Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 19, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Who cares if IE is patched soon?

I’m just barely old enough to remember when people used to patch tires rather than just replace them when they had a flat. But you know why people don’t tend to do that anymore? It’s because a patched tire grew ever more likely to have a total blowout. Guess what? It’s not that different with IE (Internet Explorer).

Microsoft is now promising us that they’ll have a patch for the latest IE security hole … real soon now. So what? This problem, while it’s been exploited the most in IE 6, it exists in all modern versions of IE and it can be exploited in every version of Windows from Windows 2000 to Windows 7. And, I’m supposed to trust that Microsoft will ‘patch’ it right this time and that it won’t blow up on me again? I don’t think so.

Since this security hole has shown up, I’d strongly recommend that people drop IE for all uses. I’m not the only one. France and Germany are both telling users to stop using IE. Even Ed Bott, a long time Windows fan and expert, says that, at the very least, you should stop using IE 6.

We were all saying that before the situation got even worse. Since then, the attack code, which had gone public, is being used in attacks on users who wander onto poisoned Web sites.

More >

January 19, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Linux and USB 3.0

Ever get tired of Windows people proclaiming how their operating system has device support for this, that, and the other thing and Linux doesn’t? Well, now you have a perfect come-back. The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0 is out and only Linux has native support for it.

Linux started supporting USB 3.0 in the September 2009 release of the 2.6.31 Linux kernel. Neither Windows 7 nor Snow Leopard currently supports USB 3. Windows support? That will have to wait for Windows 7 SP1 —whenever that shows up.

Long before then, many USB 3.0 devices will have arrived. Some will doubtlessly have Windows drivers, but only Linux is USB 3.0 ready. USB 3.0, aka SuperSpeed USB, reaches new highs in PC peripheral speeds. USB 2.0 has a maximum throughput of 480Mbps (Megabits per second), which is fast — but these days, when you might want to move gigabytes of movies from one your PC to an external hard drive, it’s not fast enough. USB 3.0, by comparison, has a maximum throughput of 5 Gbps (Gigabits per second). Of course, that’s a peak speed. In real life, USB 2.0 has an effective throughput of about 32MBps (Megabytes per second) while USB 3 easily laps it at an effective throughput rate of 350MBps (Megabytes per second).

More >

January 18, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Should Ubuntu include proprietary software?

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, arguably the most popular of all Linux distributions, is asking its users what new, proprietary programs they’d like to see as optional software in Ubuntu.

Note, I said “new.” Ubuntu has actually included proprietary software in the form of hardware drivers since April 2007. Then, Ubuntu developers decided to place binary ATI and NVIDA graphic card drivers in the distribution because, “A large proportion of people using Ubuntu – including 70%-80% of people with new computers – need a non-Free driver for reasonable performance from their graphics card, wireless card, or modem, because there is no Free driver available, they had little choice in the matter.”

Never-the-less, when it came to end-user software, Ubuntu has, generally speaking, held the line against including proprietary software in their distribution. You won’t find, for example, Adobe Flash 10.x in Ubuntu, even though it’s commonly included in other popular Linux distributions such as openSUSE.

Indeed, there are several other distributions, such as Mint, which are perhaps best known for including proprietary programs that Ubuntu has refused to incorporate into the distribution. Until now.

More >

January 18, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

EHR is health care reform we call all agree on

Since I run my own small business, I’m very interested in health care reform. You see, my tiny — two-person — company pays more than four figures a month for health insurance. Ow!

That and taxes are the two biggest expenses on my ledger. Unfortunately, I don’t see much reason for hope in the crippled mess that has made it this far in Congress. Still, no matter what ends up passing into law, one common theme in all the reforms is support for electronic health records, and that’s good news.

EHR is just what it sounds like: maintaining medical records in an electronic format. Some of my records are on papers locked in cabinets. God help me if someone needs to know what my EKGs from a few years back looked like.

I’m not alone. According to an April 2009 survey in the New England Journal of Medicine, only 1.5% of U.S. hospitals have comprehensive electronic records systems, and only 8% have basic systems that cover at least one clinical unit. Think about that: Almost every important financial transaction you do is recorded online, but your medical records are stuck in the 19th century.

More >

January 18, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Dump Internet Explorer Now

I’ve always known that Internet Explorer was an insecure mess, but this latest attacks on Google and dozens of other companies has really opened my eyes to just how bad it really is. The latest zero-day flaw exists not just in bad old IE 6, but in every modern version of IE.

To be exact, according to Microsoft, the same security hole is in IE6, IE7 and IE8 on Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are vulnerable to attack. In other words, if you’re running any remotely current version of IE or Windows, you can be hacked. Great. Just great. How anyone on the planet can actually believe Microsoft when, with every new release of either their browser or operating system they claim that they’re more secure, is beyond me.

Windows has been, is now, and always will be insecure . It’s baked into its single-user, stand-alone computer design that was never designed to handle a networked universe with attackers always one network connection away.

More >

January 15, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Update your Adobe software Now

Some things are the same no matter what operating system you run. Mac, Windows, or Linux user chances are you use Adobe Reader to read PDF (Portable Document Files) and Adobe Acrobat to create them. So it is that, no matter what you’re running on your PC, you need to update your copies of Reader and Acrobat.

After some delays, Adobe has finally updated these programs and to run safely you need to update as soon as possible. Windows, Mac and Linux users can all find the Reader updates at this site. Windows Acrobat users need to go to this page for their updates, while Mac users need to head to this site.

Why am I making such a fuss about this update? After all software gets patched every day. I’m raising a little Cain about it because major attacks on Google and Adobe are already happening because of these now fixed security holes.

These attacks aren’t coming from J. Random Hacker, they’re coming, according to Google, from the Chinese government.If you don’t want your computer to be part of state-sponsored espionage, you need to fix it now before you run across a malware-infected PDF.

More >