US Electrical Grid Compromised!

According to a report the United States Electrical Grid is being compromised by Russian, and Chinese attackers. 
This leads me to ask two questions.
1.  Why is our electrical grid on the internet?
This question is ridiculous that I have to ask it.  But at the very least if you are going to put the computers that run […]

Fair Use and the democratization of media

Here is an interesting judgment regarding fair use. 
 There is a continuum of legality for copyright.  Somewhere along the continuum is the ability to use something in a work that you make.  For instance, a 30 second youtube video with a baby dancing to a Prince song.  Somewhere along the line is outright copyright infringement.  For […]

Spammer goes to jail

In more good news on the spam front, a spammer from New York goes to jail for spamming to AOL.  He was order to pay 180k to AOL in restitution.  I don’t see that as a good enough amount, but at least he gets 30 months in the slammer.  Maybe this will make spammers think twice […]

If you only install one patch this year…

I don’t ordinarilly send out these types of things.  (Goes the mantra from your friends who always send you junk.)  It is true, I try not to be reactionary and alarmist.  I try not to rile people up with bug fixes they need to install NOW.  Most bug fixes can wait.  They tend to not be […]

So long, and thanks for all the bugs…

XP is finally leaving us.  It has been end of lifed by Microsoft.  They wanted to put a spike through its head the day Vista came out.  But, the business world wasn’t having it.  To be honest, Vista is still considered junk by businesses.  Maybe it has something to do with mission critical programs not […]

Why do I get all this spam?

If you have ever wondered why you get so much spam, this article will take that question away.
“Our research has revealed a smoking gun that shows that Storm and other botnet spam generates commissionable orders, which are then fulfilled by the supply chains, generating revenue in excess of $150 million per year.”
 That’s Million.  With an […]

WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY IE7!?!?!?!

So, I’ve been having all sorts of problems with windows and Internet Explorer lately. 
Vista would freeze when I was in the middle of anything intensive.  XP IE7 was freezing whenever I tried to type something into the address bar.  It would intermittently freeze when I was switching between windows.  Someone had me look at their […]

New Years Text Messages Got Delayed

This is something to take a look at, as we start to use cell phones, and email, for more important tasks.  In this story, New Years Eve revelers sent out text messages in large numbers.  These text messages, sent all at once, caused a logjam on the servers and some of the messages were delayed for […]

National Firewall anyone?

Here is yet another reason I think we should have a national firewall.  I think it is absolutely insane that we don’t have a firewall blocking other countries traffic.  We would then be able to block any malicious traffic.  If you look at the spam traffic from other countries, we could cut that out immediately.
I […]

Domain name registrations following exponential curve…

If you look at this netcraft.com domain name registration graph, you will see a clear exponential pattern. 
Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 - November 2007 
There are two lines here.  In blue you have the number of domain names registered.  This is the total number of domains people are snapping up.  In red you see […]