Category: Security
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Security is easy again
The toughest part of staying secure with your software programs is to know when to go and fetch a new patch/update that is critical to the security of your computer. Secunia brings the solution with Personal Software Inspector (PSI), a software application that checks the updates for the software programs that interest you.
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Live Rock n’Roll and die young
Rock stars do not have a quiet life. But they often have violent or surprising deaths. When you’re a star, you need to stay one even in the process of dying. The 50 Most Awesomely Dead Rock Stars. But as if this was not completely obvious, there is an English scientist (he’s from Liverpool John…
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Vertigo on the top floor
As if climbing up was not enough to create vertigo in some sky-scrappers, here comes an Italian architect, David Fischer, proposing to have a tower whose floors would rotate independently in a 68-floor tower. This is in Dubai. This is not decided yet. But the local lack of architectural restraint make it very believable. Thanks…
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How to visit freely some paying web sites
This is really not complicated, many web sites (even subscription-based) want to be indexed by Google. To this end, they recognize the Google spider and give it priviliged access rights. Why not try to disguise yourself as the most well known search engine of the world? Simple: Modify your browser identification string? Simple, but not…
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Microsoft WGA servers are down
Those servers are central to validate the “Microsoft Genuine Advantage” service. In plain words, they provide the verification that you are really a registered user authorized by Microsoft. But these servers are currently down (some kind of network failure?) and Microsoft forecast about two days before going back to a normal situation. This simply means…
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Is your password safe?
This has been the big question of security for many years. You are told repetitively that this is critical. Over the injunction not to trust anybody with your valuable passowrd(s) and not to write it down, it is interesting to know what would happen if a hacker tried to crack your password with minimal knowledge…
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FileHamster: Better than backup
It’s often (but not often enough) repeated: data backup is a critical element of the security of your data. Too often, we frget about it because of a lack of tools easy enough to support it without significant user involvement. Here comes the main advantage of the excellent freeware tool for Windows: FileHamster from Mogware.…
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Chernobyl, 20 years later
Chernobyl, the nuclear accident that frightened the world on April 26, 1986. Chernobyl, the heart of a forbidden zone under guard by armed forces from Ukraine and Belarus, of an abandonned zone nearly void of human life. A photographer went there in 2006. He brought back a journalistic tale and triking images: “My trip to…
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Fight SPAM and scan books
It is well known that the human brain has pattern matching capabilities much further advanced than those of the best equivalent software programs. This explains that failure rates of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program may be as high as 1% (or even 2%) of errors, which is requiring later human proof-reading to ensure a reasonable…