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Saturday 28 July 2007

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Tech News

Hackers have been able to hack into three major electronic voting systems in California. In the light of this, House leaders have introduced a bill to revamp electronic voting systems to include a paper receipt of sorts.

Yesterday was SysAdminDay!

There was a huge power outage in San Francisco this week that took out several huge sites.

Guests

Q Steve Gibson - Captchas

• To be able to tell humans from machines
• There are spam bots that go on the Internet to set up free accounts
  • To prevent that, you’re presented with text distorted by noise, lines, and more
    • Easy for humans to interpret, but not machines
• Though humans, such as Steve and Leo, even have a tough time somewhat
• Computers are being trained to read certain captchas
• You can get Leo’s address by typing in 2 words in a captcha
• ReCaptcha is a project to put pre-computer era book text into captchas
  • Words typed are contributed to database to help digitize old books
• Catch up on captchas on Security Now 101

Q Dick DeBartolo - HP Photosmart R937

• Huge 3.6-inch touch screen display
• 32mb built-in memory
• Built-in panorama feature
• Auto-slimming feature
• Adaptive lighting

Q Rick Alber - Truemors

• Looking for rumors on the Internet
• Implements Digg-style voting system
  • Simple by clicking on the post
• Things that you read there not necessarily true
• Posts are heavily moderated

Hour 1

Q Todd from Warren, PA - Setting up PCs for an organization

• Wants to use Linux
• Could go to Dell with Ubuntu
  • Having identical machines is helpful
• Or buy parts in bulk and build PCs
• Going to be spending more time than money

Q Debbie from Simi Valley, CA - Reformatting a partition/Scanner

• Be very careful about blowing out another partition
• Sounds like you need to tell files to go to the C: drive
  • Make sure you have more than just a few GB
• SpaceMonger is a tool to keep track of free space on your PC
  • Very powerful tool that will break it down by folders and files
• 80gb hard drives will usually give you 73gb, and then Sony probably partitioned that
• TweakUI will allow you to change where your Program Files folder is
• Change browser settings to put download folder in drive with more space
• Take a look at the Epson Perfection series which has scanners in every price imaginable

Hour 2

Q Carl - IP webcam

• Axis and D-Link are very good
• The Axis will come with an application to set up a dynamic DNS
• There are other services such as DynDNS

Q Fred - Sharing data from very old laptop to iMac

• Can plug it into router via ethernet
• iMac will see PC

Q Voting machines

• Asks why can’t the machines simply have a disk the voter gives to the front desk
• If hacker has physical access to machines, they will figure out how to infiltrate the machine

Q Sean - G4 vs. TechTV/Windows emulation in Linux

• G4 is most definitely not geared towards technology
• They are aiming to become the next SpikeTV
• The Internet is where this tech content is going
• Everyone’s doing better than ever
• Wants to know if there is anything besides WineHQ
• There is Crossover Office
  • Doesn’t support every application
• VMWare is a good solution

Hour 3

Q Jerry from Big Bear Lake, CA - Getting the same audio out of 4 sound cards

• Use different applications to output via different sound cards
• The Sonos system will allow you to get audio all around your house
  • Expensive though
• Can also use VLC to run multiple instances
  • Each instance can point to different stream and different sound card

Q Mike - Hard drive dead

• The drive began to smoke
• Only way to recover the data would be to send to a service with a full clean room

Q Keith - Using iPod video on DVD/Backing up Firefox

• Wants to use videos made for the iPod Video on a DVD
• Simply download the highest quality file and convert it into the DVD format
  • MPEG-2, 640×480
• Need to use DVD authoring software
• Read this article regarding keeping Firefox backed up

Q Victor from Pasadena, CA - Need code to be able to install software on Nokia

• Wants to install Gmail application
• T-Mobile has disabled the ability to install applications on the phone

Q Bob - Smartphone with large screen

• HTC has a model that Sprint sells as the 6800
  • The HTC Mogul