Kelly's Tech Nexus

This is an excellent question, and it’s a good time to think about putting a home server to work for you. The benefits are many and immediate; for one, all your files would be stored off of your main computers, so they’re safe from harm if, say, Windows goes belly-up on you. Nah, that never happens!

Another benefit is that more storage may be added as needed, and it’s usually easier and safer than operating on your daily driver computer.

iTWire – Is it time for a Windows or Linux server in your home?.

Frankly, a little (forced) transparency would be refreshing:

To the horror of Latvia’s political establishment, a mysterious group of computer hackers is threatening to expose the incomes of top officials after stealing millions of government tax records. The group, calling itself the People’s Army of the Fourth Awakening, claimed to have downloaded more than 7.5 million documents, including VAT receipts and income tax returns, from the State Revenue Service (SRS) after exploiting a security loophole on its website.

via [ISN] Latvia in turmoil after hacker exposes establishment salaries.

Intel was also a victim of a cyberattack at the same time as the high-profile attack on Google, adding it to the list of companies allegedly targeted by Chinese hackers. The company revealed the information Tuesday in its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, noting that the attack could harm Intel’s business operations if any intellectual property was stolen.

via Intel victim of cyberattacks at the same time as Google.

According to an analysis by Symantec, a rootkit is responsible for many of the blue screen problems currently occurring with Windows XP. The company reports that Tidserv infects low level kernel drivers, such as IDE driver atapi.sys, in order to conceal itself and worm its way into the system. As soon as the rootkit is active, it becomes very hard to detect using simple means (including anti-virus software), so that most users never know there is anything wrong with their PC.

via Symantec says rootkit causes Windows XP blue screen of death – The H Security: News and Features.

Last week, Google announced it would soon be ending support for older versions of popular browsers, with IE6 topping the list. This is a good thing, because these older browsers are riddled with security holes and IE6 in particular is despised by web developers for not following established web standards. This is sure to cause problems and hard decisions to be made by those organizations who use Google products and rely on IE6 for their browser; even though IE6 is antiquated by web standards, it is often still used due to incompatibility with existing web applications within an organization. Soon they will either have to fix these web apps to work with newer browsers or discontinue using Google Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, etc.

From the article:

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar. Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

via IE6 users to be evicted from Gmail, Google Calendar.

Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com.