Fighting with computers

Imagine your computer gets a new type of malware that makes it download certain URLs every now and then. Imagine that software creates a special HTTP request with a fake "Referer:" header. Imagine that the purpose of that is to pretend that you are clicking on an advertising link. Imagine that the mentioned links are ads of porno sites. Imagine the software includes an engine to spread itself on your local network. Imagine your boss starts monitoring the employees network activities so you are caught red handed, at least apparently. Imagine that you are fired because of your alleged browsing activities. Now stop imagining. It might already happened to one of my clients and his colleague, both fired for the same reason (porn surfing at work) they claim it is wrong because they did not do that. I cannot tell you for sure because their former company is not interested in researching this matter any further. However, neither the cookies nor the temporal internet files nor the URL...

In a previous post I explained how I got my laptop running SuSE Linux 10.0. But I was not happy with the way Linux was working on my Acer laptop. Although I managed to get everything working ok (except the internal memory card reader) I was not very happy about the power management. I was not happy it took me some effort (including recompiling the kernel) to get audio working. But after all it worked. I have been giving away Ubuntu CD-ROMs to my students since 4.10 and I have installed Ubuntu to my brother's computer and both (my brother and his computer) have been happily working since then. It is a pity MP3 or Divx are not supported out of the box. Printing and OpenOffice and GIMP have been working like a charm. This time I thought maybe I should give Ubuntu are try, so I downloaded the latest beta (Dapper flight 7) but instead of Ubuntu I took Kubuntu, which is a blue-ish KDE-based versus Gnome-based Ubuntu. The new Live Cd includes a more or less painless built-in graphical ins...

I saw a couple of items on a PCCITY brochure that catch my eye. First one was the Freecom MediaPlayer-35 with a 250GB HD. I bought last summer a similar device from EasyBuy but I sold it after the summer as it was only 40GB capacity (though the fact it was USB-powered and only 2.5" made it quite portable). This unit is based on the use of 3.5" IDE hard disks which are cheaper and higher capacity than 2.5" cousins. This unit like many others in the market will handle your DivX, MP3 and JPG files so you can bore or scare to death your friends (worth mentioning it can also handle OGG audio). But it can also came with the relatively new feature of a LAN connection so you can also play contents from a Windows (or Samba) share on your home network. Network connection is just for streaming and video/music/photo files are transferred using USB 2.0. The unit can also play your ripped DVDs, menu included. Outputs are quite complete, including composite, analog audio, coax audio an...

They are playing this one now in Spain. And it seems that youtube has not a problem with you posting an ad even if your do not hold the copyrights of that ad. I guess this is what ads are for. Anyway, I think it is a funny ad.