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Monday, April 25, 2005

Opera's CEO to swim from Norway to US

Opera's CEO is keeping his word and is going to swim from Norway to the US with only one stop-over for cup of hot chocolate at his mom's home if Opera reaches 1 million downloads in the first few days of release. Opera's PR manager who let the news get out is feeling guilty and rowing all the way with him. I need to mention he's not a experienced swimmer.
In a related news, I applied to Opera for the position of the CEO since I'm not yet drowned or lost in the Atlantic ocean :-) .

Update
The next day the site was updated saying that the PR manager's boat was punctured and they didn't make it. I didn't read the whole page but something about the pictures and the news tells me this was all made up in the first place...

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Geek Jargon Explained

Pharming: When fraudsters redirect net users from legitimate to fake sites
Phishing: Fraudulent e-mails and pop-ups to fool you into revealing personal information for criminal gain
Rogue dialler: Software that installs itself on computers and changes settings to dial a premium rate number instead of usual dial-up account
Spam: Unsolicited e-mails, often offering products or services in which you have no interest
Spyware: Small programs that secretly monitor sites visited, potentially violating privacy and slowing computers
Virus: Malicious program designed to damage data; usually spread via infected e-mail attachments
Trojan: Malicious software disguised as harmless program
Firewall: Software to protect computers against hackers
Keylogging: Software/hardware to track keystrokes on a computer to gather passwords, credit card numbers

I found this list in a BBC Article about a survey by AOL UK that claims 16% of participants never heard of the word "spam". Well duh! If you're still using "America Online" and you're doing it in "Europe" I'd even be surprised if you'd recognized the word "e-mail"!

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Linux you can use.... at last!

If you look around my web site you will find a few articles I wrote encouraging people to use Linux. There are distributions that are easy to use but the fact is up until now every one of them while very easy to use overall, had one small problem that would make you spend hours trying to figure out... so while I've been using Linux for two years now, eventually I gave up on making other people use Linux.
Then, a few days ago I heard about Ubuntu Linux so I though I gotta give it a shot. I tried it on two computers, one at work and my laptop. It worked like a charm on both computers. Not just it was easier to use than other Linux distros but it was much easier to setup that Windows (may dad run Windows on a laptop just like mine).
So I think it's finally time for everyone to try Linux. But while it worked out nicely for me, Ubuntu may not be totally there yet, so for now I only recommend it to people interested in computers. But then again, as I always say, if you've read this far you'll want to give a shot :-)