Here is another reason why those of you running Windows should not use Internet Explorer.
Forbes reports Spyware problems are increasing, and a lot of these tend to arrive via Internet Explorer on unpatched Windows systems.

The people who call Dell Inc.’s customer service line often have no idea why their computers are running so slow. The ones who call America Online Inc. can’t necessarily explain why Internet connections keep dropping. And those who file error reports with Microsoft Corp. don’t always know why their computers inexplicably crash.

Sometimes, the company that gets the complaint is rightly to blame. But with alarming frequency, officials at these and other technology companies say they are tracing customer problems back to one culprit: spyware.

Of course, I’m not saying this is the only way for spyware to arrive, those folks who have installed some legitimate software have unknowingly installed Spyware as part of it. TechNewsWorld reports:

One major legal point so far gives spyware companies the upper hand. Many of the companies distributing spyware products have lengthy end-user license agreements. These are legal contracts. Some of these user agreements exceed 20 pages and contain hyperlinked references to additional terms and conditions.

For example, said English, buried in the middle of the document in fine print, the license agreement could state, “and, furthermore we can do whatever we please to your computer.”

Here are my helpful hints:

• Use Firefox as your web browser (as recommended by USA Today and Forbes.
• Enable Windows “Auto Update” to keep on top of securty fixes.
• Use something like AdAware to find Spyware and remove it.
  

There’s an interesting thread on AberMUD 1 going on over on Alec Muffetts blog where I wrote the following:

It was created as an extension of the Honeyboard BBS talker that itself was the result of a challenge from the Computer Unit sysman Rob Ash (immortalised as Rotash Burt the mobile in AberMUD1) that you couldn’t do it because there was no IPC.
So folks (I think Alan, Leon, possibly Jim, not sure as I hadn’t discovered them then) decided to create an IPC mechanism out of shared files.

And thus a legend was born, and a number of degrees ruined.

You could argue that without AberMUD 1 Linux would be in quite a different state these days.. 🙂

Alec has an article about his first experience of AberMUD when it was still part of the talker of HoneyBoard on the Honeywell L66 at Aberystwyth.

For those who’ve seen early AberMUD sources the reasons that rooms had numbers was because they started off as talker channels which you could go to for a chat with someone away from the hoi polloi of channel 0. 🙂

From a personal point of view without that experience in using and programming on a big multiuser system, and the people I got to know both inside and outside of the Computer Unit, I would not be where I am now, having fun with big Linux clusters!

Courtesy of Yahoo Finance, this is what SCO’s share price has been doing over the last 12 months.

Found via Alec Muffett’s blog, Southern California’s air traffic control system failed due to a Microsoft Windows problem causing at least 5 near misses and leaving 800 planes airborne with no contact to ATC in mid-September.

Just to make you more depressed, read how the UK’s new Type-45 destroyers are being fitted with “Windows for Warships” (from the Risks Digest) – a chilling new turn for the blue screen of death if it goes wrong, which it has plenty of opportunity to according to the report.. There is another report on this over at the Register.

The BBC is reporting that Symantec say that 30,000 Windows PC’s are being recruited into spam and virus spreading networks each day which is a massive increase from 2,000 a day 6 months ago.
Computer Weekly is also reporting a security hole in Microsoft Word (2000 and XP) which will let people run code on your machine. This does not yet have a fix.

So, if you must use Windows, make sure you keep your machine up to date with patches from Windows Update and Office up to date with OfficeUpdate, switch from Internet Explorer to a more secure browser like Firefox or Opera, use a personal firewall like ZoneAlarm and install a good virus checker and keep it up to date!
Oh, and don’t forget to clean out spyware with a program such as AdAware.

Of course if you don’t have to run Windows then you can think about switching to Linux, I’d suggest looking at a distribution like Ubuntu, Mandrake or Fedora.

You can even try out Linux without installing it by running it from a CD using the Knoppix boot-CD.

Earlier in the week Kodak won a patents case against Sun Microsystems over what appear to be excessively broad and not at all novel patents covering, well pretty much anything that tries to do anything with remote programs, or even other local programs. Well, Sun have decided not to appeal and have settled out of court for US$92 million.

This sets a dangerous precedent, and it’s very likely we’re going to see more legal action over these three patents. Now hopefully the courts will see sense and strike them down, or maybe the Public Patent Foundation will take them on (they beat Microsoft).

If not, then the consequences could be dire, and if you don’t believe me then try these opinion pieces on eWeek and ZDnet.

This is just so cool, Ammonite is a 200-processor (AMD Athlon) cluster of bare diskless motherboards built by Jack Wathey and Tom Bartol.

Groklaw is reporting that Kodak have won a software patent lawsuit against Sun Microsystems and are now claiming US$1.06 billion dollars in damages on Sun’s hardware sales because of an alleged infringement of Java on a patent of Kodaks.

Why are they claiming on Sun’s hardware sales? Because Java can be downloaded for free and Kodak say that Java provides “the engine for such computer equipment”. I can’t believe that a court accepted that as an argument.. 🙁

Australia, are you watching ? This is what’s coming our way now the FTA is entering law, bringing software patents with it..