Category: Computers

Consider this quote from a hard drive manufacturer:

It is important to realize that the reported capacity of a large drive may often appear as less than expected. Please remember that, depending on the particular utility used, the capacity of the hard drive can be reported in either decimal gigabytes (where 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) or in binary gigabytes (where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes). Highlighting your C: drive in Windows Explorer reports the drive capacity in binary gigabytes. For example, a WD2000BB hard drive’s capacity will be reported as approximately 186 binary gigabytes. For more details about this issue, please see Answer ID 615.

This is a marketing term, NOT a computer term … A gig will always be 1024*1024*1024 … Any “utility” that doesn’t report this based on binary, octal or hexadecimal figures is simply … rubbish …

They call these things a weblog or a blog … I guess it can’t just simply be a site? I don’t think that this is necessarily anything new, I just think that the software involved to make these things easier for the laymen to run is why it has become something popular … I mean, I know it’s nothing much to create a database, devise a way to show its content on the web and provide a form to enter new content into it … They just came up with some nifty tools to do such a thing …

The January 31, 2005 issue of Information Week has as their cover story “Who owns Weblog content?” … The article is sorta based on the employees of a company who part of their job is to provide a weblog … One such person who works for Google posted some stuff that he shouldn’t have posted … He discussed his compensation package as well as his signing bonus on his weblog … Two days later it was gone …

So yeah, if you work for a company and it’s your job to produce weblog content, I would assume it’s the property of the companies. When I worked for a company, any resulting code that came from my fingers was the property of the company. I would assume using their computers and their systems that weblog content would fall under the same category …

For someone like me who publishes this crap for anyone to read, the content is mine, and I have the nifty Creative Commons License to protect my intellectual prowess … If there’s something here that someone actually finds of value, the method described in the license is to give me credit, and if you’re gonna get money as a result, well, we gotta talk …

I just think it’s interesting to blow out of proportion the simplest of things that we use on the Internet … One valid point however is the feeds … I don’t believe in the feed you get the license, so if you send all of your text (as do I) I don’t think the license is passed … but in order to get the feed in the first place, I assume you’d have to have visited the site and had access to the license … Therefor I think you’re still liable … Cause if there’s something you want to use from someone’s work, you would probably research it fully before assuming it’s “up for grabs” …

That’s just my opinion …

… and I’ll tell you why … There is no discipline … The “meanies” are allowed to continue their malicious behavior with no threat of penalty … What recourse do I have against the people that are constantly filling my little world here with fake comments simply in order to post a link to their gambling or pornographic site? I have moderation on comments turned on so I can delete them before they’re made public, but this surely isn’t a solution … I have deleted hundred of bogus comments … It’s around on guest books too … It’s out of control …

Not only comment spam, but port scanning … My firewall stats show millions into the billions of port scans 24/7/365 … How can this be allowed to continue? They’re looking for wide open MS Windows machines with networking enabled … Active Directories that are wide open … Open MSSQL Servers, easily brute forced SSH ports … any vulnerability that has been or hasn’t been reported constantly scanned … What a waste of Internet resources …

So, comment Spam, port scanning and finally SPAM itself … UCE … Unsolicited Commercial Email … Then there are the illegal sites … For illegal software that even post “How is this legal?” … How to get women in your area … Make your penis larger … (and yeah, an email is going to convince me of this) … Drugs over the Internet … after they make my penis larger, then they want to make it harder by selling me Viagra and Cailis directly … No doctors … Who needs them? … and after you’re bigger and harder, they have married women in your area looking for some while their husband is away … All this via email …

I propose that it’s about time that all these logs that are kept on everyone’s actions on the Internet ought to be parsed, and the people that have those nasty scanners running 24/7 be shut down … It’s obvious what they’re doing … The people that are sending tons of useless email … They should be shut down … The people running automated comment spammers, they should be shut down … It’s not like this isn’t a possibility … It is something that certainly could be accomplished, and it should happen …

Let’s take this a step further … How about those people that violate their TOS for their cable or DSL provider by bringing up illegal servers … I don’t think it’s right that those who’ve invested time and money should be thwarted by a company’s lack of enforcing their own TOS … For it is mostly these people who are the ones generating all of the scenarios described above … Their ability to accomplish such things makes it possible to make our Internet lives a living hell … I remember when I used to get my email each day and there were 200 useless messages that I had to sift through … Now I have all sorts of goodies in place that this doesn’t happen anymore, but the wonderful computers that have figured out how to do the sifting for us have also found how to get past the sifting … A constant struggle …

On the other hand, there are plenty of people providing all of the things I mentioned above in a laid back way … There are those that provide resources for everything listed above in a non-threatening, non-abusive way … If you want to find something, you will … that is a given … For the most part, no, the Internet doesn’t suck … Most people are oblivious to the constant traffic that floods our pipes … More and more people are knowing that if they have a computer hooked onto the Internet that they need some sort of firewall … Some sort of virus prevention and a means to deal with SPAM email … It’s almost second nature at this point, but I suggest that it need not be this way if the people providing the service … The connection to the Internet would do more than provide that connection and stop there … I think they should monitor their customers’ activities and stamp out those that abuse the priviledge of the Internet world … It could trickle down … So even those that don’t realize this activity could be coming from their own network would be able to isolate these beings, or find out the holes in which they’re exploiting to accomplish these “meanie” tasks …

To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it.
– Scott Granneman, Security Focus

“I can write a program in 20 lines with .NET where it takes you unix people 200 lines to write the same program!” Said a Microsoft guy. His program crashed as soon as the first client arrived due to a buffer overrun.

They say when you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear satanic messages…but that’s nothing, if you play it forward it will install Windows!