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Ubuntu, Google and the Storm worm

September 3, 2007 – 7:00 am

Ubuntu advertised on Sun’s new SPARC servers (from a full page web-ad I came across very recently)… More times then I can recall seeing or noticing Red Hat’s logo on advertisements (probably because they focused mainly on the Enterprise).
I’ve been championing the Ubuntu-based distros for the last year or so and the deals from Dell and Sun and Oracle with Ubuntu mark the beginning of an era that will usher a reverse-migration from the office to the home.

Technicians toying with test distros at the office will undoubtedly thinker at home with what works easy and best for them. Based on my own experiences, I tested several Linux distros while looking to set up, build and maintain a simple LAMP server for my home business about a year and a half ago. Tried SUSE, Mepis, Xandros, Fedora among others. As a newbie, the one that gave me the least trouble out of the box and was intuitive enough was by far Ubuntu, Breezy Badger. Since the release of the Dapper Drake version of Ubuntu, I’ve steadily and slowly migrated any computer or laptop used for my business that needed overhauled to one of the versions of Ubuntu. Now, the LAMP server is running Dapper Drake; my new Toshiba Media Player laptop and my old back-up business Dell Latitude notebook both run Feisty Fawn; the 4 year-old Compaq used for music production and video work, runs Ubuntu Studio. They all nicely integrate with the Windows Network and the Wi-Fi setup of my apartment in New York. The still unresolved problem I am having is with the Broadcomm Wi-Fi chip on the Compaq machine that refuses to connect to the home WEP-enabled Wi-Fi network. I’m not saying that this is a Ubuntu only problem because the same exact thing was happening when the machine was running on Windows XP, it’s last operating system.

The problem is with the early batch of Broadcomm chips that powered the Intel wireless offering. The next major upgrade for the business is the Windows XP dedicated PC that serves as file server and office applications server. Yes, you guessed right; It’s moving to Linux with all it’s 350+ GB hard drives and all the USB peripherals attached to it. (I’ll write more on the upgrading experience in a later post).

Of notes to all. There is a new worm (again) to keep in mind and/or keep track of. With the name Storm worm, this one is keeping the security experts up and on watch. On average, about 1 million virus-laden e-mails were tracked crossing the Internet, says Adam Swidler of Postini. Starting around mid-July, they’ve tracked on average 46.2 million malicious messages of which 99% were a form of the Storm worm. Using peer-to-peer bot techniques, the worm usually comes in e-mails with links to fake e-card site, news sites describing catastrophic current events (”Russian missile shot down Chinese satellite”, “Sadam Hussein alive”. ) To IT managers: block, track, sniff, analyze the peer-to-peer traffic on your networks. For home users, try PCTool’s Storm remover.

I am a Googler, but I hate search engines. They are inefficient at best when time is of the essence. What gets returned is like the portal to a gazillion possibilities. People search for 11 minutes on average before finding what they’re looking for! eleven minutes! Multiply that by 3, 4 or five (that’s the number of ‘searches‘ I usually have to do for average one-item work) and you start understanding where all the time goes by when you are working on a deadline. It’s a notion that always raises the hair on the back of my neck when family members or friends are amazed at the wealth of information that I can email or forward to them and ask me to show them (teach them) how to search as efficiently as I do! The horror! I’m not efficient… At all… On the contrary. It’s just that I keep at it longer and persevere for those 11 or more minutes, trying to find the more appropriate results before giving up.

People have this notion that search engines are like the old Bell operators of the past. Ask and you shall be connected right away, sir… The holy grail is the HTML text entry box where I can type in plain English (or any other language) a normal question, hit that HTML label button marked ‘Search‘ and get at least a page-full of 70 - 80% on the nose results (in mixed media: text, video, audio, calendar, etc), offer me some off-beaten results for a different perspective, ability to refine results, preview pages before loading them, and finally save that query (if I turn the feature On) without any personally identifiable information somewhere on the web cloud so that I can access it from my aunt’s computer when I visit during Christmas. That’s why I’m still a Googler (wink)… The ability for search engines to “understand meaning” is promised in the next decade. What to do in the mean time?

Some Data mush: Median US internet download speed is 2Mbps; in Japan 61Mbps; 45Mbps in South Korea and even 17Mbps in France. Sacré Bleu!

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The iPhone, the Google Phone, Firefox 3.0 and more.

August 31, 2007 – 12:24 am

The week of August 27th, 07 started with the big news of two companies coming out over the weekend with software to completely unlock the iPhone. One of those companies iphoneunlocking.com, a subsidiary of UniquePhones (www.uniquephones.com) has released a video showing the software unlock in action with an iPhone running normally on the T-Mobile network. Needless to say that the lawyers at AT&T - the required carrier to use the phone in the US - went into action immediately and sent stern letters to the companies that came up with the code. Marshall Sponder at Webmetricsguru.com had this comment that summed up the sentiment of most people still holding on from buying the iPhone: “My guess is that most people who buy and iPhone want to get rid of AT&T.”

Meanwhile, a story reported by Informationweek.com, announced that Verizon Wireless callers have sent more then 10 billion short messages in the month of June alone. Now, wasn’t just a couple of months ago that the majority of the media was complaining that sms was not a U.S. phenomenon and that lots of startup businesses that were built around the delivery of sms went belly-up because of this wrong notion! It’s time to revisit those business plans because like i have said previously and based on my own experiences, sms messages are an important part of the cell phone revolution and that slowly and surely, U.S. based customer will start to understand and integrate these small and quick messages/alerts into their way of living. Let the market decide how it wants to use them and supply service based on that demand. I know from my own experiences how much short messages has reduced my cell phone bill and allowed me to conduct non-essential transactions and business on the go, without formality.

More and more talk is being generated about the upcoming Firefox 3.0 version, due out sometime later this year. One of the more interesting developments is the upcoming Malware Detection code that will be included in the release. Alex Faaborg on his blog “User Experience Design at Mozilla”, details a lot of the GUI enhancements to expect and adds “Similar to how Firefox 2 blocks Web sites that are potentially going to try to steal your personal information, Firefox 3 will block Web sites that we believe are going to try to install malicious programs on your computer. Mozilla is coordinating with Google on this feature.”

Over at Realtechnews.com, Alice Hill mentions the patent-pending first Corvette-shaped PC from Compucar. Among other things under the hood of this baby are a Genuine Intel P4 processor w/Hyper Threading (up to 3.8GHZ), 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA Hard Drives up to 400GB, 80mm Ultra Quiet Cooling Fan and Silent Low Profile CPU Cooler (whisper quiet). At a suggested price of $1,750 US, it may seem pricey for just a computer, but who would buy this as their first PC? This is sqarely aimed at the gadget fans for whom that price is a bargain compared to what they usually pay for souped-up game PC’s. Let’s not forget that the Compucar LLC computers also come in 16 different models to choose from including the 70 Boss Mustang, the 69 Camaro Z-28, the 2003 T-Bird, and many more.

Finally, one story that is just starting to become reality is about the long-rumored upcoming Google Phone (coming early 2008 apparently). Webmetricsguru.com makes a compelling case for why the introduction of such a device would not only disrupt the current status-quo in the U.S. with the monopoly of the major wireless carriers and their unfair lock-in contracts and feature-crippling practices, but it would also totally revolutionize the way we look and the cellular phone (or it should be another name completely: the communicator), at communicating, at interating with others both with presence and through web-based visual means, and redefine a completely new class of devices. They’ll call it a cell phone for a while at first - just to educate and entice users - but it is definitely more then a cell phone. It’s perhaps the first attempt at a truly universal communicator, something that could be a precursor to the famed Start Trek communicators/locators. If the 700 MHZ spectrum bid that Google is going to bid on to control is another clue into perhaps what is to come.

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New Slant on Tech

August 30, 2007 – 1:15 am

Today, we are launching our comprehensive blog on all things tech, as observed and commented by our wonderful geeky staff of computer professionals and web nuts.

This will be a place for discussion about newsworthy development in the area of coding, applications, industry and rumors with a special focus on anything web 2.0 and forward.

The staff of bloggers is not a static list as we are accepting submissions from rogue computer professionals with something different to say about the internet industry that is not a regurgitation of what all the other news media site are printing. Contact us if you have you are looking for a free-spirited forum to express and discuss your opinions.

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