Author: Dr. Bill

I know, I know… believe it or not, we did get the Gamemaster segment recorded on Saturday with the new mixer board and microphones, and it is the best audio quality we have ever achieved! Now, I just need to finish the rest of the show! Sigh! Tonight fer sure!

Happy Birthday virii. Right. May they die a horrible death. Bleh! Evil.

The computer virus turns 25

“The computer virus turns 25 years old this year. It’s been a rocky quarter-century, but according to Richard Ford and Eugene Spafford, two computer scientists writing in this week’s issue of the journal Science, viruses can look forward to a long, fruitful life. The researchers say that in today’s hyper-connected world, when everything’s got a chip in it and is running software, stopping malware is basically an impossible task. (Their article is not online.) The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. ‘I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays,’ Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. ‘I’d give out a new game, they’d get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen.’ When his friends realized his tricky ways, they banned Skrenta from their machines. And that’s when he had an epiphany: He could put his code on the school’s computer, and rig it to copy itself onto floppy disks that students used on the system. Thus was born Elk Cloner, the world’s first computer virus to spread in the wild. The virus didn’t do much damage; it infected the Apple II’s OS and copied itself to other floppies, and every so often would display a tittering message on the screen:

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it’s Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

Ford and Spafford note that in the years since, as viruses spread to other computer platforms and throughout the world, wreaking billions in damages, there has been little progress in fighting them. There is a scientific reason for this: ‘Building a computer program that can tell with absolute certainty whether any other program contains a virus is equivalent to a famous computer science conundrum called the ‘halting problem,” they write. The halting problem concerns the difficulty of spotting whether a program will terminate or continue to run forever. ‘It has no solution in the general case and has no approximate solution for our current computing environments without also generating too many false results,’ they write.”

My friend Chuckie is ticked off! Why? He found a cool, new thing to do on the ‘net… that is, listen to Internet radio. And now the bad guys wanna kill it. So, he has blogged about it. Check it out:

Emergency Train Stop: Call “2DAY” please!

Chuckie likes his Pandora Internet radio… help him stop the bad guys. It is up to you!

They how ultimate power over your computer life and data… so be kind to them! And, we get so little love throughout the year… so celebrate Sys Admin Day this year! July 27th… send a geek a card!

Official Sys Admin Day Page

“Friday, July 27th, 2007, is the 8th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication. Let’s face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work. But seriously, we are asking for a nice token gift and some public acknowledgment. It’s the least you could do. Consider all the daunting tasks and long hours (weekends too.) Let’s be honest, sometimes we don’t know our System Administrators as well as they know us. Remember this is one day to recognize your System Administrator for their workplace contributions and to promote professional excellence. Thank them for all the things they do for you and your business.”

Is this the Open Source iPhone?

Open Source Phone – OpenMoko

“OpenMoko is a GNU / Linux based open software development platform. Developers have full access to OpenMoko source and they can tailor their implementations to underlying hardware platforms.”

The “Neo” phone is open, and looks pretty cool!

Microsoft wants to “play” in the Open Source game, but they want their own bat and ball… and they want to be able to take it home if things don’t go their way. They are the proverbial 800 pound gorilla… but, they may not be able to break the GPLv3 (Gnu Public License, Version 3) provisions that they don’t like.

Microsoft Tries to Spit Out the GPLv3 Hook

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has an article in eWeek that states: “Microsoft wants everyone to understand that GPLv3 has nothing to do with the company, its Linux partnerships or anything else Redmond-based. In other words, Microsoft is doing its best not be caught on the hook of GPLv3. Ah, Microsoft you’d love to be able to do that, wouldn’t you? Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice president of intellectual property and licensing, spelled it out: Microsoft is ‘not a party to the GPLv3 license, and none of its actions are to be misinterpreted as accepting status as a contracting party of GPLv3 or assuming any legal obligations under such license.’ I’m no lawyer, but let me spell it out for Microsoft. In Section 0, Terms and Conditions, of GPLv3 we find that ‘to ‘convey’ a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies.’ Moving along, we reach Section 3, where we find, ‘When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work’s users, yours or third parties’ legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.’ Notice that phrase ‘You waive any legal power.’ That sounds to me that if Microsoft were to convey a Linux distribution like Novell’s SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) to a customer and some of the included code was covered by GPLv3, Microsoft’s Linux patent threats go right down the toilet.”

I suspect we will be hearing about this issue for some time. And, I imagine Microsoft will be wrangling with it back and forth. Will this affect their new protection racket scheme? I think ultimately, it will!

XBox 360’s are failing right and left. It is so bad that Microsoft has decided to extend the warranty out by three years and pay for fixing the systems, including shipping!

Microsoft to Pay Consumers for Bad Xbox 360s

“Microsoft announced today they are extending all Xbox 360 warranties to three years, a policy that not only applies to new consoles but retroactively, as well. f you’ve had to pay for Microsoft to repair the red ring issue in the past, they will pay you back. At 2:30 p.m. PST, Microsoft will hold a teleconference to announce this. ‘As a result of what Microsoft views as an unacceptable number of repairs to Xbox 360 consoles, the company conducted extensive investigations into potential sources of general hardware failures,’ said the company in a statement. ‘Having identified a number of factors which can cause general hardware failures indicated by three red flashing lights on the console, Microsoft has made improvements to the console and is enhancing its Xbox 360 warranty policy for existing and new customers.'”

Don’t you love the term “Blogosphere?” Yeah, right! Anyway, Roch Smith, Jr. has long provided a blog aggregator for Greensboro, NC blogs at Greensboro101.com – now he has “branched out” to provide the same kind of service to the world at large! I used Greensboro101 daily to keep up with local bloggers and topics, but now, the service is available to the world! I told Roch that he may be the next “Kevin Rose!” We’ll see… but it is cool tech! Way to go, Roch! Check it out at:

https://www.we101.com

You can get the same as Greensboro 101 has by bookmarking this link:

https://www.we101.com/GreensboroNC

Check out why Greensboro is known as “Blogsboro!” Here’s to We101!