October 5th, 2007

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:33 am

Yesterday was the last straw for me when it comes to the way spam is impacting my work. First, before purging the junk mail folder in my Outlook, I did a quick scan only to notice that almost every other e-mail that was classified as spam was actually a legitimate e-mail that should have flowed into my inbox. Why was it in my junk mail folder? I have no idea. That’s part of the problem. In many cases (not all), you can’t look at the e-mail, see what the offending issue was, and notify the sender of why their e-mails are getting classified as spam.

But that wasn’t all that happened yesterday. For the events company (Mass Events Labs) that Doug Gold and I co-own to produce Mashup Camp, Startup Camp, and other events, we use a masseventslabs.com-specific context of Google Apps for e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, etc. In other words, when Doug and I send e-mail to each other through the masseventslabs.com domain, both he and I are sending and receiving from and to a Google Apps-based version of Google’s GMail. Yet somehow (as you can see in the attached video), yesterday, when he replied from his Google Apps account to an important e-mail that I sent to him via my Google Apps account, GMail redirected his reply to my spam folder. How can this be? That’s the equivalent of users of the same, behind-the-firewall copy of Microsoft’s Exchange Server not being able to send e-mail to each other because it’s getting classified as spam. Surely, an e-mail server has some idea of when the source of e-mail is itself.

So, what’s the problem and whose to blame for “friendly fire” and other SNAFUs in the battle against spam? The problem is that the major e-mail technology providers won’t work together to come up with some standard approaches to stopping spam. And when I say major, I mean AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. If those four companies simply got together and said it’s time to fix the problem and here’s how we’re going to fix it, the rest of the world would have no choice but to follow. Don’t agree with me? Watch the video. From my interview the other day with Matt Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, I extracted the part where he unequivocally agreed that that’s all it would take.

Yet, here we are, more than five years after the major e-mail tech providers said that they’d find a way to curb the problem, and the situation buying cialis is markedly worse. Markedly. Compounding the problem is that there is some cooperation going on between pockets of vendors and Web sites here and there. But the end game there will be separate Internets. If Yahoo! and eBay get together as they’ve just done to address phishers going after users of eBay and PayPal and Google does something different with GMail to address phishers going after users of Google Checkout, pretty soon, you end up in a situation where you have to enter completely different multi-site contexts (walled Internet silos) to get anything done. That was not the idea behind the Internet.

So, are you outraged enough to join me in taking action? How can we (you and I) solve the problem. We have to put the pressure on AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. I’ve recorded a video Technology Shakedown (see above) and I’ve licensed it under a Creative Commons license that allows you to re-use it anywhere you want. It’s not easy to grab our videos from ZDNet (I’ll work on that). So, if you want a copy of the video to paste into your blog or Web site, feel free to grab the YouTube version. Maybe together, we can all send a clear message to these four technology providers that its time to stop dilly-dallying and to lead the Internet to a standard “stack” of anti-spam solutions that will have most spammers and phishers looking for a new line of work.

David Berlind has been Executive Editor at ZDNet since 1998 and has been a technology journalist since 1991. Although he can't respond to all e-mails, he reads them all. You can reach David at david.berlind AT cnet.com. If you don't want the content of your e-mail to turn up in a blog entry, make sure you say so. To the extent that most e-mail he receives looks to sway his opinion about something, he usually looks to pass those points of view onto ZDNet's audience members for their consideration . For disclosures on David's industry affiliations, click here.

Pasted from <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=817&tag=nl.e539>

by Greg Shultz | Jan 4, 2006

Takeaway: Did you know that unless you uninstall a device driver on a Windows XP machine that it still may be sucking up valuable system resources? Here are step-by-step instructions on how you can view and remove these unnecessary devices.

When you install a device driver on a Windows XP machine, the operating system loads that driver each time the computer boots regardless of whether the device is present—unless you specifically uninstall the driver. This means that drivers from devices that you have long since removed from your system may be wasting valuable system resources.

Follow these steps to view and remove these unnecessary device drivers:

1. Press [Windows]+[Break] to bring up the System Properties dialog box.

2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.

3. Click the New button below the System Variables panel.

4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices in the Variable Name text box and 1 buying cialis without prescription in the Variable Value text box.

5. Click OK to return to the System Properties dialog box and then click OK again.

6. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.

7. In Device Manager, go to View | Show Hidden Devices.

8. Expand the various branches in the device tree and look for the washed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers.

9. To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall.

Pasted from <http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6017628.html?tag=nl.e064>

Date: September 19th, 2007

Blogger: Greg Shultz

If you need to copy output from a command and paste it into a Windows program, such as Notepad, while working at the command buying cialis without a prescription prompt, chances are you’ll try to use the Mark and Copy commands on the command prompt’s Edit menu. A better way to get information from a command prompt and onto the Clipboard is the Clip.exe command line tool.

Clip.exe comes with Windows Server 2003, but it also works in Windows XP Professional. Simply copy Clip.exe from the Windows\System32 directory on a Windows Server 2003 system, and then paste it into the Windows\System32 directory on a Windows XP system. (If you don’t have access to Windows Server 2003, you can download a copy of Clip.exe from Daniel Petri’s IT Knowledgebase site.)

Once you have a copy of Clip.exe on your Windows XP system, using it is as easy as appending the pipe and the clip command (| clip) to the end of your command line. For example, you can use this command to copy the directory listing to the clipboard (Dir | clip), or you can use it to collect, copy, and paste the results of the Ipconfig command (Ipconfig /all | clip).

Note: This tip applies only to Windows XP Professional.

Pasted from <http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/?p=521&tag=nl.e064>

October 3, 2007

The Washington Times

Time is running out for the Internet taxation moratorium. The current ban expires Nov. 1, after which states and municipalities can swarm Internet users with new e-commerce levies (and they will). There is even talk of taxing individual e-mail messages. Congress should extend the ban.

This widely popular legislation has been extended twice over nine years and has enjoyed wide bipartisan support. It flew through the Senate by a 93-3 margin when it was renewed in 2004. Everyone from Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York Democrat, to bill sponsor George Allen, Virginia Republican, supported it. In the House, its 134 cosponsors included figures across the spectrum, from Rep. Marty Meehan, Massachusetts buy tadalafil cialis Democrat, to Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican. The merits of the moratorium have not changed much.

So why the delay? The short answers are dueling legislators and the accompanying congressional foot-dragging. Groups such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Governors Association want a short extension; grandfathered privileges for the nine states that tax e-commerce; and a narrowing of definitions. Last week, Rep. John Conyers, Michigan Democrat, introduced a bill containing those and extending the moratorium through 2011. This follows Mr. Conyers' apparent rejection of a bill by Rep. Anna Eshoo, the California Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Virginia Republican, to make the ban permanent. (We prefer a permanent ban.)

A ban expiry would be a serious disservice to consumers, not to mention a drag on a high-performing sector of the economy. Some on the left are swayed by the argument that the Internet tax moratorium places a disproportionate tax burden on low-income Americans because it is the wealthy and middle class, not the poor, who spend online. This is more than a bit of tax-and-spend revenue hunger. The disparity is likely to lessen in the future, as the costs of computers and online access continue to fall.

There is no compelling reason for this commonsense legislation to expire, other than to fill the grubby hands of state and local politicians. On behalf of consumers, businesses and for economic prosperity generally, Congress should renew the moratorium on Internet taxes.

Pasted from <http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071003/EDITORIAL/110030017/1013/EDITORIAL&template=printart>

By Charles Cooper, News.com

Published on ZDNet News: Oct 5, 2007 4:00:00 AM

Remember the initial hoo-ha that greeted Netscape in the mid-'90s? The idea being that a new computing platform–in this case the Web browser–would obviate the need to use Microsoft Windows anymore.

That fired imaginations. Instead of writing applications chained to a proprietary operating system, developers would build programs that ran on top of the Internet browser.

Microsoft was dead in the water. Or so a lot of smart people wanted to believe.

Even Netscape's co-founder, Marc Andreessen, got caught up in the hype, famously dismissing Windows as a "poorly debugged set of device drivers." A lot of people felt the same way. If the industry was about to embrace Web-centric computing, Microsoft would be in danger of losing its hegemony over desktop computing.

Of course, if I had a nickel for every time some smarty-pants claimed to have found a surefire Microsoft killer, I wouldn't have to meet deadlines for a living. The optimistic scenario obviously didn't work out the way Andreessen and his fellow travelers hoped it would. But the final coda had yet to be engraved on this story.

Microsoft is getting used to living–and competing for your loyalty–in a brave new world.

Now comes the announcement of a new product from Adobe Systems that intrigues me–as much for what it suggests about Adobe's ambitions as for what it might presage about the future.

I'm simplifying, but Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR, lets you build applications that are kind of the best of both worlds. That is, they'll run in a Web browser or as a standard client app on your desktop (and, presumably, OS-agnostic, too).

There's a lot of activity in this field–including the rise of browser-based Office competitors. This cross-platform development approach has been attempted before. Sun is still trying with Java on desktop. The company announced Java FX at JavaOne this year.

Of course, there are some potential limitations. People can do a lot with scripting languages. (That's where Ajax comes in. You can write an AIR application with an Ajax toolkit.) buy real cialis online Adobe's doing Photoshop Express with scripting, but some apps still will require the native OS. But to the degree that any of this is successful, it means the further marginalization of Windows (someday, maybe).

We can quibble over who's got the better technology, but there's a bigger picture to consider. With all the recent advances in Web development the last couple of years, this is emerging as a golden era for users. We're up for grabs and now we've got options–lots of them.

When former Sun CEO Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison were barnstorming around the country during the bubble trying to sell the world on the network computer, it was–as McNealy was wont to say on other occasions–all hat and no cattle. (Sorry Scott, but I couldn't resist.) The big reason the network computer approach failed to work was the "cloud" factor. Critics like Microsoft would (rightly) note that it was impossible to work on your spreadsheet or word processing documents unless you were first connected to the Internet. If you needed 24-7 access to your stuff, you had to pay The Man.

But a product like AIR, which is still in beta, allows people to do their work offline. They can drag and drop graphics or text between Web and desktop applications without first needing to be online. One potential negative: AIR is another proprietary plug-in and people may not want to write to it because it's Adobe's technology and consumers may get sick of downloading yet one more download.

In public, Adobe's observing diplomatic protocol. Instead of waving a red flag in front of Microsoft, Adobe execs dismiss any suggestion that they're spoiling for a fight with Microsoft (or the Java development community, for that matter.) Speaking earlier in the week with my CNET News.com colleague Martin LaMonica, Adobe's chief software architect Kevin Lynch offered this gem of an understatement: "Microsoft is trying to bring the .Net community to the Web. We are really focused on bringing the larger Web community to the desktop. It's two different approaches. It's not a head-on thing–it's just two groups of developers," Lynch said. "Our bet is on the Web."

I'm not sure that's going to mollify the folks in Redmond. But Microsoft is getting used to living–and competing for your loyalty–in a brave new world.

Pasted from <http://news.zdnet.com/2010-3513_22-6211802.html>