Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - Posts
This is one of the best animated GIFs I've ever seen...
A bookmark on my Blog is required... 
Some weeks ago I've blogged my thinks about possible Google plans... the news of a Google Browser was on the air, but I said that this could not be the right choice for Google (too many browser on the air now) and that a company like Google must think to other biggest projects. I wrote that Google could think to realize the "Network PC concept", an online platform to manage all my PC (desktop, files, documents, email, messaging etc). I've not received too much reaction about this...
Today I was surprised to see on Kunal.org that someone is thinking like me...
The author talks about a possible new Google project that is similar to what I've thinked:
"A RICH desktop application that is probably capable of running in full screen mode. Lets call it GDesktop for kicks. GDesktop will probably index all your files. Picasa will handle all your multimedia needs, GMail will handle all your email as well as deliver alerts. There will be a side panel in typical google fashion, which will be customizable, and will deliver RSS feeds as well as contextual advertisements based on what ever you are doing at the time".
Yes, I agree with you... this could be a real revolution and a really cool new way to work. My "Network PC concept" is really like this. 
I don't know if this is only a my dream, if a day Google (or others) will realize these ideas, but I've just launched a little signal!
Terrible to see this morning an other news like this... Hackers are attacking again some big Italian ISP Providers (such as Aruba) with a great amount of DDOS attacks (peak of more than 3 Gbit/s of traffic), causing with problems to the provider and all its users. :(
Terrible also to see that there are also groups of hackers that launch dangerous messages to the ISP: "you pay us or we will break your services".
This is a dangerous situation and I think we all must do something to avoid these facts.
What we must understand is that in a Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDoS) attack, an attacker can use your computer to attack other computers around the world only by taking advantage of security vulnerabilities on your system (he can force your computer to send huge amounts of data to a web site or other servers). All of us could be the source of a great attack agains big ISPs.
Obviously, there's not an effective way to say that "I'm totally protected under DDOS attacks" but some little measures can be adopted to prevent this. Personally, I recommend to all of you to take this actions:
- Install and maintain an antivirus software (always recommended) and an anti-spyware tool.
- Install a good Firewall and configure it to restrict incoming and outgoing (extremely important) traffic to your computer. According to this, I recommend to adopt a better Firewall than the built-in Firewall with XP SP2 that (absurd for me!!!
) don't check for outgoing traffic. - Monitor your network traffic to see if there are strange peak of data sent.
Obviously, these are only little actions to do, but I think that if anyone of us would adopt these countermeasures, all these DDOS phenomenons will decrease.
Yesterday was the day for a great news on the Instant Messaging world: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) specifications as RFCs. These documents formalize the core protocols developed within the Jabber open-source community, and publication as RFCs represents a major milestone in acceptance of Jabber technologies.
I believe a lot on the Jabber Core and see this news is wonderful. Jabber is a powerful and open standard for Messaging and this standardization could be the key for a great future (maybe Google will adopt it for future services?).
Happy life Jabber!
This is only to celebrate my post number 500 on this Blog...
Blogging is a big adventure started an year ago and now is like a mania! Happy Blogging!
I've read on a newsgroup this evening that MSN Messenger 7 Beta has some dangerous flaws (for exampe you can generate a Flash file, send it via MSN and use the Flash movie to execute files on the target PC).
This is an alert, expecially because I've see lots of people that are planning to use this Beta (some copies are out on the net) to replace the standard version. This could be a terrible error... MSN 7 is a Beta, and every Beta version it has some unfixed problems, so don't use it too much.