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
- To prevent that, you’re presented with text distorted by noise, lines, and more
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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