Neat Net Tricks

What am I missing here? Inmates are smuggling cell phones into South Carolina prisons. With the contraband they are planning other crimes. Prison officials have asked the FCC for permission to jam cell phone signals to stop this nonsense, but the FCC can only give that permission to federal agencies, not state or local authorities.

Well, heck, maybe at least they can take away their texting priviliges.

I have to admit I had never heard of CA Anti-Virus until now. Just this week the software has caused computers to crash because it started flagging clean files as malicious. CA apologized and said they hadn’t been plagued with false positives for three years. Wrongly identifying good files as bad is nothing new amongst AV developers. Just last week McAfee had a similar meltdown and cleaning up what AV software messes up becomes a real pain in the anatomy.

Microsoft is warning us now that it has been unable to plug a hole in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 that allows hackers to take control of our machine. All you have to do to get the infection is visit a Web site that’s contained in a link in spam. This has been going on for a week and thousands of sites have been infected.

Rest easy, the Redmond crew is hard at work developing yet another patch to fix the problem. Meanwhile, we are told we should “disable the problematic part of the software at Microsoft’s Web site.”

Yeah, that ought to do it. Or maybe we can just turn our computers off until the threat passes. I needed some fresh air anyway.

Enjoy your July 4th fireworks. Nature has its own fireworks, as shown in this slide show at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31694190/ns/technology_and_science-science .