10 Daily Things

So you think you have the Web all figured out? Well, think again.

Did you know that you could charter a private jet online, star in your own reality TV show, or download songs as you drive your car? That’s just the beginning. You can tell your boss a few unpleasant truths without revealing your identity and sniff out trends before your oh-so-hip friends get wind of them. Using the right sites, you can give Google a face-lift, promote your products or bloviate about your blog, publish a novel, write a business plan, scan your PC for spies, and get free tech help. You can even use the Web to uncover government secrets and to predict your own demise. (Those last two activities will be unrelated, we hope.) Best of all, most of these sites won’t charge you a dime.

Here are some of the more surprising things the Web can do for you.

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The first set of release candidates for Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 have been posted to the Mozilla FTP. You can get this build for Linux, Mac, or Windows (Installer or ZIP). Remember, this is just a release candidate and may not represent what the official Beta 1 release is like but they have closed the build from further checkins.

The official release is still scheduled for Tuesday, July 11.

A secure, memorable password is easy for you to remember, and hard for others to guess.

Everywhere you turn you’ve got to come up with a password to register for something or another. Whether it’s the dozens of web sites that require you log in to use them, or your ATM card PIN, or your wireless network login, how do you decide on a new password? More importantly, how do you remember it?

Remember 100 different passwords with 1 rule set.

You don’t need to remember 100 passwords if you have 1 rule set for generating them. One way to generate unique passwords is to choose a base password and then apply a rule that mashes in some form of the service name with it. For example, you may use your base password with the first two consonants and the first two vowels of the service name. Say your base password is “asdf.” (See how easy those keys are to type?). Then your password for Yahoo would be ASDFYHAO, and your password for eBay would be ASDFBYEA.

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According a CHAP from Benq, the company is slowly phasing out 15-inch LCD models as the market “doesn’t want them” anymore. He said that today people want to buy at least 17-inch LCD displays. The prices have gone down and you can buy a 17-inch LCD for €150 to €160 already. The biggest problem is that the 15-inch LCD will cost about the same, and you get less inches for the money. A 19-inch LCD is mainstream now and you can but it from €200 to €300+ for a really top end one. CRT displays are almost dead, as they are bulky and the reaction time and the picture quality on LCD is good for just about anyone, except some professionals that will still stay with the Cathode Ray Tube, CRT display

HP has decided to hack into its customers’ computers under a new service to test their reliability.

The penetration-testing service for businesses will begin in October. HP hackers will use the same techniques as hackers to gain access to its customers’ machines.

Richard Brown, threat management department manager at HP Labs, told News.com that once HP has control of a system it will attempt to make the system safe.

The HP Active Countermeasures service will use a single server and 10 clients to scan through a range of IP addresses to scan. They will sniff each address for any flaws and exploit vulnerabilities by sending malformed protocol messages to open ports. Other techniques will include buffer, heap and stack overflows to gain control of clients’ systems.

If a machine is such a security risk, HP will shut it down so it’s no longer a threat to the infrastructure, Brown said.

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