Baldy’s Paradox

Well after a day or two of playing with ScribeFire I have decided that while it is a handy tool to have handy it has a major drawback that might deter some users. That being the pain it is to post pictures. While it is easy to post them if you have a link handy, when it comes to uploading pictures to post there is a major problem there. While that is not as major of concern it might be for some users.
While I have installed it and used it on two types of systems, one is Wordpress and the other is Expression Engine, both were rather easy to setup and get running. The program does have a nice selection of blog tools to automate the setup for the EE I had to resort to custom and had no problems with it. While the GUI has most of the options that the average user will need, including the fact that it will add Technorati tags and add page to your del.icio.us bookmarks. which to me seems like a little much, I will say it as a basic remote blogging tool this is one that you might want to add to your browser on a scale of 1-5 I will give ScribeFire a 3 and hope for improvements in the up and coming releases.

Technorati Tags: Software

Spammers have decided to kill two birds with one spam: The stock-touting e-mail messages regularly sent out by spam-focused bot nets have started to include links to malicious code, according to a report published Wednesday by e-mail security firm MessageLabs.

The criminal groups responsible for the spam appear to believe that recipients of the e-mail may click on a Web link, even if they don’t buy the stock touted by the e-mail message. In the past 10 days, MessageLabs has only detected about 3,500 of the messages, so the spammers may be testing to waters to see how often the scam works, said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer for the company.

“These activities are now much more under the radar because they are sending the messages out in discrete chunks,” Sunner said. “If you spam out (the malicious link), you have a lot of control over the resultant bot net — you can control the size, (and) what time zone it is being sending to.”

The Storm Worm, which is actually a Trojan horse that does not spread on its own, embodies the latest tactics by spammers and bot masters to grow their networks. Rather than using worms and viruses to create bot nets that likely grow out of control, the Storm Worm — also known as Zhelatin and Peacomm — is sent out in spam to increase the size of a bot net at a controllable pace. The tactics also cause problems for traditional antivirus detection, since new signatures capable of detecting the latest variants of the Storm Worm may only be developed after the program has infected its victims and moved on to the next variant.

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Technorati Tags: Security

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Some folks love life on the edge, so they run Debian Unstable, or the newest Ubuntu or Fedora releases. These are all wonderful Linux distributions, and under most circumstances are reliable enough. You’ll run into weird dependency issues, or find out the hard way that the latest release of an application has a few problems, or that the distribution maintainers introduced entirely new applications that are chock-full of amusing surprises. For the most part they work well, but you never know when they’re going to get bored and have a little fun at your expense.

Then there are the brave souls who dare to be dull and don’t want surprises. They just want their systems to chug along and not need a lot of babysitting. For these fine folks there is CentOS Linux.

(Hey,are they talking about me? Well almost I guess I better install Centos today and take a look, Baldy)

 

Technorati tags: Linux

Source: CentOS 5: Linux for Grownups

Open source software — it’s fast, it’s popular, it’s practical, and, best of all, it’s free. Chances are you’re using some of it somewhere in your enterprise; in fact, you’re probably using it in multiple places. One of the most frequent questions security professionals get asked is how open source software compares to its commercial counterparts from a security perspective. There are a number of well-respected individuals arguing on both sides of the “open source security” fence.

(Good read and it might surprise you. Baldy)

 

Technorati tags: Linux, Security

Source: The Truth About Open Source Security

DistroWatch.com, for years a staple of the Linux information scene for its coverage of distribution development, today posted a new “Top Ten Distributions” page. The list provides a few paragraphs of general information and history for each distro, plus a brief list of fast facts.

(while the list is nice it has it’s faults if you read the breakdowns of each distro and therefore I belief it is more a list of the writers favorites, however it is a good read on the history of the some of the distro’s, Baldy)

Source: DistroWatch publishes top 10 distros list