Joe Wein’s blog

“Does Linux stand a chance now that Windows 7 will run on netbooks?”, Shane O’Neill asks in an article in ComputerWorld on 15 January 2009 that overall sounds fairly optimistic on Microsoft’s prospects. However it largely avoids one crucial subject that matters for Microsoft in the struggle over market share in the booming nettop market: [...]

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You can tell that an anti-spam tool is becoming too effective when spammers start trying to work around it.
Such is the case with Spam URL Blacklists (SURBLs), which list domains advertised via spam. Spamfilters will intercept emails that mention blacklisted domains used in clickable links. The spammers can use fake sender addresses and send [...]

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A few days ago I received email alerts notifying me of abnormally high web server traffic. Naturally my first thought was that this might be a Denial of Service attack (DoS): My sites have been attacked before, including by botnets consisting of several thousand rogue computers. This time, during a one hour period, traffic exceeded [...]

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This week I bought myself a late Christmas present, a Sony PS-LX300USB turntable and there is a story behind that. I have a fairly large LP collection which I acquired mostly in the 1980s, mainly reggae and African music. Most of the about 450 LPs I found in record stores in the UK, others were [...]

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Checking my PayPal details today, I found that three of my most recent payments for Skype involved a dollar to euro conversion. This surprized me, since quite a while ago I had changed the currency of my Skype account from euros to dollars to match the currency of my PayPal account, in order to avoid [...]

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