My favorite scene from my favorite movie, the Battle of Hoth led to many recreations of snow speeders tangling up AT-ATs in my living room as a kid. Who’d ever have thought that it was so…well, poorly executed? The menacing Imperial walkers, the ominous snow troopers, and the cocksure ground commanders reporting their success to Lord Vader. I loved it.
But check out this analysis to see what was really wrong, and what could have been better.
A good read about how the cable industry in the U.S. is getting away with highway robbery, monopolization, and stifling progress. This really needs to change.
“If you’ve got a commodity that everybody needs as an input into their businesses, like take railroads for example, and it costs a lot to initially build that network so it’s hard for someone else to enter, and you can cooperate with your colleagues who are also providing that service, and you can divide up markets, you’ve got a monopoly business,” Crawford explained. “We’ve seen this happen with wired Internet access in the United States.”
Most of us don’t even know how bad we have it. We lag behind most other modern nations in broadband permeation, cost, access, and options.
“If you move into an apartment in Seoul [South Korea], you have a choice of three different providers, they show up in a day because there’s so much competition, and they charge you $30 for TV and everything. Koreans when they come to the United States… actually laugh at us for how expensive and how slow [American Internet service] is.”
Don’t we deserve this?
If you use the Carbonite cloud-based backup tool for Mac, you may notice that your computer’s fans are running loud and often, and that the Carbonite daemon is running at 80-120%. This gets really, really annoying after not too long.
I’ve dealt with it for two years by pausing backups while I’m working on my computer, hoping that Carbonite would release a new version that fixed the problem soon. That has not happened yet, and I grew tired of trying numerous fixes mentioned around the Internet, only to have the problem continue.
Finally, I saw that someone used a different backup tool called CrashPlan. I am on their 30 day free trial and am really digging it so far. The pricing is at or below that of Carbonite (depending how much space you need) and it seems to be running quite smoothly so far.
I really like the extra configuration and security settings that you just don’t get with Carbonite. It allows you to set schedules for CPU and bandwidth usage so that you can maximize your time efficiently. You can even choose what type of encryption you want to use on your stored backups, and if you set a password, your backups will be protected by that as well.
There doesn’t seem to be any restriction on file types, either. I remember Carbonite had a thing for a while where they wouldn’t let you back up video files, which just seemed dumb. They might still have that stipulation. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, because I’m ditching Carbonite for good now.
What do you use to back up your system and how well does it work for you?
A pretty interesting analysis of major websites and what they do with your personal data.
Why would ESPN want to send my username to Adobe?
Why is Pinterest sending my name to Google Analytics?
I’m interested to see who is bothered by this, or if anything is done about it.
Send In The Drones
They are coming in 2014, according to this. Just imagine what it will be like walking out of the mall to your car, looking up to see a drone checking you out. And you know that sooner or later they will be outfitted with tasers. This is the impending wave of the future.
I look forward to seeing what types of countermeasures will be developed. Could it be something as simple as a TV-B-Gone (which, as I recently learned, is a great gift for 7 and 9 year-old boys)? Or would it need to be something more complex such as a hand-held Electromagnetic Pulse Generator? (I know what I’m asking for next birthday).
Still using Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8?
WHY?
Targeted zero day attack being used against Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8
Microsoft have published a security advisory for a zero day attack being used against a “targeted audience” using Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8. This atypically means corporate or business users still locked in to using these older browsers.
Home users running XP should be looking to use another browser as their primary method of browsing the web, and corporate security staff should review Microsoft’s recommendations to build a layered defence to protect staff.
These folks are giving away free flash drives in a back to school promotion. Get em while they are hot.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function update_core()
You don’t have enough disk space on your hosting account anymore.
Pick one:
I never ran into this problem before, but during an update to WordPress 3.4, the error kept appearing every time the upgrade script tried to unpack the downloaded zip file from wordpress.org. It would be helpful if they included a message about it to let you know you may be out of space, but at least you can Google the error and find this page now 
If you are not paranoid about using open Wifi service at coffee shops, hotels, and other public establishments, you should be. Time and time again it has been proven that such locales can be extremely dangerous for doing mundane things such as checking your email or posting to your Facebook account. If you are unlucky enough to be sitting near one sniffing snooper looking for login credentials to be passed over the air, and you can quickly find yourself locked out of everything you thought was your own.
I recently tried out Hotspot Shield, a quick and easy way to get yourself up and running on an encrypted VPN. This one is for Macs, but there are probably many other solutions out there if you are on Windows, Linux, or others.
Hotspot Shield has a free version, but for $29.95 it’s well worth it to have the ads removed and get a bump in speed. In fact, the speed of this VPN solution is what impressed me the most. I didn’t notice any lag in surfing around the web.
Once you have it installed, it’s just a click of the button in the task bar to launch the VPN and get yourself routed through the tunnel. It takes about 3 seconds to connect.
With a third party VPN solution such as this, you aren’t covering your tracks or surfing around in complete anonymity, mind you, but you are at least securing what you are doing from the prying eyes of anyone on the same Wifi (or other) network as you.
The vulnerability that sat undetected for 7 years was disclosed last week, but today it has been announced that exploits have been seen in the wild. They are working on releasing a new patch. This is pretty bad as it’s not exploiting one particular web application, rather, it is exploiting web servers running PHP in general.
The quick fix is to add this to the .htaccess file on your website(s):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^[^=]*$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} %2d|\- [NC]
RewriteRule .? – [F,L]
Unless you have compiled PHP from source on your web server, you will need to wait for your vendor (Cpanel, WHM, RedHat, CentOS, etc) to release the updated version. I suggest you implement the above .htaccess fix in the meantime.
Edit 5/9/12 12:19PM Eastern:
Most cPanel configurations are protected by default: http://www.cpanel.net/2012/05/cpanel-protects-against-php-vulnerability.html