Firefox & Thunderbird updated

Firefox 1.0 RC2 and Thunderbird 0.9 were released today. If you
were, like me, bugged with TB 0.8’s filterless global inbox, then 0.9 is the
update you should download right away.

Firefox remains my highest
recommendation for any Windows user. Still using Internet Explorer?? Switch to
Firefox TODAY!

Just what a computer
needs:

A
cigarette lighter – beer can holder from Thermaltake to mod your PC. Doh!

Thermaltake 5.25″ Bay with Cigarette Lighter & Cup Holder

I’ve said for years that, from my perspective, SPAM accounts for 75% to
95% and in some cases 99.9% of emails received.

Finally, the sad
truth about how big the SPAM problem really is, is starting to come to light.
According to Postini, December last year they found: “81.3
percent of 160,611,437 emails currently processed by Postini per day are spam
(that’s 10 of every 12 messages on average) ” and ” The ratio of spam to
legitimate email increased from 65 to 80 percent during 2003 ” and now “Of the 10.75 billion SMTP connections
received, only 11 percent were legitimate email.”

To me,
their numbers are far more realistic than the common 50-60% SPAM ratio.

What I don’t understand is why the forces that are & the
internet industry have such trouble upgrading to a more spoof-proof email
protocol, can’t shut down SPAM zombies and can’t stop spammers in their tracks.
It’s costing the economy billions of dollars (actually, it does create jobs
& revenue in the anti-spam industry). Make the internet environment tighter,
secure the mail protocol, make SPAM as illegal as it can get, do the same for
SPAM tolerant ISPs & companies and those using SPAM services.

You SPAM? Your mail server is insecure? Bye bye connection. Your PC
is a SPAM Zombie? Sorry, fix it. ISPs have the capability to check how much
email you send, they should use it. You are an ISP that tolerates spammers? Or
actually rents bandwidth to known spammers? You’re locked down and we’ll see you
in court. Same thing for those using SPAM to promote their product(s), store,
service … Of course once that starts, the bad guys will start faking SPAM (!)
to get legitimate companies in trouble. But, that shouldn’t be hard to track
down. It’s pretty clear that those leading the fight against SPAM know who’s who
& where.

Fighting SPAM is not impossible, we just need more
action.

If you’re into serious digital photography you have to pre-order a Pretec 12 GB CF card ;) They’re only $14.900!
Before taxes. All joking aside, it’s nice to see they are squeezing that much
capacity into a compact flash card. Of all camera storage media, compact flash
is my favorite and the most economical.

Wanting to grow into a more versatile & better digital camera, we
upgraded to a Canon G5 a short while back, and, I have to give
it a failing grade. With over a 1000 exposures, I’ve taken enough time for (a)
the camera to prove itself and (b) for me to grow into it. I made sure I wasn’t
overlooking anything by checking things with the manual. After all it’s a very
capable camera with lots of settings.

I generally know my way around
electronics, cameras & digital cameras, but getting this camera to take a
picture was often a nightmare, and then still it wouldn’t have the right focus!
Day to day I mainly use P mode -1/3 stop down + manual white balance. On this
camera I also used auto mode to complement trying both continuous vs single and
center vs evaluative focus in P mode, because I simply wasn’t getting the
results a camera of this level should produce. (read more)

I can’t help but laugh and shake my head about some of the technology
headlines.

A new Intego
trojan warning. Do they really need to make a fool of themselves,
again?! You’d think they know what is what since they’re in the security
business. Let’s see. There is a small applescript file you can download from P2P
networks related to cracking Office for Mac, which in fact wipes your home
folder. Does that sound like anything virus-, trojan-, whatever-like? Not to me!
It’s nice that they alert against such a file but it has zero to do with the
virus & security realm. They need a computer dictionary.

A new
critical wireless
802.11b flaw has been detected at a university. (Ok, you have my
attention.) You can disrupt a wireless network with a certain adaptor or
transmitter and block communications. Really?! And you need to be at a
university to figure that one out? Throw a metal/lead shield around a
transmitter and it’ll be mute. Put a more powerful emitter near the
infrastructure and it’ll blow the legitimate one out of the air. This has
happened with radio communications since whenever. Nothing new. Oddly enough
this would only affect 802.11b. Wrong. It affects every kind of radio
communication. The only difference is that with 802.11b you can hack the network
easier with cheaper tools and then mask the 3rd party router as the one to
authenticate with, get people’s NICs, the WEP keys, … and go to work with
those later. Old wireless security news in a new jacket.

Just two
comments ;)

Things just got a little worse, again. Getting a bogus corporate email
that your Citibank / Ebay / Paypal / … account has expired / been compromised
/ … with the kind request to update them; is one thing.

Enter
SEPUC: You receive a blank email with hidden
code that downloads & installs pieces of code on your system which build a
keylogger Trojan that transmits your sensitive data nicely back out. Nice! Thing
is we had more than a few of those in the past week.

Oh, have you
heard about the new SASSER? It’s a worm that hits a vulnerable
machine, scans the internet for more vulnerable machines, forwards itself
without user intervention onto that machine through a windows security hole and
then it continues from there. No email involved!

Why again do I
like using Mac OS X on my primary machine? No, it’s not for some of the
features it’s lacking ;) With increasing frequency we find ourselves on the
front line, before certain patches and updates have been released. Even with the
right tools the security side is a time consuming stressful side effect of
Windows computing. I’m starting to see Mac OS X running on C’s desk in the near
future (even though her incredimail email client has no Mac
brother/sister).

You may have heard that Virex 7.5 beta is available for those who’d like
to test it. So, I gave it a whirl for a few days. It’s under NDA, so I can’t
disclose anything specific. I’ll just say it’s a step in the right direction,
but don’t waste your time & resources. And that you can take very literal.

McAfee, my feedback is ready and I’ll gladly consult on a few things
as well.