External Brain

I just upgraded my old Toshiba laptop to a new Toshiba laptop. Seeing as the factory install of Win98 on the old laptop was the most robust instance of Windows I’ve used, I opted to stick with the factory WinXP install on the new, the only drawback being that it’s XP Home.

The one problem I’d anticipated was a possible problem connecting to my wireless network. Aside from WinXP getting in the way with it’s bloody wireless network wizard and the time it took to find the MAC of the wireless card, it turned out to be simple.

What I didn’t expect was the lack of a web server. And it wasn’t just the lack of a web server, but the crippling of the operating system so you can’t even install Microsoft Personal Web Server:

Windows XP Home Edition does not include or support any versions (1.0, 2.0, 4.0) of Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS). Users that need Web server functionality in a desktop operating system should use Windows XP Professional

It seems that there used to be a workaround in the knowledge base, but the scum at Microsoft yanked it in an attempt to force punters into upgrading to XP Professional. Alas, this way of thinking just pisses people off and makes them look elsewhere. In my case, that was Apache and, thanks to Webifying XP, it was a simple and painless process.

The FTC and more than 30 of its counterparts abroad, including Australia, are planning to contact ISPs and urge them to pay more attention to what their customers are doing online. Among the requests: identifying customers with suspicious e-mailing patterns, quarantining those computers and offering help in cleaning the zombie code off the hapless PCs

Hackers have found a way to lock up the electronic documents on your computer and then demand money over the Internet to get them back

Evidence is mounting that many Australians will miss out on next-generation ADSL services such as video-on-demand, unless Telstra upgrades its copper network

Australian government agencies have shut down more than a dozen local web sites that sought to solicit credit card details from unsuspecting consumers

BitTorrent development is occurring at a furious pace. At the beginning of May, an Azureus update added distributed tracker and database features. A couple of days ago, Bram updated BitTorrent to include support for trackerless torrents in the new BitTorrent 4.10 beta

Donald Kendrick has been accused of breaking into a church and using the pastor’s computer to look at pr0n. He was arrested Tuesday night after a scuffle with Charleston police Constable George, who was responding to a report that a light was on inside the First Presbyterian Church — via Warren Ellis