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Editorials
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Written by Brian Austin
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Sunday, 16 August 2009 |
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Say what you will of Twitter but the ills of social networking and DDOS attacks against controversial bloggers only scratches the surface. According to security researchers Twitter has become a command and control channel for botnets. IT World describes the tweets of a now deactivated account which disseminated instructions to compromised computers designed to gather personal information for a group of identity thieves in Brazil.
Though the discovery is a first for Twitter it doesn't taken an expert to realize that this vector is incredibly promising and falls under the "malicious content hidden in mundane Internet traffic" channel which hackers are exploiting with ever increasing frequency. While services like IRC and chat are being blocked or falling under ever increasing scrutiny hackers are quietly moving to other methods of instructing zombie computers like HTTP/HTTPS. Twitter, in spite of obvious service problems, is a very promising method as its popularity and user base grows because botnet commands can hide amongst normal tweet traffic. |
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Editorials
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Written by Brian Austin
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Wednesday, 12 August 2009 |
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Why not over complicate this? The original chart contained 66 cells but was later pared down to 14 by blogger Ed Bott. The key sticking point is the ability to "upgrade" install Windows 7 over Vista and XP rather than forcing users to do a "clean install".
In my opinion Windows users are better off conducting a clean install when upgrading their OS, especially if the prior OS is exhibiting slowness, quirkiness or isn’t running just right. I keep my systems incredibly clean but still find myself reinstalling every 2-3 years due to hardware replacement or upgrades. Regardless it’s probably a better idea to back up your data, lay hands on the original CD/DVD application media and start fresh with Windows 7.
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Editorials
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Written by Brian Austin
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Friday, 07 August 2009 |
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I can't remember the last time I walked into a Blockbuster, for my family Redbox has been the way to rent movies for some time. Only now are the movie studios realizing that the novel and convenient concept of movie rental at your local grocery store is a threat to their bottom line. As such both Universal and FOX have forbade wholesalers from selling movies to Coinstar, owner of Redbox, until 30-45 days after the initial DVD release.
Coinstar has in turn pursued legal action on the grounds that the studios are "engaging in anti-competitive behavior and abusing copyright law." I'm hopeful the two parties can come to some sort of arrangement however I'm not convinced the studios will allow Redbox to keep it's $1 per day rental rate. I'm also skeptical of the touted threat to DVD sales. Redbox is more of a threat to NetFlix and Blockbuster than to other outlets due to the downright shoddy condition of some of the rental disks plus the lack of ancillary packaging materials.
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