Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Linux FUSE Port of “Open” Solaris ZFS

Posted on by

Because Sun unfortunately chose to create a new and GPL incompatible license for “Open” Solaris it is not legally possible to directly port their interesting ZFS filesystem code into the Linux kernel, so any Linux kernel implementation would need to be a clean room rewrite under a GPL compatible license.

However, there is a way around this license incompatibility problem for filesystems by using the Linux Filesystem in UserSpace (FUSE) project. It (as the name implies) allows a filesystem to run in user space rather than in the kernel, a system now used by many other filesystem projects as an easy way of providing a filesystem paradigm for all sorts of wacky ideas (including filesystem access to Wikipedia through WikipediaFS).

So the Google Summer of Code 206 project is sponsoring Ricardo Correia in Portugal to port ZFS from “Open” Solaris to FUSE – he’s keeping a blog of his progress too.

Ricardo writes:

I’m very pleased to announce that, thanks to Google, Linux will (hopefully) have a working ZFS implementation by August 21st, 2006.

Good luck to him – I’ve had a demo of ZFS on Alec’s laptop and it looked quite snazzy – it’s kind of a fusion of an online resizeable filesystem & logical volume manager.

Anti Virus Company Recommends You Don't Use Windows

Posted on by

It used to be the joke was “Friends don’t let friends do Windows” – well now it’s a case of many a true word spoken in jest.

The UK anti-virus company Sophos is reportedly recommending that you don’t use Windows any more due to its increasing vulnerability to attack.

Security threats to PCs with Microsoft Windows have increased so much that computer users should consider using a Mac, says a leading security firm.

As someone who is constantly having to fight spam because of Windows PC’s that have become infected by viruses, trojans and other malware I second the call – please think twice before buying a Windows PC!

Microsoft ‘Genuine Advantage’ – Kill Your PC ?

Posted on by

Boy am I glad I don’t use Windows! I don’t have to worry about another company deciding that I don’t have the right to use my computer..

There is a ZDNet blog article relating a conversation someone had with a Microsoft support person which was posted to the interesting people list in which the MS support person said:

“in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”

I don’t think this is actually likely to be true as the only way they could be sure to disable Windows it if WGA wasn’t installed is to have planned this from the first release of Windows XP, otherwise they’d have no guarantee that the code they need to do this would be installed.

However, the ZDNet person questioned Microsoft and only got this in response:

As we have mentioned previously, as the WGA Notifications program expands in the future, customers may be required to participate. Microsoft is gathering feedback in select markets to learn how it can best meet its customers’ needs and will keep customers informed of any changes to the program.

Now given that MSFT is already being sued over WGA for violating the Washington Consumer Protection Act, Washington Anti-Spyware Laws, California Consumer Legal Remedies Act, California Anti-Spyware Laws, California Business and Professions Code and California’s Unfair Competition Law you would think that they would take this opportunity for a good PR exercise about it..

New Blog Anti-Spam Tools

Posted on by

Recently I’ve added a three new tools to my anti-spam arsenal. A few weeks back Rich gave me a heads up that he’d gotten the time to modify the WP 2.0 Akismet plugin to allow you to simply ban spamming IP addresses to your blog based on what Akismet classifies as spam.

Basically you get a top-10 of comments ordered by IP address and URL allowing you to quickly dispatch (and ban in the case of IP addresses) those evil posts. It works rather nicely, I must say.

This evening I’ve just added the Did You Pass Maths plugin from Aussie Steven Herod which is kind of a numeric captcha plugin for comments.

But this won’t stop trackback spam which seems to come in bursts, so I’ve also added the Trackback Validator Plugin from the Computer Security Lab at Rice University which visits the referrers of trackbacks received to ensure that there is really a link to you from that site in that page.

It’s not infallible as spammers can still configure a fake blog with links to your site, but they believe that when that happens it is no longer completely a spam trackback as it does originate from a real posting somewhere – just that you may disagree with the content and agenda behind it.

So, we’ll see what happens!