A recent study found that at least 45.2% of web users were not using the most secure version of their chosen browser, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or whatever. But it gets better... most of them (577 million out of 637 million in the survey) are using an old version of Internet Explorer. The rest include 38 million users of Firefox, 17 million users of Safari and about 5 million users of Opera.

You're not one of those with an old version - are you???

I had the pleasure of having lunch today with my friend Gary Bannerman, with whom I've worked for a number of years now on all manner of business, web and internet projects. With Gary, and the reason for lunch, was artist Kerry Waghorn. Kerry's brand new web site has been created by my brother-in-law, Doug Cook, and has just recently been launched. We were together to discuss some of the marketing methods and for me to meet Kerry at long last after hearing of him over the past 4 years while Gary and Don Nixdorf created their Kerry Waghorn illustrated book, Squandering Billions, on the state of health care in Canada.

"Why does this fact rate a blog entry?" you might ask. Read on for the answer...

At dinner tonight the major topic of conversation turned to whether or not the Billion-$-plu$ budget for the twinning of the Port Mann bridge and widening of Highway 1 through to Vancouver was justified, or whether the money was better spent on some other means of transportation.

Now I personally think that not only is it justified, but that it is over twenty years too late and probably not enough expansion to adequately deal with the problems we have here in the Vancouver Lower Mainland with traffic and congestion. But I found myself having to justify my opinion in light of the recent radical rise in gasoline costs; and that got me thinking that maybe others might be interested in why, since I've actually given this quite a bit of thought over the past few years.

What it comes down to is that I believe that the personal automobile, at least here in North America, is not going to disappear, no matter how high the price of gasoline goes.

read on for why I think this way...

Several of my daily reading sources have pointed out new attacks on popular consumer firewall/router hardware including those of Linksys and D-link although not limited in any way to these ones.

The malware changes the DNS hosts to ones the bad-uglies control - and so instead of going where you think you are going when you browse the Internet, you go instead where the crooks want you to go with no obvious way of knowing you are in the wrong place.

The attack works because the malware tries to (and is successful) hack the router's web interface from one of the "protected" computers inside your Local Area Network (LAN). How the malware (DNSChanger Trojan) gets onto the inside computer is not specifically stated, probably because there are several ways currently being used:
1 - infected legitimate web sites that a user visits
2 - lots of e-mail methods including "phishing" and "social engineering" to get people to visit an infected site or download the malware directly.
3 - trying to view a video the system (itself compromised) tells you that you need a new video CODEC - and the codec is instead the trojan

I was setting up one of my servers to be a workstation for my wife, and had to bring in some video drivers. The latest version of the drivers referenced a new kernel, and of course I have not been updating the kernel because on this machine I also run VMWare's free server instance. VMWare requires that their software be linked against the latest kernel development kit so updating the kernel all the time requires re-linking the software, so I use the "exclude=kernel-*" line in /etc/yum.conf to not automatically update the kernel each time I do other updates.

So I updated the kernel - version 2.6.25.4-10.fc8-i686 - and rebooted.

Then I went to re-link the VMWare software and it wouldn't link :(

I use the "vmware-any-any" patches - version 116 being the latest from http://www.miscreant.org/files/rpms/ - but in this case the compile failed and nothing I did would bring it back to working status.

So I put the incantation "vmware-any-any 2.6.25.4-10.fc8-i686" into Google and came up with a single hit - a French language blog entry at forums.fedora-fr.org which Google kindly offered to translate for me

It turns out I would have saved myself a whole mess of trouble if I'd kept up with the updates from VMWare - seems their latest version, 1.0.6, no longer needs the patches. Thank you REMI

I downloaded the Linux server file from www.vmware.com and the install went without a hitch.

I was speaking to a friend of mine earlier this week and the conversation turned to motorcycles and the Can-Am Spyder he has placed a deposit for. He's waiting for the release of the semi-automatic version as he has problems with his legs and can't use a typical motorcycle shifter. He's looked at all manner of trikes and actually owned one that was being rebuilt for him - by someone with less than noble intentions it turned out, but that's another story.

This story is about how I came to try out the Can-Am Spyder for him and my impressions of it.

I read a bulletin from the Internet Storm Center http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=4465 a couple of days ago about the fact that there are active exploits (nasty advertising links and videos) already on the net for a vulnerability that has just surfaced with all current and previous versions of Adobe's flash player.

It turns out this is an old attack and that the affected player versions are still being used by many people. You should check your IE and Firefox (and other) browsers separately for the version of the Adobe flash player they use. This can be done by browsing to this address: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507

In my case my Firefox on Linux is 9.0.124.0 - which is the correct/latest one - my Windoze box is down for the count after a power burp a couple of days ago - but I'll check it as soon as I have it back up. It's a good thing I don't rely on Windows eh???

I'm a little late getting to comment on this subject, but I was just spurred by an automated phone call from a local car dealership to look up the regulations on unsolicited telephone calls.

The subject has been buzzing about in my mind for several years but there never seemed to be time to do the research when I got the calls - usually around dinner time, and usually from a business that almost certainly was from the US and therefore far more difficult to deal with.

Today I'm working on various web sites and projects at my computer, so getting the call meant I was in position to do the research immediately. Google: "canada unsolicited automated telephone regulations" got me the top item about Telemarketing from Industry Canada which was modified in February this year.

Automatic Dialing, Do Not Call, Telephone spam - lots of good info here

I was talking to a friend and fellow work-at-home computer consultant, Tom, who lives quite a way outside of town - so far that he uses a wood stove for heat in Winter and until recently was reliant on a satellite internet feed for his software business.

While diagnosing a problem with his connection to my e-mail service, we got to talking about computer hardware in general, and he commented that his newest machine put out a lot of heat (dual Xeon); to which I quipped that this meant he didn't have to stoke his wood-stove quite so much in the Winter. This lead to my observation that since my run in with our local electrical inspectors over whether or not I had a grow-op here in the house (I use a lot more electricity to power the computers here than the typical family home) my tax adviser and friend David Ingram says I should be deducting 2/3 of my electricity bill instead of the square-footage pro-rated amount I've been deducting (about 20%), and that had relevance to Tom too.

One thing lead to another, and we got to thinking that, since Tom's cabin also has electric heat, that there might be an opportunity here to increase the amount of deduction by making computers do ALL the electric heating when necessary.

Hmmm... if you had as many old computers around your place as I do, you could simply plug them into a mechanical thermostat that caused them to boot up when you needed heat, "yeah - and if they came up on the net you could donate the CPU cycles to Folding@home or SETI@home, or if you really wanted to make sure the power was tax deductible, sell them to one of the new businesses looking for cycles such as CPUSHARE."

So here's our thinking - for all of those homes (and businesses too) out there that are electrically heated, we can kill 2 birds with one stone so to speak. First, we can make some use of the electrical power before it ends up as heat by powering CPUs doing as much work as possible. Remember that it does not matter what provides the resistance to the electricity that makes heat, whether it be a bit of niobium wire in a stove, tungsten in a light bulb, nichrome in a heater, or silicon in a CPU chip - the same amount of heat comes out eventually for the amount of power that goes in. 200 Watts is 200 Watts (typical max power for an older computer) and 10 of them is the same as 2000 Watts of electrical heater.

And the second "bird" is a use for all those old computers sitting around out there - instead of breaking them up or putting them into land fills, we can get some more use out of them as heaters and get the CPU cycles too - all in the name of a good cause.