Phasor Burn

Linus Torvalds has created a patch to allow a cross platform virus to function correctly on modern Linux kernels.

Not only that, but the anti-viral industry aka hype-wagon has been flying this virus from the flagpoles and shouting from the rooftops that people should be buying their antivirus products to run on Linux.

Leave it to open source hackers to debug and fix aging viral code so that it works correctly. And shame on the anti-viral industry, Kaspersky Lab in particular, for its attempts to deceive the public by passing off old code as something new.

Now there are good reasons why you might want to run an AV product on Linux, but for the most part it is to protect windows systems that may be using the Linux system as a file server.

I suppose the handful of virii that work on Linux need to be looked out for also, but come on… we just need a distibution to come along that chroot/jails all services aggressively and makes it easy to add/change/delete/manage those chroot/jail/whatever. That includes a way to have a Linux user’s browser run under it’s own protected chroot/chail/whatever thing without making it too hard to actually use.

Hmm.

vmware player browser appliance seems to meet the safe-browser-environment requirement . . .

Symantec hit with $1 billion tax bill Guess I shouldn’t have bought into their stock via my RRSP when the Veritas deal was going thru. It went underwater immediately and hasn’t surfaced again. Maybe never will, now. Crap. Oh well, it wasn’t very much anyways . . .

Symantec, where good software goes to die. — They made a bloated useless mess of Norton. Now watch what they do with Veritas File System, Volume Manager, Cluster Server, etc.

What was I thinking, throwing money at their stock? Bad bad bad bad. Never do that again. Ever. Maybe.

SHAW internet went splat this afternoon.

So what else is new?

Would anybody of sane mind really trust SHAW with “digital phone service” (voip) when things like today happens… all of downtown, beltline, Marlborough, Whitehorn, Huntington Hills in Calgary was offline for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon. Plus High River and the south side of Lethbridge.

Exactly two hours, actually. 1422 - 1622, according to our Nagios installation.

Great freaking morons running Shaw, I tell ya… This smells of some really bad software push or maybe dhcp leases or something similar gone haywire.

Guess we’ll be talking to Telus for an ADSL at the office to act as a backup connection. Or maybe we’ll stop monkeying around with “business” connections that are no more than home adsl/cable connections with a different number to call when things go wrong.

Time for a managed connection with real $$ penalties when it’s broken. Of course those managed connections also cost real $$. Think about it though. How much $$ did a few hours of downtime cost us in people not being able to help customers etc?

Putting data in your rdbms and not your code seems like such a basic and obvious thing to do . . . but do have a look at the article. I think we’re all guilty of this.

Then again, not everybody knows how to do joins properly either. Or too many take the “short cut” of pulling all the data into the program, manipulating it, then displaying. When a big chunk of that could have been done with proper sql, in the db, using the power of the db … and not having 16 TB of results pulled into main memory to be manipulated further.

Hey, does this mean awk isn’t always the best tool for manipulating and massaging data? Certainly not for reducing a huge sql based dataset down to some summary data perhaps.

I’ve seen this high-tech way to defrost mentioned in the past. Maybe a year or more ago. I wonder why it’s still a “news item” and hasn’t made it into high end cars yet? Or more importantly, airplane de-icing?

Video of prototype in action..