Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
Posted on January 28, 2011 - by Venik
FBI Rushes to VISA’s Defense
The FBI has announced that it executed 40 search warrants for suspected members of the Anonymous international hacktivist group known for its actions in of Wikileaks. Police in the UK has arrested five suspected members of the group. Anonymous is credited with the successful attacks against VISA and MasterCard payment systems late last year after [...]
Posted on December 9, 2010 - by Venik
Network attacks against PayPal are effective
PayPal is backpedaling and there is good reason for that. While PayPal’s financial services remained accessible throughout the day, their performance was well below average. Prolonged, intermittent degradation of service can lead to the same loss of revenue as a complete but relatively brief outage. An intermittent degradation of service is also easier to achieve and harder to troubleshoot than a full outage. While PayPal’s PR representative was not lying when he said that attacks failed to crash PayPal’s services, they did degrade them significantly and it is just as bad, or worse.
Posted on October 27, 2010 - by Venik
Breaking WikiLeaks
It is a familiar feeling: you work on a major project, build something from the ground up, stick your neck way out to keep things running smoothly and suddenly all kinds of coauthors and collaborators come out of the woodwork to take credit for the job well done. True, I did not work alone. I [...]
Posted on July 16, 2010 - by Venik
Secret Cell
Sorry to disappoint you: this post is not about some new secret CIA jail discovered in a budding Eastern European democracy. What’s on my mind is all the ridiculous secrecy surrounding the development of the iPhone 4 and Nokia N8 and how it hurts the sales of these devices. In case you haven’t heard, iPhone [...]
Posted on June 4, 2010 - by Venik
Microbrain(tm)
When a few years ago I bought my Xbox 360, I had to shell out almost five hundred bucks. One of the extras I got was the 60Gb hard drive. Even by those times, charging a hundred dollars for what essentially is a standard 2.5″ SATA hard drive with special firmware was highway robbery. And [...]
Posted on February 2, 2010 - by Venik
Novaya Gazeta and DDOS Attack
The Register, among others, reports that the Web site of one of Russia’s leading independent newspapers – the Novaya Gazeta – came under a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Currently the newspaper’s site is unstable. The reason I even noticed this news item is not because I am a big fan of Novaya Gazeta. It is [...]
Posted on January 21, 2010 - by Venik
Oracle vs. MySQL
Sun Microsystems – the creator of Solaris operating system and manufacturer of my favorite computers – is being acquired by Oracle – the maker of the world’s leading commercial database software that works best on Sun servers. This seems like a good deal for both Oracle and Sun. Unfortunately, this merger will be very bad [...]
Posted on June 13, 2009 - by Venik
Bluehost.com Web Hosting Problems
Bluehost.com is a large Web hosting provider based in Provo, Utah. It advertises “professional Web hosting” and claims to be “specializing in customer satisfaction”. Yesterday I learned neither of these claims is true. Originally, I selected Bluehost.com over my other top picks – Site5.com, Hostway.com, and my own old Sun E3000 server sitting in the [...]
Posted on April 21, 2009 - by Venik
Open-Sourcing JSF
The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese hackers broke into the Department of Defense computer systems and stole several terabytes of information related to the $300-billion Joint Strike Fighter project. Let’s imagine that three terabytes (this would be the minimum to qualify as “several”) of data were transferred over a 10-mbps connection. This is a [...]
Posted on April 12, 2009 - by Venik
Is Sprint Reading Your E-mail?
We all know that Google has a huge database of your online searching and browsing interests. We also know that every credit card company is tracking your spending habits more diligently than you do. We even know that your Windows operating system comes pre-configured with a clandestine application called the WGA Notification tool, designed to [...]
Posted on November 20, 2008 - by Venik
New Interface for Xbox 360
As of last night Microsoft went in and changed one of the best things about its Xbox 360 gaming console – its graphical user interface. Instead of a functional, neatly-organized folder view, now you get a childish design with avatar selection reminiscent of Sierra’s vintage Leisure Suit Larry characters. Microsoft succeeded in creating an interface [...]
Posted on August 17, 2008 - by Venik
Verizon FiOS is still too green. I am back with Comcast.
A quick update on my Verizon saga: I had to cancel my new Verizon Business FiOS and went back to my Comcast Business connection. There are just too many issues with Verizon’s service. The primary problems are Verizon’s impossible-to-reach customer service and its inept technical support, but there are also issues with quality of signal [...]
Posted on August 9, 2008 - by Venik
My Verizon FiOS Experience
The Motivation I had Comcast as my ISP since 1998, when their broadband service was still known as Network. I had a few complaints about Comcast’s Internet service, but it wasn’t anything major – perhaps a brief network outage now and then or an occasional slowdown. Still, for about a year now I’ve been [...]
Posted on February 3, 2008 - by Venik
RIAA Offers to Self-Incriminate
An interesting timeline of the RIAA crusade against its customers has been published by P2PNet. In the face of continuing decline in music sales, RIAA and its members persist with their worn-out business models. RIAA excretes thousands of lawsuits against college students and senior citizens, war veterans and single mothers, teenagers and their grandparents – [...]
