ITWorldCanada | Another Fantastic Larry Ellison (Oracle) Quote

Commodore.ca | Great W.O.M.D. Error Page

Try this soon:

1. go to Google.com (or Google.ca);

2. type in (but don't hit return): "weapons of mass destruction"

3. click the "I'm feeling lucky" button, instead of the normal "Google search" button; on

4. READ what appears to be a normal error message carefully.

Commodore.ca | Microsoft Finally Stops Charging for ResKits

Among dozens of current and future downloads for Windows 2003 available from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/downloads is the Resource Kit.

ITWorldCanada.com | Silicon Flakes To Track Your Assets for Just Pennies

One day, not long from now, virtually any store, restaurant or business may be able to identify you, note what clothing you’re wearing — and possibly even detect how much money you have in your wallet — as you enter the establishment.

With little fanfare the new technology that could make this possible, called RFID, or radio frequency identification, is rolling out on a massive scale. RFID tags potentially could be placed in clothing, laptops, even currency. The chips that run RFID tags are barely detectable flakes of silicon, some no bigger than a grain of salt. Each tag uses radio frequencies to transmit a code that uniquely identifies the tag.

How might the tags identify you? If you buy a sweater using a credit card, your name could be forever linked with that plaid cardigan.

Alien Technology Corp., an RFID tag maker, projects that within three years the company will sell 10 billion RFID tags a year and that the cost of a single tag will drop below five cents, cheap enough that they may start to appear in most products.

RFID readers within about 15 feet of some tags can pick up their signals. Global databases will let businesses keep track of every location where an RFID signal has been read.

That’s what worries privacy advocates: how easily companies can read the tags and keep logs, identifying and profiling consumers long after the tagged products those consumers bought leave the store. “In the future, (RFID) tags could take away from your ability to move about anonymously,” said Katherine Albrecht, the founder and director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), a U.S. consumer group opposed to customer profiling through companies’ use of supermarket discount cards...

News.Yahoo.com | Commodore 64 Makes a Comeback

Tulip Computers, which owns the Commodore brand name, plans to relaunch the brand to take advantage in an upsurge of interest in the obsolete Commodore 64 (C64) computer and its 1980s-era games, the company said in a statement Friday.

CNET.com | Cracking Windows Passwords in Seconds
Thanx to Victor for this one

Swiss researchers released a paper on Tuesday outlining a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds, from 1 minute 41seconds...

The results highlight a fact about which many security researchers have worried: Microsoft's manner for encoding passwords has certain weaknesses that make such techniques particularly effective, Philippe Oechslin, a senior research assistant and lecturer at the Cryptography and Security Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com."Windows passwords are not very good," he wrote. "The problem with Windows passwords is that they do not include any random information." ... Microsoft has used two encoding schemes, also known as hashing functions, to encrypt passwords. The first...was used by Windows 3.1,  95, 98, Me and early NT systems...While the more recent NTHash fixes the first two weaknesses, it still does not use a random number to make the hashes more unique.

The result: The same password encoded on two Windows machines will always be the same. That means that a password cracker can create a large lookup table and break passwords on any Windows computer. Unix, Linux and the Mac OS X, however, add a 12-bit salt to the calculation, making any brute force attempt to break the encryption take 4,096 times longer or require 4,096 times more memory...

Users can protect themselves against the attack by adding nonalphanumeric characters to a password. The inclusion of symbols other than alphanumeric characters adds complexity to the process of breaking passwords--and that means the code cracker needs more time or more memory or both.

ZDNet.com | Tired of Those Abusive PopUp Dialog Boxes?

...User Mike Percival reported that after installing WinXP Professional, he started seeing unsavory ads in pop-up windows. "Whenever I connect to the internet," wrote Percival, "I get pop-up messages inviting me to view pornographic pictures on some Web site." Percival attempted to get rid of the problem by uninstalling MSN Messenger, but this had no effect...

Disabling the Messenger Service
If you don't want your computer to receive pop-up messages via the Messenger Service, you can follow these instructions to disable it on WinXP:

1. Go to Start | Control Panel | Performance and Maintenance | Administrative Tools.

2. Double-click Services.

3. In the Services panel, select Messenger as shown in Figure A.

4. Right-click and select Stop to turn off Messenger.

5. Right-click and select Properties. (You can also simply double-click Messenger).

6. From the Startup Type drop-down list, select Disabled as shown in Figure B.

7. Click OK.

On Windows NT and Windows 2000, the process for disabling Messenger is similar. Access Services in Administrative Tools and select Disable or Manual as the startup setting in the Properties...

Commodore.ca | Forgot the Admin Password to Your Windows Server?

Just get the free "Offline Password Registry Editor".  'This is a utility to (re)set the password of any user that has a valid (local) account on your NT system, by modifying the crypted password in the registries SAM file.  You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.'

'It works offline, that is, you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a floppy disk or CD. The boot disk includes stuff to access NTFS partitions and scripts to glue the whole thing together. Works with syskey (no need to turn it off, but you can if you have lost the key)  Will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled out user accounts!'

Commodore.ca | Want to Use Linux Tools in Windows?

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:

• A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.

• A collection of tools, which provide Linux look and feel.

Click www.cygwin.com for details.

ITWorldCanada.com | IBM to Use 2100 Opteron 246 CPU's in New Linux Supercomputer

IBM Corp. Wednesday took the wraps off its first Opteron server, saying that it will use Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) unannounced Opteron 246 processor in a forthcoming Linux supercomputer, and in the process confirming reports that the chip is on the way.

...The dual-processor eServer 325 will be generally available on Oct.17, with initial shipments making their way to customers in the third quarter, an IBM spokesperson said. The company will also develop an Opteron workstation slated for release early next year, he said.

IBM's Linux supercomputer will be built for Japan's National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. It combines a eServer 325 cluster of 2,116 Opteron processors alongside a cluster of servers with a total of 520 Itanium 2 processors from Intel Corp., allowing both companies to claim a design win from IBM.

Commodore.ca | Helpful and Free WebCasts From Microsoft

see http://microsoft.com/usa/webcasts/

ZDNet.com | July Spam Exceed all of 2002

Anybody still unconvinced about the scale of the spam epidemic should consider this fact: MessageLabs intercepted more spam in the last month than in the whole of 2002.

While this is in part proof that filtering is more widely used, it is also an indication as to just how much spam is being sent and received each day. According to MessageLabs spam accounted for 50 per cent of all e-mail again during July...

Commodore.ca | Still Don't Understand RAID?

You can now access a very helpfull video from Intel by clicking HERE or you can read an excellent written description of RAID levels sourced from Intel and reprinted on our site, by clicking HERE.

TomsHardware.com | AMD announces Athlon MP and Opteron Price Cuts Up To 34%

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), in response to Intel’s processor price cuts in mid-July, has also lowered its workstation CPU prices. The largest price cut was on its Opteron 242 processor, whose price fell from US$690 to US$455, a 34% decrease.

Commodore.ca | Old Command Line Tools Worth Another Look

I needed to search through a vast number of text logs for particular entries and only wanted a count of the resulting hits.  I could have done this through the Windows GUI but it is slow, so a buddy of mine on the net suggested I try

FIND /C "text" c:\logfiles\0203*.*

which did the trick.  See below for more FIND settings from Windows 2000.

FIND [/V] [/C] [/N] [/I] "string" [[drive:][path]filename[ ...]]
 
  /V        Displays all lines NOT containing the specified string.
  /C        Displays only the count of lines containing the string.
  /N        Displays line numbers with the displayed lines.
  /I        Ignores the case of characters when searching for the string.
  "string"  Specifies the text string to find.
  [drive:][path]filename - Specifies a file or files to search.

I also had to make space on Domain Controller and decided to follow an MS suggestion to delete all .TMP files in all directories that were not in use:

DEL /S *.tmp

DEL [/P] [/F] [/S] [/Q] [/A[[:]attributes]] names
ERASE [/P] [/F] [/S] [/Q] [/A[[:]attributes]] names

  names         Specifies a list of one or more files or directories.
                Wildcards may be used to delete multiple files. If a
                directory is specified, all files within the directory
                will be deleted.

  /P            Prompts for confirmation before deleting each file.
  /F            Force deleting of read-only files.
  /S            Delete specified files from all subdirectories.
  /Q            Quiet mode, do not ask if ok to delete on global wildcard
  /A            Selects files to delete based on attributes
  attributes    R  Read-only files            S  System files
                H  Hidden files               A  Files ready for archiving
                -  Prefix meaning not