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10 years, eh? Hard to believe! Congrats to all of the many admins, mods and forum regulars who have made this place a warm and friendly enclave on the Internet. Still proud to have my name on it. But it's all yours.

-- Scot

What's really shameful is that the citizens of the United States, in their ignorance, apathy, and complacency, have let this happen. A liberty once taken away is 1000 times harder to reacquire. Privacy is more than a liberty. It's a foundational right of a civilized being, like the right to defend one's self, loved ones, and property. This country is slipping down into the crapper at an ever increasing pace.

Of course, this is all my opinion and subject to debate. There are those out there who feel more comfortable and safe with cameras all around them and constant surveillance taking place. They feel the world is a better place with all these technological gadgets all interconnected and tracking their every key press, voice pattern, or facial characteristic. What a wonderful world that is, huh?

Hello,

Sorry, I have been preparing and participating in presentations the last few days.  It is very rare for me to do any public speaking, so these are some things I had to put a lot of prep work into and I was somewhat focused on that.  I finished my first video conference today, and even wore my Bubonic Plague tie, which, I figured was kind of appropriate.  I have an hour-long webinar next week but there's no live video feed for that.  There is a presentation, though, and I've about 40 slides done in my deck.  The marcom folks told me to add some transitions and graphics, though, as it's all text based.

A couple of things you should keep in mind about the issue within Kaspersky's NDIS filter driver:

• The attack has to be made over IPv6.  While there are a few tunneling technologies like Teredo and 6to4, it soiunds like this attack requires a native IPv6 connection in order to be reliable.  IPv6 adoption still lags, and do not think are many small to medium businesses, let along residential home users who have a complete Internet-enabled IPv6 connection.
  
  I would think most attacks would occur in an enterprise environment, where someone is already has physical and logical access to the network.  And that means that the defender probably has larger concerns than someone DoSing endpoints.  But I do not think this problem is going to show up much in the real world.
  
  
• From my reading of the announcement, the vulnerability exists in an NDIS filter driver.  NDIS is a standard which defines the API, or interface used by software applications to communicate with a component, which, in this case, is the network interface card.  NDIS is actually an older technology, and one that both Microsoft and antimalware companies have been moving away from for quite some time.
  
  While NDIS is not fully deprecated (yet), the replacement API, Windows Filtering Platform, was introduced in the Windows Vista timeframe and is meant to become the default lower layer and which network traffic is intercepted.  From a technology point of view, it's full of all sorts of interesting features that should easily allow security companies to do things which were problematic in the past, like co-exist together on the same system or scan encrypted traffic.

I feel a lot of sympathy for both Kaspersky Lab and its customers, and wish for them a prompt and uneventful resolution to the issue.  It is always problematic when such things occur, and I hate to see it happen to any software company, especially one where I have a lot of friends and acquaintances.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Please note my new sigline image...



I passed.

It all boils down to one thing. Linux= Variety and choice.  And no other OS will ever provide that.

Later that same evening...............
Installed Wheezy LXDE on my EeePC 900. Extremely easy install although the Expert Install requires a little knowledge. The only things I had to tweak afterwards were to add the firmware-atheros package from a flash key to get internet working as I had installed without setting up network. Then put my wireless SSID and password into the LX network utility and I was connected! Too easy.
Of course i couldn't leave it there, I had to see if it would run KDE. I didn't have great expectations but installed kde-plasma-netbook, the nice KDE interface specially designed for netbooks. I rebooted and was pleasantly surprised that it felt quite responsive.
Then installed Amarok to really push the friendship. It ran perfectly, although top showed it was using a lot of memory. So I removed it and installed Clementine. Much better.
The little 4GB SSD was now about 90% full so I went through the packages and removed a lot, Libre Office being the biggest. Now down to about 70% full - quite acceptable. The 16GB SSD which I put /home on is only 2% full. It's bootup memory usage is only about 200MB which also surprised me.
So I'm running Debian Wheezy KDE on my little netbook and it's going really well so far. Posting from it now. I'm impressed!

Looks like a lot of Bruno's Classroom Alumni Assc. members here at Scot's have become old hands at this Linux stuff, huh?

I had to laugh when installing Debian the other night. I remember the TERROR I experienced the first time I installed Debian... just 7 short years ago. It was only the second Linux distribution I'd ever installed (Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake) was the first. I've gotten lots of practice since then. Stuff that used to raise goose bumps on my arms doesn't faze me a bit these days.

Shoot... just yesterday I rsync'd my primary OS partitions onto my backup partitions and manually changed out kernels on both of my laptops.

If you have a nVidia GeForce 6-7 graphics card before you do the latest update for PCLinuxOS You may want to read this thread on the PCLinuxOS forum.

Quote

Instructions are included of course, even for those of us who managed to do the update before reading the thread and got the pleasant surprise of a command line. (I like to do things the hard way it seems).

You know a few years ago that would have given me a panic attack, now its just, "Oh, hmm, well pop in a live CD and check out the forum and see what updating broke and what I need to do to fix it." I love Linux.

Welcome Jade88. There aren't many issues that the regulars who hang out in the Bruno's All Things Linux section can't solve.
Plus, no matter how basic your question might seem to the snobs/know-it-alls at other Linux forums, everyone here answers with a respectful attitude. As a result, you don't have to be afraid to ask questions.

I certainly hope not. I prefer my PC to my laptop. It doesn't have the same heat issues, its easier to type on my keyboard and a whole lot easier to swap parts in and out. I like the laptop for traveling, which I do very little of and I use my kindle to read (but I've been doing some of that on the PC and it isn't as bad as I thought it would be). As far as gaming I think really serious gamers prefer the PC too, way more mods available and as long as you have good enough graphics and sound cards installed the experience is as good as if not better. I kind of think having a PC which is really capable of doing all the  stuff you get from your gaming system, ebook reader, tablet,  as well as making phone calls is better than all the others. I guess to put it simply if I could keep only one it would be my PC because it can technically replace all the others. Mind you it is a little more difficult to take with me.

I just love APOD.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SNF!!!!!!!!!!
JcGriff2 hit the nail on the head  (by the way, great to see you again JcGriff2 who started me on my journey of learning BSOD analysis   )  A small percentage of online forums have achieved what Scot's forum has achieved.  Some may ask, what is so special about this forum.  I have been a member since September of 2010 and have not been here NEAR as long as most but I have been here long enough to KNOW I can answer this question.  It's the people.  Obviously in all aspects of this Forum from Windows, to Linux, to MAC a foundation of treating that person who needed assistance with a level of respect and providing in an amazing way the ability for that person to not only get their problem resolved but to LEARN from the issue is the foundation that will keep Scot's going for another 10 years.
I am proud and humbled to be part of this community and I am proud and humbled to call many of you FRIENDS!!!!!!

Keep doing what you are doing.  It no doubt is working.  

All the best,

Ian

Time for some right proper part food,



Cucumber sandwiches ! yummy yummy even the latest fashionable ones  

Oh noes!  The Assimilator did it again!  We're doomed.

10 years of online public service by an Internet Forum is. . .

• A near-unheard of accomplishment that very, very few forums can say as of today or will ever be able to say that they have achieved. My conservative estimate is that 0.000001% of currently active Internet Forums are 10 years old or greater.
  
• An achievement that Scot's Newsletter Forums and all associated with it should be very, very proud of.

Time for some goodies to share.

From the Twitter blog post, Twitter Blog: Keeping our users secure:

Quote

Even if you didn't receive an e-mail from Twitter indicating your account was compromised, it is strongly suggested that you change your password anyway.  Better safe than sorry.

A couple of articles of interest:

• Bits from Bill: Updating your Twitter Password Isn’t Enough
  
• Questions and answers about the Twitter hack | Naked Security

V.T. Eric Layton, on 08 January 2013 - 09:11 PM, said:

Aren't we all.

crp, on 02 January 2013 - 01:21 PM, said:

I'm not in the least loath to admit one doesn't need 40" screens just to "read lots of articles".  Even though I do.  But particularly at this time of year, I can't play golf all the time.  So at 74yrs old, I do spend an inordinate amount of time with my "devices".

I've been installing Mint for my converts for quite some time now. I even occasionally install Zorin or Bodhi for them. It's been a while since I installed an Ubuntu anywhere, though. I don't have anything against Unity or any such qualms. However, this advertisement thing is something totally different. I said a long time ago in a blog article at my old LockerGnome blog that Shuttleworth was prepping Ubuntu to be a profit-making tool eventually. I received a dump truck load of nasty and mean comments about that prophecy, too. Well, lookee here...