If you are an IT professional providing customers with Internet connectivity solutions you know that the internet is a scary place. Back in the dark ages (before 1993) when things started out everyone using the internet trusted each other. Unfortunately things changed drastically and trust is a thing of the past on the internet.
When you set up an internet connection for a customer you do everything you can to protect them, you set up a restrictive firewall, you have a proxy that enforces policy for web surfing as far as possible. You also use all possible means to block spam and viruses in e-mail before they reach the lusers that still believe Bill Gates will give them free Nokia cellphones.
After you did all the technical stuff, you tell everyone (you know it falls on deaf ears, but you have to try) that they must not visit those porn sites, that they must copy links in e-mail and paste them into their browser rather than simply clicking on them etc. So what happens when one of the lusers that actually listened goes to a legitimate website and still have his windows computer exploited? Or if they are lucky the lusers get a warning from their anti-virus software and the site gets blocked.
Continue reading ‘The internet is a scary place!’
I have written about my favourite mail client Mutt before and still consider it the best around. There is another contender around that I heard about on the linux-elitist mailing list. It is also console based and is called “Sup” short for “What’s Up”
Continue reading ‘Whatsup! – There is another decent mail client on the block’
About 6 years ago I started installing advertisement monitoring systems in Africa for a small media company. A media company of course has good relationships with their customers i.e. television and radio stations.
Kampala
The first installations I did was in East Africa, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala. My first trip was kind of hectic, the logistics was screwed up totally and we had a lot to learn.
Our first mistake was thinking that renting a car and self driving is a good idea. The roads in these cities are atrocious, and the drivers worse. And the irony is that for the same money you can get a full time driver with a car of the same quality. Anyway on this first trip I was driving around in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi dodging potholes and Kamikazes in cars.
Continue reading ‘Africa from the rooftops – East Africa Trip 1′
Yesterday Andrew McGill posted the message below on the Gauteng Linux User Group mailing list. Because he is not blogging I’m doing it for him. What he is describing is one of the biggest frustrations people have with so called new and improved software. more....
Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters
Google To Challenge Facebook Again
Hugh Pickens writes "Google is set to make a fresh attempt to gain a foothold in the booming social networking business, seeking to counter the growing threat that Facebook poses to some of its core services. USA Today reports that the search giant is upgrading Gmail to add social-media tools similar to those found on Facebook, including photo and video sharing within the Gmail application, along with a new tool for status updates. According to reports, Google is planning to give Gmail users a way to aggregate the updates of their various contacts on the service, creating a stream of notifications that would echo the similar real-time streams from Facebook and Twitter. Google's decision to exploit the heavily-used Gmail service as the basis for its latest assault on the social networking business partly reflects the failure of Google's previous stand-alone efforts to enter the social networking sector. Its Orkut networking service, though launched before Facebook, has failed to gain a mass following in most parts of the world, despite success in Brazil, and its acquisition of Twitter rival Jaiku ended in failure after it scrapped development of the service."
more....
