Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 9, 2011
by sjvn01
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Are your search engine queries being hijacked?

Who doesn’t trust their search engine? When we need to find something, we all turn to Google, Bing, or Yahoo. We shouldn’t be so trusting through. On Bing, cyber-crooks are now placing ads to ensnare people who want to switch to the Chrome Web-browser. Now, we find that some U.S. Internet Service Providers (ISP)s are sending your search queries to a third-party proxy company instead of your search engine of choice.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), several recent research studies have revealed that “some or all traffic to major search engines, including Bing, Yahoo! and (sometimes) Google, is being directed to mysterious third party proxies.”

Further research by the EFF and the ICSI Networking Group, a non-profit organization that researches Internet architecture and related networking issues, has revealed that your searches are sent to a company called Paxfire.

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August 8, 2011
by sjvn01
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How seriously should you take “Operation Shady RAT?”

If you believe cyber-security firm McAfee, you can “divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.” Why? Because McAfee believes a major power, perhaps China, is systematically attacking and looting major companies and governments of their secrets. Other security companies don’t see it as being that much new “news” here.

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August 6, 2011
by sjvn01
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20 years of the Web

In 1991, I’d already been using the Internet for more than a decade. There might have been, at a guess, a million of us then. The Internet we knew was accessed almost entirely by ASCII-based applications like pine and elm for e-mail, command line/shell programs like ftp and Archie for finding and sharing files; and the most advanced tool we had was Gopher, a Yahoo-like guide to Internet resources. Then, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web and everything changed.

No one saw the revolution at first. The Web, which was running on NeXTStations–Steve Job designed Unix workstations that would prove to be the forefathers of today’s Macs–was something that only a few people even in elite techie Internet circles knew about. In its earliest days, only a few people could access it. Indeed, it wasn’t until early 1993 that the public learned about the Web from a writer named Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Looking back, I see I also didn’t quite get it.

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August 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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Five reasons to stay off Google+ for now

I think Google+ may just turn out to be the best social network of them all. I also think though that Google+ has a lot of headaches currently and unless you’re ready to deal with them you should stay off Google+ for now.

Here’s my short list of Google+ problems. If you can’t live with any of these: Don’t try to get on Google+ yet. Most of these will be fixed. Keep in mind that some of the potential policy problems may not be changing anytime soon… if ever.

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August 4, 2011
by sjvn01
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How open is Google’s Android?

People debate how “open” various open-source projects all the time. In fact, the very way I made that statement is charged because I didn’t include the phrase “free software.” Sometimes these arguments get more serious though. For example, in VisionMobile, a market research firm, A new way of measuring Openness, from Android to WebKit: The Open Governance Index report the company declared that Android was the least open project they examined. Chris DiBona, Google’s open-source manager, vehemently disagrees.

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August 3, 2011
by sjvn01
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Linus Torvalds would like to see a GNOME fork

Those of us, who’ve known Linus Torvalds over the years, like yours truly, know that Linux’s inventor, Mr. Penguin if you will, is a quiet gentle soul who never raises his voice when something distributes him. Ahem. I lie like a rug. While I have known Torvalds for decades, he’s anything but shy and he never suffers fools gladly. So, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that when Torvalds decided he didn’t like the new version of the GNOME desktop, he didn’t mince any words about it.

It all started in a public Google+ posting by Dave Jones, a Red Hat engineer and one of the maintainers of Fedora Linux, where Jones announced some minor Linux kernel news for a Fedora update. As the discussion continued, Torvalds joined in and remarked, “Could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment? I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3.”

He’s not the only one. I also don’t like GNOME 3 either. I much prefer the last version of GNOME 2.x: GNOME 2.32. It may be “out of date,” but it’s the default desktop for my current favorite desktop Linux: Mint 11.

Why? Well, I’ll let Mr. Torvalds tell you:

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