I’ve been dealing with a lot of security issues for friends and clients using Windows XP and Vista lately. For many of them, the best solution was for me to backup their important files, reinstall their operating systems, and set them up with tighter security so that the virus that got them in the first place hopefully wouldn’t get them again.
It’s not that my clients did anything wrong. Most swear that the last healthy, operational session on the computer consisted of some simple email checking or an instant messenger conversation. And I believe them, especially since I noticed many victims of this little surge were using Yahoo email accounts.
The plain truth is that Windows isn’t great when it comes to security. A little adage I’ve come up with is: they don’t call it ‘Windows’ because it’s a fortress. Even if you aren’t performing the classic hallmarks of insecure computing such as downloading random and questionable files or surfing illicit websites, just using Windows is itself one of the hallmarks of insecure computing. Because of that, you have to put in some work to tighten the loopholes, but even then there are pitfalls to overcome since many of the popular programs that claim to enhance security don’t actually help that much at all. Spending money on marketing is pretty much all it takes for a large company to buy itself a good reputation, which the “black hats” who write the malicious code and the “white hats” who work against them know only too well.
So what’s the solution? Well, since total security probably only exists in laboratory vacuums, the best option other than using a more secure alternative operating system is to mitigate the risks by using an informed and tested combination of software. To that end, I’ve listed some of the tools that I’ve come to prefer. There are of course other options, but these are the applications I can vouch for. Click here to continue reading
Once upon a time, there was BeOS. It was a wonderful operating system (OS), built by Be Inc. in 1991. Back then it has all the hallmarks of a revolutionary OS, and while its punch may have weakened over the years, it still has the potential to be a great platform. It was originally optimized for digital media work, it squeezed the juice out of multiprocessor systems, used a nice 64-bit journaling file system by the name of BFS and used an API written in C++ (because of its ease of programming). Although BeOS is not a Unix derivative, it used the bash shell and was POSIX compatible. Unfortunately, BeOS was not viable from a commercial point of view, and the company stopped its development. Be Inc. was acquired by Palm Inc., and now BeOS fans are trying to bring it back to life once more. Projects such as Haiku for example, are trying to build a new BeOS, from scratch. Others, such as PC/OS are using Linux distributions as their basis.
So what is PC/OS all about? It’s a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which seems to be the epitome of all ‘user friendly’ distros lately), and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it mostly derives from Xubuntu given that it uses XFCE as the main desktop environment. PC/OS aims to provide a stable, easy to use, out of the box operating system. To say that it’s fool proof would be exaggerating given the various installation problems I encountered, particularly with sound and video cards, but I’ll leave that aside for now and move onto the mainstay of this review. Click here to continue reading
Apricot is the title of an open source game currently being developed by the Amsterdam-based Blender Institute. While Blender is perhaps best known in the open source world for its cross-platform 3D content creation suite of the same name, it is fast developing a presence in the multimedia entertainment industry too. In 2005/06 it launched Elephant’s Dream, “the world’s first open movie”, a short film made entirely from open source software and released with open production files. Riding on the success of this creative enterprise, Blender went on to make Big Buck Bunny, another open source animation film that recently premiered at the Amsterdam Film Academy. The characters from Big Buck Bunny will feature in the Apricot open source game.
The Apricot project was launched in February 2008 with a core team of six members covering all areas of design, artwork, development, scripting and level editing. It is a cross-platform 3D game and like its cinematic cousins, it’s built on open source software. The team use”Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together”. The fundamental aims of the project are to work in connection with the online community to deliever a piece of software that not only offers a compelling 3D game experience, but aims to “improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions”.
Curious to find out how Apricot was coming along and to hear some of the rationale behind creating an open source game, I put the following questions to the Apricot team and here’s what they said: Click here to continue reading
The guys at WineHQ have been serving up a lot of new ‘varietals’ of their application in recent months, particularly after receiving sponsorship from Google. With an average of 2 or 3 new upgraded versions per month, the developers released Wine 0.9.57 and 0.9.58 last month, and just yesterday they brought us Wine 0.9.59.
For those of you still wondering what the Wine application is, let me explain. Wine is an open source project that takes the Windows API and transposes it onto Mac and Unix based systems (OSX, OpenGL, etc). You can use it to run most current Windows programs, although there is still a fair number that don’t work at all. This is partly what the Wine team is trying to address with their frequent updates. Take a look at the OSLiving Archive entry on Wine for more details.
So, what’s new in this latest version? Let’s take a quick look. The WineHQ offical website states that the .NET framework has been given some ’support love’, meaning that Windows apps running on Wine should generally work much better. A separate services.exe process will handle the services more efficient and in case you had some problems with http proxies, you’ll be glad to know that these issues seem to have been fixed (services.exe, or Services Control Manager is responsible for the system services, running/stopping and interacting with them). Click here to continue reading
WordPress is a widely used PHP/MYSQL blog platform or to quote directly from the source: “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” See the OSLiving Archive entry for more information.
In Retrospect
WordPress (WP) began in 2003 as a fork of the blog engine known as b2. The project was a joint venture by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. 2003 was in many ways a significant year in blog history; not only did it mark the launch of WordPress, but it was also the year in which Pyralab’s 4 year old platform, Blogger, was taken over by Google. And whereas Pyralabs had previously charged for a number of its services, Google stepped in and offered the ‘premium’ elements for free.
The third pillar underpinning the ‘blogopshere’ at that point was Movable Type (MT). It was only last year (June 2007) that the decision was made to release MT software under a GPLv2 license; prior to this it had been a closed source, fee-based platform. Then in 2004 came the release of version 3.0 and with it the famous/infamous decision to adopt tighter restrictions on licensing fees. This decision prompted a significant portion of the MT userbase to shift to the up and coming Open Source platform known as WordPress. Click here to continue reading
