Revision3, home of web TV show ‘Diggnation,’ shuts down for three days after its computers are overwhelmed. The culprit: traffic sent by anti-piracy company MediaDefender. Both firms cry foul.

One of the most popular Internet-based television networks was shut down all weekend, a casualty in the entertainment industry’s fight against pirated material.

The outage at Revision3, which features shows such as “Diggnation” and others targeted at techies, highlighted the risks of serious collateral damage in the usually invisible but bare-knuckled technological war between copyright holders and pirates.

The victimized company said today that the culprit was MediaDefender, a Santa Monica firm that distributes fake music and video files on the Internet in order to fight piracy. The shutdown resembled the denial-of-service attacks often used by cyber-criminals and other malicious hackers, but Revision3 and MediaDefender said the outage was accidental.

Hum you mean that the RIAA stooges are now going after all torrent sites? This could be a good fight to watch as the group over at Revision3 are not the type to say oh it was a mistake that is okay. Oh no I bet that after the FBI gets done there will be a lawsuit or two coming out of it. And as far as I am concerned I for one am glad to see it.

The Mole will begin airing on Monday, June 2, 2008 at 10:00 pm EDT.
The game will feature 12 civilian contestants.

The Mole on ABC

Microsoft has begun privately beta testing a new tool, known as “Windows Advisor,” which is aimed at helping consumers better pinpoint why their Windows machines might not be up to snuff.

Microsoft officials have been saying that Windows — and especially the much-maligned Windows Vista — isn’t to blame for all of users’ PC problems. Faulty drivers and badly written apps are often behind users’ unhappiness with their new PCs, the Softies have said. Microsoft is making sure that users will be able to place blame where it belongs with Windows Advisor.

Yeah like Microsoft has never had a bad Operating System, you know it is not their fault it is the cruddy hardware you are using silly.

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Malware hunters have spotted a previously unknown — and unpatched — Adobe Flash vulnerability being exploited in the wild.

The zero-day flaw has been added to the Chinese version of the MPack exploit kit and there are signs that the exploits are being injected into third-party sites to redirect targets to malware-laden servers.

Technical details on the vulnerability are not yet available. Adobe’s product security incident response team is investigating.

This SecurityFocus advisory warns:

Adobe Flash Player is prone to an unspecified remote code-execution vulnerability.

An attacker may exploit this issue to execute arbitrary code in the context of the affected application. Failed exploit attempts will likely result in denial-of-service conditions.

Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115.0 and 9.0.124.0 are vulnerable; other versions may also be affected.

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Okay the topic of doing back ups in linux has come to the forefront as of late so I thought I would toss a couple of possibilities into the fray. The first is Clonezilla and here is what they have to say about their product;
You’re probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You’ve probably also heard of Symantec’s solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Features of Clonezilla

* Free (GPL) Software.
* Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux or MS windows. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
* LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
* Multicast is supported in Clonezilla server edition, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
* Based on Partimage, ntfsclone and dd to clone partition. However, clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
* By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

While the second option is more of a network backup program it is a viable option for a lot of folks.
Bacula is a set of computer programs that permit you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds.

In technical terms, it is a network based backup program.

Bacula is relatively easy to use and efficient, while offering many advanced storage management features that make it easy to find and recover lost or damaged files.

There you go folks look at both and you decide what will work for you. I don’t want to sway you so I will tell you I have used both and find them well done, each with it’s own agenda.

Okay you all have had that perfect install only to find out that the darn wireless card would not work and no matter what you did the darn thing just sat there and laughed at you. Okay maybe not really laughed but it seems like that some times. Well here is a great site to visit and hunt up the newest wireless drivers that are out there. Free downloads and easy to use lists give the site a visit and enjoy folks wireless is just around the corner with the help of this site.

Wireless Drivers

Free Geek Vancouver (FGV) is now certified as the first ethical recycler in western Canada by the Basel Action Network (BAN), and an important part of the certification is the organization’s refurbishing of used computers with free and open source software (FOSS).

Darn they are really trying and that is a fact. Heck that puts them ahead of my hometown area.Baldy

FOSS helps Free Geek Vancouver become an ethical recycler

Penguinway » Puppy Linux 4.0 on a Dell Inspiron 1150 Review

I got a chance to check out the latest Puppy release this week. Puppy Linux is a small Linux distribution (roughly 87 megabytes) that runs off of CD. It is ideal for running on older hardware or for people who just want a lean system. A couple years ago I put Puppy on a Pentium II 233 Mhz computer with 64 megabytes of RAM. I wiped Windows 98 off the 4 gigabyte hard drive and donated the computer to Goodwill. I was sad to see the system go after the Puppy install. The system ran better than it ever had. Not to mention the fact that it was far more secure.

This week I booted the Puppy 4.0 “Dingo” CD on my trusty Dell Inspiron 1150 notebook. The system has a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz Celeron, 1 gig of memory, and a 80 gigabyte hard drive. I generated a report on the system using Puppy’s HardInfo program. HardInfo is available under the System menu in Puppy. It is nice utility for getting info on your computer.

I tried this out the other day and I gotta say, “Wow!” Puppy has come a long way, super fast, nice looking and did I mention, super fast!

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AP – For an “American Idol” season so flat and lifeless, the end sure rocked: Ex-bartender David Cook virtually body-slammed teen prodigy David Archuleta in a surprising landslide Wednesday night, capping an energized finale filled with big stars and polished performances.

Jeeesh LC’s favorite rocker won! Naw I am fine just a slight rush of Idol overflow this morning. It’s LC’s fault she got me hooked. Baldy

It’s a landslide: David Cook rocks the ‘Idol’ vote (AP)

It’s been more than a week since Debian patched a massive security hole in the library the operating system uses to create cryptographic keys for securing email, websites and administrative servers. Now the hard work begins, as legions of admins are saddled with the odious task of regenerating keys too numerous for anyone to estimate.

The flaw in Debian’s random number generator means that OpenSSL keys generated over the past 20 months are so predictable that an attacker can correctly guess them in a matter of hours. Not exactly a comforting thought when considering the keys in many cases are the only thing guarding an organization’s most precious assets. Obtain the key and you gain instant access to trusted administrative accounts and the ability to spoof or spy on sensitive email and web servers.
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