Saturday, April 28, 2012


It is never enough to simply implement a security procedure. You actually have to follow Best Practices exactly and then test it every way you can...
"A new project that was setup to monitor the quality and strength of the SSL implementations on top sites across the Internet found that 75 percent of them are vulnerable to the BEAST SSL attack and that just 10 percent of the sites surveyed should be considered secure. The SSL Pulse project, set up by the Trustworthy Internet Movement, looks at several components of each site's SSL implementation to determine how secure the site actually is. The project looks at how each site is configured, which versions of the TLS and SSL protocols the site supports, whether the site is vulnerable to the BEAST or insecure renegotiation attacks and other factors. The data that the SSL Pulse project has gathered thus far shows that the vast majority of the 200,000 sites the project is surveying need some serious help in fixing their SSL implementations."


In Texas it's, “One revenuer, one revolution.”
"The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Amazon.com will soon start collecting sales tax from buyers in state of Texas. 'Seattle-based Amazon, which had $34 billion in sales in 2010, has long opposed collecting taxes. That has drawn fire from state governments facing budget shortfalls and from traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, who say online sellers essentially give customers an automatic discount when they don’t collect taxes. Combs has estimated the state loses $600 million a year from untaxed online sales. However, Amazon has recently begun making deals with a number of states to collect sales tax. Those deals have usually included a one- to three-year window exempting Amazon from sales tax collection.'"


A new legal niche? “If you can't be civil, we'll fit you for a civil suit?”
Teen Sues Over Facebook Bullying
A teenager in Georgia has decided to take things into her own hands after her school and police said they could do nothing about the classmates bullying her on Facebook.


Oh look, a symptom! Now, how to we cure the disease?
When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End?
It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.
Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.”
Stephenson was clearly trying to be provocative. But he’s not alone in the judgment that we’re not actually living in an era of great innovation. Economist Tyler Cowen’s e-book-turned-book, The Great Stagnation, made similar points: Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century wrought by electricity, cars, and electronic communication, the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.
… The most common response to such griping has been, just wait. Many techno-optimists base their thinking on a famous 1990 paper by economic historian Paul David, which described how, for decades, electricity had little effect on industrial productivity as manufacturers simply swapped out older energy sources for electric power but changed nothing about how they made things. It was only as new factories were built that took advantage of the unique properties of electric motors that a productivity boom ensued. Just give the digital age a bit more time, and you’ll see huge changes (and, one hopes, improvements) in how we work and live.
[A correct link to Paul David's paper:


After using Open Office for more than 10 years, perhaps it's time to move?
"If you are looking for small niche features such as interactive word count, bundled report designer, or command line filtering etc – LibreOffice beats OpenOffice hands down. 'Noting the important dates of June 1, 2011, which was when Oracle donated OOo to Apache; and Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is due probably sometime in May 2012; Meeks compared Apache OpenOffice 3.4 new features to popular new features from LibreOffice: 3.3, 3.4, 3.5. It wasn't surprising to find that LibreOffice has merged many features not found in Apache OO given their nearly year long head start.'"


This could be very useful as I try to teach my students my SOP PDQ. (LOL)
When you are browsing websites, you will come across countless abbreviations. These abbreviations can be anything, ranging from Internet slang to something specific to the website you are visiting. What you need is a tool which you can use to quickly reference abbreviations and their possible meanings without having to leave the webpage you are currently on. Here to offer you that is a service called ABBREX.
ABBREX is a free to use browser tool. It comes as an add-on for Mozilla Firefox and an extension for Google Chrome. The purpose of ABBREX is to reveal all the possible meanings of abbreviations you find on websites. Although you could easily execute a web search to find out what an abbreviation stands for, ABBREX lets you learn the abbreviation’s meaning without having to leave the webpage.
With the add-on or extension installed in your web browser, all you have to do is place your mouse pointer over an abbreviation and its meaning is shown in a floating window. Multiple meanings are shown and these are all contributed by ABBREX users.


How geeks become experts before 'normal' people even hear of the software.
OnlineBeta is a website that allows users to participate in beta tests of unreleased products. Users get a chance to review products from well-known companies such as Logitech, Dell, T-Mobile, Polycom, Kodak, Yahoo and many more. The products range from household items to video games to enterprise class hardware . The website sends only offers that might catch the interest of the users.
To use the service, you must sign up for a free account, and you will be sent offers over the period according to the information you have provided along with the beta product details.
Similar tools: BetaBait and InviteShare.

1 comment:

Alex ken said...

Proponents of flat tax also say that the tax system is fair, compared to other tax systems.

Issacureshi London tax specialist