. “We’re ready to move on,” says Paul Shane, IT director at the Seattle offices of Milliman, an actuarial consulting firm. He avoided Vista, which he says was initially problematic, clumsy, buggy, and continues to suffer from slow performance. But he expects to have most of his 150 desktops and laptops upgraded to Windows 7 by the end of this year. Disappointed with Vista, Shane briefly considered the Mac OS X platform. Now, he says, “We’ve cast those aside.”

Though I have Windows 7 on a couple of machines, if I tell the complete truth, I have 0 problems with the machines that have Windows XP, and not only does Windows 7 have some annoyances, it has some real problems. Since the so-late Patch-Tuesday-that it-was-Wednesday did not have any patches for Windows 7, it will be at least another month for the possible low-memory problem to get resolved. For those like myself, with no problem installations of Windows XP, the phrase that pays is” If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”.

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Technorati Tags: Windows XP,useful still,40% of IT pros survey will stay with XP,no problems,if it isn’t broken,IT professionals,still the most popular•

Iron browser, all the strength with no communications problems!

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1 week, 3 days ago onWordpress in www.lockergnome.com

It should become eminently clear that patent trolling happens with the big guys too, as the story about the early, and late, problems of Sun were against Apple and Microsoft. It makes my stand on some of the harassment of Microsoft in eastern Texas a little different, perhaps it is their just desserts.

The story this morning in ComputerWorld tells just how pushy, and protectionist both Gates and Jobs are with anything that comes close to looking anything like what they dish out.

The thing is, there are lots of ways to attack a problem, just as there are many ways to get out a batter in baseball. Sandy Koufax had his way, Bob Gibson had his way, but Gibson never fought with Koufax about how he was possibly being copied. It makes me think that software patents are perhaps not a good thing at all, and if allowed to stand, should be much more strictly applied to cases of infringement.  If something doesn’t do the exact thing, in the exact way of another piece of software, there should probably be no case for infringement.

You might disagree, now, but read the following excerpt from above and you may change your mind quickly.

The former CEO of Sun Microsystems has taken to his personal blog, provocatively titled "What I couldn’t say…," to dish some industry dirt and tell his side of the story about the demise of Sun. He has already hinted at plans to write a book, and a new post Tuesday suggests a tell-all tome could indeed be in the offing.

"I feel for Google — Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too," Schwartz writes, apparently referring to Apple’s patent lawsuit against HTC, which makes Google’s Nexus One smartphone.

Schwartz says he had just unveiled Sun’s Linux desktop, Project Looking Glass, in 2003, when Jobs called him to assert that Sun’s graphics were "stepping all over" Apple’s intellectual property. If Sun tried to commercialize the technology, Schwartz says, Jobs told him, "I’ll just sue you."

This is pretty gutsy, since we are made to think that Jobs could have in no way seen the code at this time. How could any infringing be judged at that point. This sounds like Sun was bluffed by a master. Still, who wants a fight when it costs so much. This is one of those things that regular juries should not be qualified to judge. It should be a judgement made by a panel of programmers, all that have no stake in the outcome. Hard to do possibly, but in the end, the only fair way to get adequate results.

As Schwartz tells it, he responded by reminding Jobs about Sun’s considerable arsenal of OS-related patents. "Steve was silent," Schwartz writes.

A later meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer ended on a similar note, according to Schwartz. The Microsoft duo, then its CEO and president, had flown to Silicon Valley to meet with Sun’s executive team.

"As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk and went straight to the point, ‘Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice,’" Schwartz writes.

OpenOffice is the open-source productivity suite that Sun backed heavily as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

"Bill was delivering a slightly more sophisticated variant of the threat Steve had made, but he had a different solution in mind," Schwartz writes. Gates offered Sun a patent license. "That was code for ‘We’ll go away if you pay us a royalty for every download’ — the digital version of a protection racket."

I have heard about the struggles that Word Perfect had with Microsoft, and that the best people left, exactly because brilliant pieces of code were being thrown aside as being “possible problems” in a Microsoft complaint. No doubt, many other software publishers have had this problem, and it boggles the mind to think what great software we could currently have if not for stupid anticipation of lawsuits and the problems that they cause. ( I think about the stories I have heard about IBM wanting to donate the code for OS/2 to the public domain, but it is tied up due to Microsoft code interspersed, making i impossible. How great would it be to have an open source OS/2 ? That would kick Microsoft’s collective ass once and for all. Just ask any unbiased source, they’ll tell you that OS/2 was far superior to anything Microsoft ever dreamed up until IBM stopped doing any development.)

Schwartz says he responded by asserting that Microsoft’s .Net development platform was a rip-off of Java. "It was a short meeting," he says.

If you think about it for a moment, it’s not such a far stretch of the imagination to think that. If only Sun had had the buck to do some litigating – again, things could be very different.

Microsoft declined to comment on the post and Apple didn’t respond to an e-mail message.

The former Sun chief had been keeping a low profile since Oracle announced its plans to buy Sun almost a year ago. But he is apparently determined to tell his side of the story concerning Sun’s demise, a collapse that some attributed to the waning Unix market and others blamed on decisions by Schwartz himself.

While Tuesday’s post is more of an inside look at how corporations wield patents, it seems future posts will start to retell the story of Sun.

"I think I’ve said pretty much everything I could say as CEO of Sun Microsystems," Schwartz writes in the "about" section of his blog. "The more interesting stuff was what I couldn’t say. And that’s what this blog (and maybe a book) is going to be about."

"Make that ‘definitely’ a book," said 451 Group analyst China Martens.

So, perhaps patent reform, in the software realm, is really needed before we can get something really better. Have you ever stopped to think what Microsoft might unleash if any Linux distribution ever really started to threaten their market share? I can imagine that 9.5 billion they recently stated was going to be devoted to research, quickly reapportioned to legal strategies and their fees.

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Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems,Oracle,Microsoft,Apple,patent trolling,litigation,East Texas courts,open source problems

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1 week, 3 days ago onWordpress in www.lockergnome.com