Category: Software

I’m not going to put up photos for another day or two, but I’m taking shots daily, so maybe by tomorrow or Friday.  In the meantime, if you got a few bucks kicking around, and can’t think of anything better to do with them than give ’em to some sorta good cause, like maybe Movember?

Of course, a bucket of icecream’s good too, if you wanna go that way.  Costs about the same these days.

So what sorts of things have I been reading about lately?  It’s always fun to do a linkdump, right?  Right?  No?  Tough.  Buckle up, ’cause Kansas is going the way of the Feces Ape.

• The long unanswered question of the four Doc Browns.
• Use the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool with custom ISOs
• The XBox Media Center Minus the XBox

• The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

• Change Product Key On Windows Server 2008

• Run Windows 7 on two different computers from only one install

• David Lynch and his people are running around the States interviewing random strangers
• The cutest owl in the world that you keep thinking is gonna eat your head
  

• Sysinternals Disk2vhd helps migrate physical desktops to virtual machines

• Know-Em: Check Usernames on a whole bunch of social networks at once
• Hard-to-Place Accounts (Insurance People have a forum for the “Yeah but what if…” accounts)
• Boing Boing Video remix of documentary about Synesthesia

Anyone still here after all that?  You haven’t wandered off into space yet?

I’m on the emergency call number for this and next week for work, and I’ve been woken around 2am three times now, and I’m starting to get used to it, ’cause it’s the same overnight wrangler calling me from an out-of-town studio to help with things that so far have been either “Okay, let’s see what happens in an hour” or “Phone the guy (yep, at 2:10am) who knows the site best and have him figure it out.”

I feel bad about it, but when you’re baaarely awake, and you can’t think your way out of a sketch of a paper bag, just about anything sounds like a pretty good idea.  I bet one of these days I’m going to either suggest she put the spaghetti back into the frog swatch before the king of the potato people harvests the sunjuice OR I’m going to tell her she should just go get a pillow and a blanket and wait until the sun comes up before watching TV.

The only problem so far is that I have a little trouble getting back to sleep after having to suddenly be awake and play calm support person while the person on the other end, while not at all panicking (awesome), is WIDE awake, and has been at work for a couple hours.  Gotta be a weird job for them.

Arwen’s worked the graveyard shift for a coffee place (if you lived in Vancouver’s West End  during the mid 90s, you probably bought coffee from her), and she used to talk about heading homeward for dinner and sleep when the rest of the world was waking up and heading, blearily, to work.  Working graveyard at a coffee place is one thing (you get the club kids and the folks who can’t sleep and the crazies), but when it’s a hightech job at 3am… how’s the… who d’ya… I mean.

Yeah, I don’t know if I could do that job.  Maybe for a little while.

I’d need to go somewhere for coffee though.  Coffee from a nightowl who’s used to it.

BREAKING NEWS:

Just saw the ad for the HTC “You don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you.” which was quite good, except for the fact that a number of the snippets of reasoning they showed looked more like heartbroken stalker footage than actual “here’s why you need one.”  The other problem was all these shots of people going places and using transit and trains and planes and stuff, but the music riff they’re playing the whole time is Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.”  All these “isn’t it cool that people have GPS and cameras” clips and all I kept hearing in my head was “Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?”

I think that’s why I’m somewhat grey hat about my use of security technologies.  There’s the part of my jobs that have always meant I had to know about viruses and security systems of some sort, but then I’d turn around a corner and I was being asked to defeat those same systems in order to determine whether or not someone was up to no good with something.  I’m certainly no forensics expert, nor would I even consider myself a script kiddie, much less an actual hacker at all.  I’m hackish though, in that any time I’m presented with something that claims to be secure, I’m trying to figure it out.  It’s a new puzzle for me to play with.  A new game.

When the web was young, we didn’t have to worry about viruses, ’cause nothing worked well enough, fast enough, or often enough to actually spread a virus that would work on the fly.  It had to be copied manually.  The virus would have to attach itself to a file that people wanted, and that they’d share around.

Now?  I think it’s something like four minutes that an unprotected Windows machine attached directly to the net (not behind a firewall/router or anything) will be infected with at least on piece of malware, and that first one will usually invite friends over.

I think what’s going to very quickly become the new battlefront isn’t going to be hackers.  It’s going to be friends, family, and staff.  Social hacking, or social engineering will be where the real money is.  Mostly because the money is real.  The money is actually MONEY.  We’re back to the oldest tricks in the book to scam people, but because there’s technology involved, somehow everyone think the magical technology will protect them from giving all their identifying information to some punk who’s going to use it to buy a new pair of sneakers for $300… or a new boat for $30,000.

So everyone needs to THINK a little more about what they give to whom.  Quit freaking out about strangers snooping in your recycling box in the alley for your returnable bottles, and start worrying about Uncle Wally, who blindly forwards whatever thing crosses their inbox without thinking that maybe somehow, someone, somewhere might have started that chain email in order to collect email address that he can sell off to some spammers in Russia so you can have your mailbox stuffed with P4ent3RMINEsez.

Oh, too much babbling, I missed Midnight.

ka-publish!