I use Seamonkey (another of the Mozilla browsers - this one includes calendar, HTML editor, Email and News reader) for a very small list of things, not the least of which is as my one browser to access high-security personal stuff. 

I do this so that caching and potential cross-site scripting stuff is contained as much as possible - I use Chrome and Firefox for most of the rest of my browser work but NEVER use them to access my bank "just in case".

I've updated my workstation to Fedora 15, and the Seamonkey it was installed with was version 2.0.14-1 - which complained that it was "old" and needed updating. Unlike on Windows (where doing something as "administrator" even without the correct permissions is easy), updating is not directly automatic with the Mozilla products on Linux.

It turns out that the latest 2.3-1 version is in the updates-testing repository so...

yum --enablerepo="*" seamonkey

got the new version. It found it in the Fedora repository, but in my case it might have been in any of the many others I use, notably the RPMFUSION repos - where extra stuff is sometimes found.

I don't recommend just willy-nilly doing this (enablerepo="*") for everything - that way lies system confusion and more trouble than it is worth. But for individual packages that are subject to security updates more frequently than most things, it is a way to get the latest version most times.

One major caution - do not use the "-y" (for yes, just do it) option when invoking the above command as you really want to take a look at whatever else the system might think needs updating along with the package you want. In this case, nothing else was depended upon by Seamonkey so no other packages were included - but for some updates the dependencies can cause other dependencies and cascade into a huge update that might break other things. In cases such as this, there may be some other way to get the update, or plug the security hole it purports to fix. Again, don't do major updates with the "*" repository flag set unless you really know what you're doing. 

Got a question from a friend:

"My husband, Joe, just purchased a brand new computer a few days ago from our computer guy. Joe left the computer on overnight, as he was transferring data from the old computer to this new one. This morning, the NEW computer wouldn't boot up. Apparantly, an overnight storm fried the motherboard--even though the computer was plugged into a surge protector.

Ugh! Luckily, our computer guy is handling the issue without charging us.

However, this is what I found really interesting. Our computer guy told us that EVEN if we have the computer plugged into a surge protector AND EVEN if we have the computer turned off, as long as the surge protector (or Internet connection for that matter) is plugged into the wall, there's a chance the motherboard can still get fried, rendering it useless.

To confirm this, I searched the Internet and found an entry on a Computer Technician's (Ed Martech) Blog that read..."

When you leave the house for any length of time and there is a chance that a thunderstorm will arrive near your building, you must shut down your computer and any electronic devices, if you want them to survive the storm. And, to absolutely play it safe, even if your devices are plugged into a surge protector and they are shut off, unplug the surge protector from the wall socket and the connection from the phoneline if your computer is connected to the internet.

That little act will save you from tons of costly grief! During thunderstorm season in the spring and summer, I shut off and unplug every computer that we have running at the office, as well as any other important electronic item that I don't want damaged.

I've been using and recommending PuTTY as an option to allow access via SSH to the command line of the various Linux systems that my customers use - mostly for access to minor system administration functions that don't require a full GUI interface, but in at least one instance it is to run some legacy text applications.

In all cases, this unique facility has been working fine, so "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" works just fine for me and them.

Now we have a new version - and I'll report on how it differs in look (so far not much) and function (web says some new features, bug fixes and compatibility for Win7 and various SSH server software)

The web site is http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ and click on the "Download" link to get the package. I use the full package executable to do installs, and simply installed it over top of the previous version with no problems.

Take the fact that today our internet systems are largely "always on" and couple that with both the high speed of the net in general and the huge computing and storage ability of our computers, and contrast that with the technology in the era that the Domain Name System (DNS) grew up in; one of connect on demand, slow network and scarce/expensive local processing and storage and you come up with my premise that DNS has outlived its usefulness. Is there an alternative to the system that is a money-tree for ICANN and a lever against perceived badness by the US (at least) government (in siezing domain names) and a perceive threat to national sovereignty by most of the other countries of the world?

Maybe - in fact probably.

According to an item I read yesterday that was talking about ICANN's opening up the Top Level Domain (TLD) system to anything someone wants to pay huge amounts of money for, most people use a search engine to find a company's domain rather than trying the "obvious" domain names in hopes that they'll hit the right one. They no longer play the guessing game, they search instead. The point the article made is that all that this expansion of the TLD system does is put money into ICANN's pockets - it really does nothing to help you or me find the company, and does "tax" companies by making them protect their brands at huge expense; The CocaCola  Company would have to register for the TLD "coke" to keep the Mafia or some other criminal drug cartel from registering it and using it to market the drug (trite example but you get the picture).

The other problem of course is that the net is now so ubitquitous and has been around long enough that DNS suffers from a couple of major pollutants that affect such "intuitive" stabs-in-the-dark:

• many companies, from different parts of the world, have the same or similar names - and all have tried to get into the Dot-COM root domain for historic reasons.
• purveyors of general nastyness love to register "near miss" domain names - mis-spellings, hyphenated, etc. - and load them with spam or malware or plain misinformation

The interesting thing is that, somehow, the search engines generally get us to the point where the company or product we seek is in the first page of (and most times the top line of) options they give us, no matter what the domain name really is. They do this using several techniques that they're constantly tuning:

• geographic profiling - both of you and of the various companies that might share similar names - so you'll find the "Joe's Cleaning" from your town and I'll find the one in mine.
• popularity and feedback profiling - sites that are the "correct one" where only one such site should exist (international brands such as Ford, Coke, etc.) get in-bound links from legitimate sites that are long-lasting and from otherwise generally well accepted sites - and people who click on the sites' links don't go back and search again.

So I asked myself, "why do we need the Domain Name System in general, and ICANN, the guardian of DNS top level domains, in particular?"

Is there some other way to do this that works as well or better, and does not subject us to the US FBI seizures and excess (IMHO) fees and charges of ICANN in particular and the Domain Registrars in general?

Just remember, DNS is simply a crutch to the human mind that does not deal well with simply remembering numbers. At heart, it simply translates the human readable (and rememberable) string to a set of unique numbers that describes a host to the technology you're using; www.digital-rag.com becomes 198.162.16.6

OK - I was doing some last-minute tax preparation yesterday and the fact is, time was of the essence. So I got just a bit upset when my bank's web site made me click through the same silly notice that I "need the latest version of Adobe Reader to read this file" for every single one of the statements I wanted to print - and I sent them a snarky e-mail because of it.

The point is, I run Linux - and my system already has a PDF page viewer and print facility - in fact it has serveral (Evince, Xpdf, Google Chrome) as well as the "real" Adobe reader.

Even if I didn't run Linux, the fact is, one such notice for the whole session (or better yet, forever) would have been just fine thankyou. Popping it up every single document was not.

They're not the first to push proprietary stuff at me; probably won't be the last either - but hey, at least the PDF format itself is now openly published (by Adobe) - it's a step in the right direction, but it has been a long road to this point and doesn't look to be getting too much shorter...

hallmark.com/product/ecards/easter does not equal  medikal.com.ec/.ecard/gift.html

I just got an "ecard" 

You have recieved A Hallmark E-Card,

There's something special about that E-Card feeling. We invite you to make a friend's day and send one.
FREE Hallmark app for iPhone® Get the latest offers and products at Hallmark Gold Crown and find stores near youall from your iPhone. .

To see it, click...

Of course I hovered my mouse over the URL in this notice and note that the URL does not in any way match the text it purports to be.

If you get caught by this today, you deserve everything you get - sorry, but internet Darwinism is effective - it weeds out those who are too ignorant to survive.

The debate over Usage Based Billing (UBB) on the internet might not have arisen if we internet technologists had done our jobs better. The internet runs too slowly at times. Lots of people have noticed this and it has gotten worse over the past couple of years. But, and this is a big BUT - the solution is not UBB. The real solution is a technical one. We screwed up.

The problem is/was that we were like frogs in slowly heating water - we didn't see the problem coming because it came on so slowly; now the water is nearing boiling and we finally have woken to it.

The symptom is possibly mis-labeled as "congestion" by many, but the real problem has been tagged "Bufferbloat" by Jim Gettys, a network technology guru who should know, he deals with the underlying Internet Protocol (IP) at the bit level daily. The specific symptom most individuals see is long "ping" times when your local link is busy with uploading or downloading large files; periods of high "latency" with such times in excess of several seconds when those of us who have been around the internet for a long time are used to ping times well below 1 second and mostly in the 10-100 milliseconds range. Network operators see a different problem; that of short term and frequent spikes of 100% utilization on a link that otherwise is nowhere near full.

The problem, once described to a technologist, typically causes one of those "how did we miss that?" exclamations, and has brought over 160 (and climbing daily) of the internet's best together on the bufferbloat mail list and web site to address the problem. These are the people responsible for setting the standards and in many cases for designing the underpinnings of the software that goes into your home wireless and wired routers and firewalls, the major culprets in this situation.

In the world of the automobile, losing one (a crash) is a very bad thing. In the world of internet packets flowing across the web though, losing a packet now and then is actually part of the process necessary to make things run properly. Equipment designers forgetting (or never learning) this has resulted in a problem that we all now face on the internet; Buffer Bloat.

The internet technical community is only just beginning to recognize how much of a problem this is. It may sound strange that the designers and technicians that create the equipment and manage the infrastructure didn't see this coming, but that's likely the result of the fact that it has crept in slowly over the years as memory prices have come down and computer and network speeds have gone up.

Now it's a major problem - in fact some of us feel it is the real reason why many of the ISPs think they should be metering your internet connection. A better working flow of packets on the current networks would get rid of many of the problems that metered billing is supposed to cure - things like downloading causing major congestion and slow-downs for others.

If the internet packet flow was working the way it used to, the downloads would slow down on their own to accommodate the other uses. Instead, today, they tie up the system and cause jerky viewing of videos, drop-outs of online radio and Skype calls, and other problems too numerous to count.

The notes from a talk I'm giving today for future reference by the participants:

Today's Communications and Politics

• Mainframe computers to minis to micros to embedded
• Private leased lines at 30 characters/second to internet at megabytes/second
• Corporate email to inter-LAN to Use-Net to BBS to Internet to instant messaging
• Climbing phone poles and dial phones to selling VOIP systems and using Skype
• Producing B+W TV to live streaming wildlife cameras and video-blogs

• Create and manage corporate and non-profit internet “faces” and teach people to self-manage them long-term.
• Media and Marketing consulting for communications-oriented programs and products
• Production and Technical consulting for communications and product offerings
• Tie the ideas to the realities, and implement or manage the implementation
• Hobby is technical – Business is Marketing and Product/Image Creation/Management