Not much to say here. Just DO IT! http://www.khanacademy.org/ is a wonderful site. If you have a passion for learning or re-learning you will want to bookmark the site. I reconfirmed my ability to add and subtract 
I am going to do every math lesson until I top out (maybe at division).
Free learning – if you have kids – create accounts now. This will help every kid and you’ll be sorry if you don’t also sign up like I have and sharpen you skills.
I love to listen to these guys chat, Leo and Steve. Recently I needed to get a friend up to speed on secure key exchange. Not the simplest topic on the roster. Just how do we share a secret over the Internet. While we know others are watching and intercepting our communications. We do it with math. Math , when used like this, forces you to want to learn even more math. Really, math is fun and you will be smart if you learn math.
The first 15 minutes of this podcast prove to me that the more math you can take in the better off you will be in life.
http://media.grc.com/sn/SN-034.mp3 100% relevant regardless of when it was recorded.
Visa and others. The first time the page came up “verified by Visa” you said cool this is a very good thing Visa is making the web safer. If you thought that you can now go to the back of the class. You should have been thinking what sort of phishing scam is this? Where is the URL bar for this pop up and why would I sign up for this service from this little dialog on some site? Does Visa even have a web site? Does my bank know about this?
Now for those of you at the back of the class the zbot botnet has been augmented to shoot phish in a barrel. You are the phish unfortunately. Thank you Visa for the swimming lessons (NOT).
Click to read more news on the zbot botnet and how it is mimicking the Verified by screens.
http://www.sans.org/newsletters/newsbites/newsbites.php?vol=12&issue=56#sID301
Seems when Rogers did the magic auto renew stuff with apple iTunes or however it is glued together, it all fell apart. I give my experience of auto renew an epic FAIL. July 1st long weekend started Thursday and my iPad 3G stopped working the day before. I am going on a 4 day weekend with 8 geeks that do not yet have iPads. Who each influence 10 to 100+ geeks. They all still don’t have iPads (and none will likely have Rogers 3G iPads). Of all things I am posting this from a computer with a keyboard – how painfully near real time / out of touch is that! I could not bring myself to “show it off” when it had no network access. It was camping in the woods – wifi was distant. 3G would have worked (iPhone had no issues). Several *611 calls have enabled me to talk to many friendly people – none of which have resolved the fact that I have no 3G wireless access via my iPad yet. I seem to have paid for 3G access. Just have not seen any on my iPad yet. It is July 5th today FYI, Rogers.
Rogers – where is the front page link to the solution I need? This did not affect anyone else?
Rogers – where is the email with the link to the fix I need? I have made phone calls…
Rogers where is the phone call and or voice mail telling me what to click to fix this? ou said someone would get back to me.
Apple where is my Bell or Telus SIM (Telus plan looks like it suxs, I’ll take Bell please). Consider sending one out to all iPad owners proactively and thus encourage a competitive mobile data market in Canada.
Rogers please refund me all the missed days – still missing… and credit me a good chunk if I am going to stick around.
Bell, I am probably asking Rogers to get out of my iPad and I’d like to invite you in. Call me.
UPDATE: July 8th – no 3G data yet. Was given a ticket number for the affected users. I assumed they’d put me on a list of iPads to fix when I called them on June 30th… but calling again on July 6th(?) got me on the list (again?). They are keeping a list – are you on the list?
UPDATE: July 12th – no 3G data yet. The main ticket number provided to me was PT00016046 if anyone has any ideas on how to move this along – that’d be nice.
UPDATE: July 17th – OK I woke up today and 3G is now working on my iPad. How’d that magic happen? Not sure. A re-boot helped it sync time properly (was a few minutes off). Now – I have 13 days remaining on my 30 days with zero ability to use data for those days gone by – there has to be something that will just magically fix that too? Ready and waiting for the clock to be reset. It is not my idea of fun to hang out on a support line. Nor is it my idea of fun to be called and told to call support (and maybe later in the day to avoid the wait time). As much as I use rogers (three accounts) I am not wishing this experience on others. Currently the display on the “cellular data” link says it expires on 07/30/10. I hope this date moves – I dread calling yet again, but perhaps I may, just to voice the concept that our agreement has not been met (me data, you money).
Clearly with a few clicks I should be able to make your rain drop OS load and run concurrently on my machine. A rain drop OS is of course one little tiny part of a cloud. Minuscule in fact. Google you are the one that will enable us to monetize that idle CPU, I know you are. It is not difficult to imagine, is it? A little memory, a little cpu, some drive space and network. There must be a process out there that needs running – now! Keep the new data center costs flat – and absorb the spikes – right on my machine. Scaled to a billion instantly grow to a gazillion – faster.
Now with an open hypervisor in Chrome OS, clearly others should be able to take a run at super scale – I mean there are still aliens out there to be found, genomes to be processed. Won’t this all just be fun!
Just saying – RSR – Reality Show Rage is back. They are about to vote off the last American Idol. This will be fun. At least RSR is not yet a crime. However it is a growing problem we should all take a little more seriously than we do. This post may imply RSR is somewhat of a joke. It is not. There should be a Wikipedia page on it by now, but we all just ignore it, pretend it does not exist. How many items will be thrown across the room tonight by those engrossed in a trivial staged and persistent “reality show”. Millions of potentially intelligent, yet brain washed TV viewers (who also watch Nancy Grace, OMG) are about to explode tonight with the final RSR fireworks.
Support RSR research – vote with your money and buy the shirt – when you have it on NEXT TIME – your vote will count and your Idol will WIN !
(Idol can be replaced with survivor, handyman, biggest loser, amazing racer)
Everyone wants to have a cloud “solution” and I respect that. Few define what a cloud is but that’s not really the point. For this post I’ll assume Google or Amazon like clouds that provide raw compute or storage.
He he.. So you have a huge bot net, and you are having a tough time selling denial and destroy functionality. The whole extortion racket is a little hard to maintain? This is the post for you!
Why not convert the amazing power and storage capabilities under your control to sell “legitimate” cloud computing solutions. I mean do we REALLY know those other players have actual databases and physical machines for their clouds? Maybe they just have enough code running on enough people’s machines to provide a service people will pay for. You could rent some big buildings, make them “secret”, use huge amounts of power to heat pools and play indoor whatever games, write it all off as expense, and have people pay you to use other people’s computers as part of your cloud service offering.
In today’s tough times with the FBI and other agencies getting wise to all your prior antics – isn’t it time to step it up a notch?
Heck, your bots can be distributed as legitimate software that allow people to take part in providing cloud resources. You may even pay people to join their computers to your cloud system. Half a million PCs or so and you can resell almost all of that capacity as if it were your own. How cool will that be! Why not 10 million machines!
In fact – you’d be so big and so popular that you could be called something entirely new. Those little puffy clouds would look silly far up in the sky, disconnected from everything, raining here and there but not everywhere. Nothing on Earth could describe the power. We’d have to call it “Black Hole” computing.
Join the darknet
I am a big fan of Cisco coming down to earth where we can all interact with the technology they produce. One very powerful tool they have bought and extended is WebEx. There are not too many in the remote desktop space with the breadth of WebEx.
I see that one of the new iPad applications is a WebEx client. That’s a perfect personal format to watch a presentation. On the iPhone the technology was only cool – as the screen was honestly too small.
iPad will rock this application.
McYork is inspired every time we come across one of these “fit to form” applications.
v1.8 has been out for a while – we are pleased to say that there have been no complaints. If you have some issues you have been holding back on please email us and we will look into them (support@mcyork.com).
For a week there in February we let the app price fall to free. This was to help out those international guests attending the Vancouver 2010 Olympic games in Canada’s west. We are happy to have helped out (and the McYork Dot Com staff volunteered for various events at the Olympic Games).
