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Installing Avira (AntiVir)
After a tutorial on installing Avast and one for AVG 8 I decided to write up a tutorial on installing Avira (the former AntiVir). Download the install kit from their website (warning! there is some upselling going on) Install the software Done! Unfortunately there aren’t any options to make the program more silent or transparent…
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Actively working against security…
Not only isn’t security the first priority for people, some make a selling point of being able to defeat it! Does the following type of phrase sound familiar to you? Our product uses HTTP, so there will be no problem traversing those pesky firewalls. The solution is of course in the middle (making admins realize…
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How to interpolate a string in Perl?
Perl (and some other languages which came after it :-)) have a feature called interpolation, whereby the names of the variables in strings are replaced by their actual values. This is both useful and dangerous (it can easily result in problems like command injection / SQL injection / HTML injection (aka XSS) – as with…
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A word about splogs
I was listening to the WordPress podcast and they mentioned a service called WordPressDirect (don’t worry, that links is a nofollow one). From their marketing material: Create SEO-Optimized, Content-Stuffed Websites Instantly With WordPressDirect Basically they are an other method to “reuse” other people’s writing. Some thoughts: People feel instantly defensive and start pondering solutions like…
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pointers-uk – fail
Via the network security blog I found the article How to Rebuild your Computer and Reinstall Windows Without Headache, and the timing couldn’t have been better, since in the near future I will need to do so (although an XP machine, not Vista). The advices are given are good. Three tools which I like that…
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Mixed links
On the Extra Pepperoni blog I’ve read about Google’s 404 Service. Apparently they have a service whereby they can suggest links to people who arrived to a non-existing page on your site. Interesting… From ICANN comes an updated version of the Whois Inaccuracy Reporting System (or WDPRS – Whois Data Problem Reporting System). You can…
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Negative zero – what is it?
Computers have two ways of representing numbers: One is called sign and magnitude – usually you have one bit specifying the sign (again, most of time you have 0 for positive and 1 for negative) and the rest of the bits specify the absolute value (“magnitude”) of the number. The other is ordering the numbers…