I keep wondering two things, why does the RIAA continue to persecute people, and more importantly why do people do stupid enough things to keep getting prosecuted?

That organization exists for the sole purpose of suing the pants off of people, but they can only do so when people leave plenty of evidence about their activity - namely hosting content on their computers and allowing others to download it. Most of the time it seems these foolish people aren’t even aware that what they are doing by running Kazaa, eMule, Gnutella, or some other file sharing application puts them at risk.

But why in the world would anyone share their music, movie or software collections via open, anonymous connections? Especially when there are other virtually risk-free alternatives? (By the way, know your rights if RIAA comes calling.)
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A Canadian named Troy Hurtubise, invented a superhuman body suit specifically designed to be worn by troops and police officers which he claims is capable of stopping a range of weapons fire, blades and even shrapnel from IEDs.

This isn’t Troy’s first dance either. He previously invented a suit which was intended to be able to survive a bear attack, and even made a video of it.
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Freedom. It’s nice, right? It ought to be… the freedom we enjoy was paid for with the blood of our forefathers, and is maintained by the blood of our siblings. And no freedom is more precious than that of speech. From it all other freedom flows.

Unfortunately there are still many oppressive regimes that do not offer the luxury of free speech, and people are being tortured and killed for speaking out against injustice. (As I’ve often noted.) This is why I have decided to put my money where my mouth is and provide financial support for the Freenet Project.
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Here is a demonstration of how to open a padlock in 1 minute or less using nothing more than scissors and a coke can.
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OK folks, before I head off to Alaska… As a result of multiple requests I’ve put together the following 15 minute video tutorial that demonstrates how I use RoboForm to securely and easily manage my passwords. This is my first video tutorial ever, so please be gentle… (Ted, PlasmaCAM videos will follow once I get these technical details worked out! :-))

But before we go any further I want to share some full disclosure. I am personally a customer of Roboform. I purchased the full version as well as the add ons for Palm Pilot and Pocket PC. As of a couple of days ago, they are now paying me a small commission when people buy the software (yeah!), and 100% will go to charity. (See my Sponsors page.)

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Being the resident tech geek, I have been asked by at least 10 people now if they should upgrade to the newest Microsoft Windows variant, Vista. Now, everyone is different so I can’t provide a blanket ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, but I will say that I don’t personally recommend it, I’m not using it, and I don’t plan on ever doing so in the future.

There is a great Web site called Bad Vista which can give you tons of reasons not to adopt this operating system, but I’m just going to stick to three primary ones for now:
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That’s right. I hate to tell you folks, but if you give me 10 seconds alone with your computer I’ll not only get your user name and passwords to every mail box you have set up in Outlook and Outlook Express, but I’ll also be able to see every single login you have saved in your Internet Explorer auto-complete settings.

And I’ll do it all with this tiny little application. Don’t believe it? Fine, download it, unzip it and launch it. You’ll be instantly staring at all of the passwords you’ve ever told Microsoft to remember for you.
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If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it?

Let’s see… here is my top 10 list. I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I’ll probably get into all of them.

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth - yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

Statistically speaking that should probably cover about 20% of you. But don’t worry. If I didn’t get it yet it will probably only take a few more minutes before I do…
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It pains me to report this, because the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form version 2 from Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley seems to be a nice contact form for Wordpress, but the fact remains that this plug-in is dangerous and designed to secretly Spam blogs on which it is placed.

This stems from the fact there is an option that users believe will disable the display of credit links back to the author’s web sites; however, this option does not actually remove the links. It merely makes them invisible - and this is enough to cause Google to remove a site.
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In the recent past I’ve done a lot of harping on the security woes of financial institutions (see here, here, and here) so when I saw this announcement I was both extremely happy and a little disappointed at the same time.

PayPal is about to issue SecureID cards to all business clients in order to provide further account security. Now this is what I’m always talking about when I speak of defense in depth! PayPal will combine layers of security, in this case something I have (SecureID password generator), with something I know (my username/password combo) to ensure it’s actually me accessing the site.
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There are a lot of people that have migrated to alternative Web browsers such as Firefox and Opera; the problem is, for most people, it’s been impossible to fully abandon IE because it’s the only option they have to get Windows Updates.

But, if you really despise IE and wish you never had to open it again (or if it just isn’t working), have I got news for you… Using either Opera or Firefox you can head over to WindizUpdate and get your system updated from a source other than Microsoft.
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Here’s a question I received from a reader:

Can you recommend a good hard drive sweeper? I need to clean up my PC at work… been surfing the net a little too much.

Well yes. Yes I can…
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