If you ever doubted that Bush was letting his quest for power take control of his position, here is your chance to rant. The internet, a long-sanctified refuge for people to do and act as they please under cover of pseudonym or nicknames has lost its shield of privacy. A new law signed by George W. Bush requires that anyone that "annoys" someone online must divulge his or her real name.. The problem is, different people get annoyed in different ways.

If I say I like Barney, one of the 100k members on a forum must get annoyed at that, it?s a statistical fact. If I say I hate Barney, another person (probably more) will also be annoyed that I said that.

If I even said ‘The sky is blue,’ a psychologically challenged person might feel offended that I overstated the obvious, and if I neglected to mention the color of the sky, someone might just take that the wrong way and I’ll find myself in jail.

Why?

According CNet:

"Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity. In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess. This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison."

I’m going to make my stance clear: I am not under any circumstances required to give my name out. I’m CG, maybe if I feel like it I’ll tell you my name, but you know what? Ban me, I’m saying what I please under the First Amendment on any forum or blog I choose. Do what you like, see if I care.

My good friend Kristan over at digitalfive is giving away Web2Messenger invites.. I personally would never use that, rather just post my IM address in my sig on forums and such, but that is just me..

Interested? Here is the link.

In under three days, Apple decides that it is the new Intel money-maker, and that it has come to do Intel a favor, instead of vie versa… Apple

Apple's television ads for its new Macs boast that for years, Intel's chips have been "trapped inside PCs–dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks." Now, the voiceover proclaims, the Intel processor will finally be set free. Of course, that's not exactly the way Intel would put it. "Never would we characterize our customers that way," Intel Vice President Deborah Conrad said in an interview. Conrad said that Intel cooperated with Apple for some particulars of the TV spot, but added, "We didn't know what the end result was going to be." The company did get a peek at the ad before Tuesday's keynote, but it wasn't too much earlier. "It's probably a good thing that we didn't see them earlier," Conrad said. That said, if Intel's work with Apple inspires some PC makers to think more creatively, Intel wouldn't complain. "We certainly hope that this innovation engine kind of picks up and that you do see the beige box makers going, 'You know, maybe we could do something that looks and feels like that.' That would be a good thing, I think, from our perspective."

CNet News Story

If you have Norton SystemWorks or Norton AntiVirus Professional 2005 or 2006, your “advanced” recycle bin protection uses RootKits to help Symantec manage your files!
OK, no biggy.. Symantec is using it to help you right?
But hackers and viruses and trojans can use it too!

Don’t they ever learn?! One would expect that Symantec would patch its own rootkit secretly before, with all the hype about Sony/BMG.. After all, that’s what they are doing now!

You can read Symantec’s “response” and “vulnerability report”? here.

While technically it is not a root kit in that it does not use a series of strings, etc. to hide a directory or files, it hacks the Windows subsystem to hide one particular directory (theirs).

Again, Symantec tried to beat the bad guys by using their technology, but they ‘got played.’

Go with NOD32 instead… Believe me, you’ll finally get a good nights sleep.

If you are interested in Windows Vista Beta 2 and its rumored release dates, here are some general educated surmises taking into account previous betas for different products, information from Microsoft on the Vista builds, and some general ‘extrapolation’ (i.e. guess-work :P) First some background: People are looking forward to Beta 2 because it is rumored to be a public beta, meaning that it will be available via CPP to almost anyone interested in checking it out. Beta software means that it is not for use in a production environment, it is not guaranteed to be stable, or even to run at all, but that is an extreme. At Microsoft beta builds are fairly stable, especially compared to IDW/IDX CTP builds (commonly referred to as I-Don’t-Work/Exercises builds) and normally shows quite a bit of indication as to the direction the final program is going along, since all that hard work is rarely for nothing.. The December CTP (build 5270) was an almost code-complete build. It was released on Dec. 16th, 2005. The next build to be released is the February CTP, and is the final build before Beta 2. It will be the first look at a code-complete Vista for us Tech Beta testers. Continue reading →

How much faster and more responsive Vista is with a better graphics card!

Even though my ‘brand new’ card is the lowest WDDM supporting chipset (Radeon 9550 256MB), it has four times more memory, and more processing power than I can count; compared to my loyal GeForece 4 MX440 64MB AGP 8x… Which has gone through the mill several times with me..

The GeForce broke quite a few overclocking records.. can’t find any official database, but google makes mine look quite good ;)

Let’s hope this ATi is up to overclocking scratch too..

In what appears to be a WordPress 2.0 bug my last post (JavaScript Alternatives) decided to “unpublish” itself sometime yesterday…

Continue reading →