Archive for April, 2010


DailyTech – Report: Facebook CEO Doesn’t Care About Privacy

Filed Under: Security, Security Alerts by William — Leave a comment
April 30, 2010

From a corporate standpoint and security standpoint this should be the end of FB use.

Wired reports that new information has surfaced that claims Zuckerberg just doesn't care about the privacy of Facebook users. The revelation came in the form of a Tweet between the New York Times tech blogger Nick Bilton and an unnamed Facebook employee.

The Tweet read, “Off record chat w/ Facebook employee. Me: How does Zuck feel about privacy? Response: [laughter] He doesn’t believe in it.”

Some of the things that Zuckerberg has said and moves that Facebook has made certainly support the claim that Facebook doesn't care much for privacy. The company is on a march towards monetizing the huge amount of traffic it generates and one of the things that has to fall by the wayside to make money is some of the privacy of users.

via DailyTech – Report: Facebook CEO Doesn’t Care About Privacy.

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It Turns out the “new” features of facebook are even worse than noted before

Filed Under: Open Source, Security, Security Alerts by William — Leave a comment
April 25, 2010

Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them.

It goes further than i noted in my previous post.  Log into FB then you have a uber-tracking/login cookie following you around.  Also other applications by friends can still leak your information even if you have blocked it on your account.  There’s now more than three separate areas you have to disable all of this public disgorgement of your personal information.  it’s becoming too much of a chore to keep your stuff under guard.  It may be time for Facebook to once again get blocked at the Corporate gateway..and leave that block in place until the end of FB’s existence.

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More Railing aginst a non-existent monopoly

Filed Under: Open Source by William — Leave a comment
April 22, 2010

He said that with 70 per cent of the US market for Internet search, Google is the gateway to the Internet. How it tweaks its proprietary search algorithms can ensure a business's success or doom it to failure.

via Consumer group calls for google breakup – The Inquirer.

Give me a break.  My business works just fine without Goggle.  I do nothing to “promote” myself on Google nor do i worry about my search rankings.  Google is not a monopoly.  Users have a choice.  If they don’t like Google they can go to another search engine.  I use Google because it works..plain and simple.  That’s why most of it’s users continue to use it as well.  Microsoft is a true monopoly.  You can use Linux or apple but trust me your functional level and ease of use go downhill quickly.

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Facebook Is Becoming More of a Security Issue

Filed Under: Open Source, Security, Security Alerts by William — 1 Comment
April 21, 2010

Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Facebook is slowly making everything you do there public.  Here’s another step towards Facebook no longer giving you control over anything.

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Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 go RTM..time for all your off 2003 and under users to move.

Filed Under: Microsoft, Office by William — Leave a comment
April 17, 2010

Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 go RTM.

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More Facebook Hoaxes…This Time Farmville

Filed Under: Open Source, Security, Security Alerts by William — Leave a comment
April 13, 2010

Please folks. Please don’t post these hoaxes. there is no virus for farmville. IF you get a popup that you don’t normally see check YOUR system..it’s not farmville. Call a professional to scan your system please.

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Why does Google Chrome nail my cpu’s?

Filed Under: Apple, Microsoft, Open Source, Windows by William — Leave a comment
April 11, 2010

This is by design.  Chrome is multi-threaded and will distribute all aspects of the site(especially audio and video) across of all of your cores it can.  This leads to high intensity sites NOT getting slow or having issues provided your bandwidth holds up.  I have seen multiple tweets about this behavior.  It’s been common in many many other apps for a long time…it’s about time web browsers came of age in this regard.  On the Windows front the best browser for MT performance is Google followed by…IE8.  Yes IE8 is partially threaded.  Firefox and Safari are not threaded.  I have had to start using Google more and more because sites are beginning to overload FF and others due to them NOT being threaded.  I won’t USE IE due to it’s near constant Active X issues.  I really hope MS ditches Active X.  IE has really come a long way but Active x still allows IE to be an easy target directly to the lowest levels of your system.

The comparisons of browsers(with the exception of IE) also apply to the Mac as well.

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Get Ready for Office 2010

Filed Under: Microsoft, Office, Open Source by William — Leave a comment
April 11, 2010

Office 2010 is the typical Microsoft release.  If you already have the previous edition of their office suite, upgrading is purely a choice of preference.  If you are running older generations of Office it’s really a good idea.  If you are looking to purchase Office now..wait for 2010.  What does Office 2010 bring over 2007?  I am NOT an advanced Office user at all.  I have yet to find a Microsoft Office suite that’s truly easy to use for the Office neophyte…such as myself.  Ii have been playing with the beta and one thing it brings is usability.  The ribbon interface(which i also find much easier to use) carries over form 2007 BUT unlike 2007 ALL Office products now have the ribbon interface.  In 2007 Publisher and outlook did NOT have the full ribbon interface.  Microsoft has a tiered suport system based on the age of the product:

Support provided Mainstream Support phase Extended Support phase
Paid support (per-incident, per hour, and others) X X
Security update support X X
Non-security hotfix support X Requires extended hotfix agreement, purchased within 90 days of mainstream support ending.
No-charge incident support X
Warranty claims X
Design changes and feature requests X
Product-specific information that is available by using the online Microsoft Knowledge Base X X
Product-specific information that is available by using the Support site at Microsoft Help and Support to find answers to technical questions X X

Office 2007 will be in mainstream support until mid 2012.  After that the only updates available for Office are security updates…bugfixes, design issues, etc etc aren’t patched at all.  What are my recommendations for an Office purchase?  If you already have Office 2007 and it’s working fine for you stick with it.  By the time mainstream support ends for Office 2007 Office 15(whatever year that’s going to be) will either be released or close to being released.  If you don’t have any suite at all I would wait if at all possible for Office 2010 which has a tentative release date of June of this year.  If you have on older version of Office I would also wait for 2010.

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It’s time to move to Windows 7

Filed Under: Microsoft, Open Source, Vista, Windows, Windows 7 by William — Leave a comment
April 11, 2010

Microsoft has put out a winner this time.  I have been running Windows 7 since the first beta.  It runs perfectly on my old 1.6 ghz celeron notebook with 2 gigs of ram.  Vista on the same machine was a horrid experience(yes Vista is that bad).  The conventional wisdom is you wait for the first service pack.  That has been true in the past(Vista not withstanding.).  While Vista has had two service packs it’s still terribly slow.  Windows 7 has had zero service packs and it runs great.  I ahve seen signs of hte classic “Windows rot” in 7 though.  I’ve been running my latest installation for about a year now and it’s getting flaky.

Bottom line:

If you are still hanging onto XP it’s time to move provided you have the correct hardware.  IE9 among others are beginning to become Vista/7 products only.  I call XP “functionally obsolete” as you are going to see more and more developers move away from XP even though technically Microsoft still “supports” XP(It is a 9 year old operating system).  Even “older” hardware(aka see my notebook) can handle Windows 7 for light work.

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