Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Category: Computer Tech

  • Open Source in 2009

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    Robby Pedrica
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    2009 has been a very big year for FOSS with a number of high-profile occurrences and products being released this year. Let’s  take a short look at some of these: the release of Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 as well as Red Hat’s KVM-orientated RHEL 5.4 the submission of code twice by Microsoft into the open source…

  • Australia and the net filter

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The Australian government have gone public with their China-style Internet filter which includes the following measures: mandatory ISP-level filtering of Refused-Classification-rated content a grants program to encourage introduction of optional filtering by ISPs, to block additional content requested by households an expansion of an existing cyber-security program run by the government to improve education and…

  • The OOXML gravy train continues

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    Robby Pedrica
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    It seems that the Microsoft-dominated SC34/WG4 committee responsible for maintaining the ISO/IEC 29500 standard ( Microsoft’s submitted document format standard ) is now making changes outside the scope of the  mandated rules, in a possible attempt at bringing the standard more in line with MS Office 2007. There is a clear delineation in the rules…

  • Intel’s SSD updates and firmware issues

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    It seems that Intel just can’t get it right when it comes to SSD firmware updates. First they introduced a subsector remap algorithm on the G1 which increased performance but this was shown to cause fragmentation and performance loss over time. This was fixed with a firmware update but a new G2 appeared with more…

  • Virtualisation part 2: Storage

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The first part of the series focussed on the OS layer of virtualisation. This second part will focus on storage in relation to server virtualisation. Storage on its own, is a minefield of standards, specifications, technologies, protocols and incompatibilities. Add to this the concept of virtualisation and you’re looking at an area that’s difficult to…

  • Backups? We don’t need no stinking backups!

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Here are 2 stories ( just in this week ) of tragic data loss or nearly … My wife’s aunt phoned last night and indicated her daughter’s MacBook had been stolen while at a client. Simple: call the insurance, claim for a new laptop and restore your data. Not so fast. No backups … Considering…

  • Local insurance company loses client data

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    Robby Pedrica
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    So it’s not just the Americans who are poor at client data security – the South Africans have got into the act as well. Local insurance firm Zurich SA said it had lost a tape containing client information. Apparently the backup tape was lost during a routing tape transfer to a data storage centre in…

  • Data loss for Sidekick users Part 3

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    Internetnews.com mentioned on the 16th October that the bulk of the data had been recovered: “Microsoft today reports it recovered the majority of lost customer data for Sidekick owners amid a flurry of lawsuits filed yesterday over the recent server failure caused a service outage and data loss.” This is not quite the truth: no…

  • SCO’s Darl McBride terminated

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Finally it seems that they’ve had enough of poor old Darl at SCO. Took them long enough but they’ve filed some paperwork with the SEC in the USA indicating as much.

  • Microsoft hijacks Firefox Part 2

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    Robby Pedrica
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    So there was a call for Mozilla to blacklist the MS plugins. And that is exactly what they have done! The Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation were added, for reasons of their vulnerability to remote code execution. All versions for all applications have been blocked. Apparently the Framework Assistant has now been…

  • Microsoft hijacks Firefox

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Microsoft was quite upset with Google recently with the latter’s attempt to install a plugin ( Google Frame ) for IE; it seems though that it’s fine for Microsoft to install a plugin for Firefox – and it’s come back to haunt them with a security hole in the plugin that they silently installed! Earlier…

  • Data loss for Sidekick users Part 2

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    Robby Pedrica
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    So yesterday Microsoft/Danger indicated that they had managed to get back most of the users’ data that was ‘lost’ as part of a problem with their core database earlier this week. Unfortunately not many of their customers are amused and have started a host of legal challenges regarding the system failure. Most of this revolves…

  • Apple and data leakage?

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Wow, looks like it’s getting to be a very bad week for data security. First Microsoft and Co. lose ALL of your Sidekick data, then Apple has a pretty serious bug in terms of their OS and the possibility of data loss. Now from Apple’s MobileME service, there comes a  report of data leakage –…

  • Data loss for Sidekick users

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    Robby Pedrica
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    It appears that Sidekick users in the USA, who stored their data/backups on-line though the Microsoft/Danger on-line cloud service, have lost access to all their data after a server failure: “Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device—such as contacts, calendar…

  • Possible data loss in Mac OS X 10.6

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Based on the amount of Apple forum postings on this issue, it seems to be very serious: there is the possibility of data loss if you have a guest account enabled prior to installing/upgrading Snow Leopard. It is speculated that the actual bug is that after logging in to the Leopard-created guest account while running…