Chad's News

It’s now possible to install a bootable version of Windows XP on a USB drive. Regular readers will recall how much I emphasize physical security, but this makes it even easier to compromise a system with just physical access to the computer. On the plus side, it does make it easier to quickly retrieve information from a damaged Windows installation. I had this occur once with Windows NT, and it took me a day of work to install a second bootable copy so I could access my data.

http://tomshardware.co.uk/…
(via digg)

Newt Gingrich has made the news recently by stating the we are currently in the early stages of World War III. The linked article discusses this idea in depth.

http://www.macleans.ca/…
(via digg)

A company named Freescale has gone into mass production with magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM). Its speed is much faster than Flash, but about an order of magnitude slower than current DRAM. If they can get the capacity increased (currently about 512KB), look for this to replace Flash memory. And if they can get the capacity and speed issues resolved, look for it to replace DRAM.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

This Israeli F-15 pilot was in a mid-air collision that tore off his plane’s right wing. Yet he managed to recover from the crash and safely land.

http://www.youtube.com/…
(via digg)

Given that Microsoft is coming out with version 7 of Internet Explorer, what would you expect to find at www.ie7.com? Think again…

http://www.ie7.com/

I had a friend, back in the pre-email days, who actually got a letter in the mail proposing a 419 scam. It’s amazing how well it works, even after all this time. And it hooks people who should know better.

http://arstechnica.com/…

I’ve discussed rootkits before, but apparently they are getting much more sophisticated and difficult to detect. The best defense against this kind of attack, of course, is to be careful what you run, open, and view. And keeping Windows updated. And using a firewall. Almost makes me want to build a Linux box.

http://arstechnica.com/…

If you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, you may have heard about net neutrality. As it was first explained to me, telecom companies didn’t think it was fair that bandwidth-hogging, content-providing web sites (think Google) didn’t have to pay for their traffic that travels over the telco infrastructure. So I pay Qwest, for example, to access Google. Google serves up the content through their connection to the internet, whatever that is, and the data travels through the internet, eventually arriving at Qwest’s network and then my PC. This is net neutrality. Some of the more vocal telecom companies, however, want to also charge Google for sending the content over their network. In essence, double-charging and wringing every bit of money possible out of their network infrastructure. It’s no wonder, then, that companies such as Google and Amazon are firmly opposed to this and have been pressuring Congress to pass a net neutrality bill that outlaws it.

Since this original explanation, however, net neutrality has undergone a transformation. Without a net neutrality law in place, the internet would become a two-tier network, where content providers have to pay for preferential treatment. Thus Google, paying for this privilege, would find its content served up in much the same way it is today. While Chad’s News, which cannot afford such extravagant services, would be relegated to a “slower” internet. The best explanation of this is in the linked video of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. From the video, “The point is that with net neutrality all internet packets – whether they come from a big company or a single citizen – are treated in the exact same way.” (Note that there is some off-color humor in the clip, and the real meat of the issue starts about halfway through.)

So the push is on in Congress. The current efforts to get net neutrality passed as law have failed, but we can expect to see it come up again later this year.

http://www.youtube.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

This article critiques welfare reform, which was signed into law nearly 10 years ago. The conclusion is that it’s working better than expected but not as well as it could be.

http://www.usatoday.com/…
(via digg)

Working at a computer store, I know that we sell many, many more LCD monitors than CRTs. For certain applications, however, the CRT is a better option. The linked article goes into the relative merits of each.

http://www.bestbuy.com/…

The US government has created a comprehensive, online repository of all federal forms. Appropriately enough, they’re located at forms.gov.

http://www.forms.gov/
(via lifehacker)

I’m trying to minimize the number of “Wow! Check out this neat video!” posts and focus more on science & tech news, but the tricks done by this pool shark are too good. Some of them just don’t seem possible.

http://www.youtube.com/…
via (digg)