A few days ago, Microsoft announced a new standard for booting Windows 8 computers in the future.

The UEFI standard would be built into the BIOS of new computers that run Windows 8, allowing them to boot very quickly, while protecting them from rootkits and other malware that attempts to corrupt the boot process.

In theory, that sounds like [more...]

I’ve said it many times before, but I think it’s worth saying again.

I think that “the cloud” is a really bad idea for most users.

One reason why I think that is because it can put a very small, very powerful, and very ethically dubious group of companies — companies who make tens of billions of dollars each year by exploiting their users’ data for profit — in complete control of [more...]

A couple of weeks ago, an old friend and I began to discuss bootable Linux USB flash drives — as opposed to bootable Linux LiveCDs.

I was motivated by the fact that I’m down to my last few writable CDs.

Plus, I have a 256MB USB flash drive that is too small to use for much of anything else.

But, in the past, every time I’ve [more...]

Do you remember the IBM 5150?

If you do, then you’ve been using personal computers for at least a few decades, because the 5150 was the very first IBM PC.

Those of us who used the 5150 back then, may remember that it came with a 4.77 MHz, 8-bit processor, 16KB of RAM, two 5.25-inch floppy drives, no hard drive, and a monochrome, text-only display screen. [more...]

I remember, in the late 1980s, when I was a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, I used the University’s BitNet connection to exchange text files with a colleague who had moved to Kyoto, Japan. That was my earliest experience with what would later become known as “email.”

I remember back in the early 1990s, when the multinational corporation where I worked as a computer consultant ran only the non-routable NetBEUI protocol on all of its employee PCs. [more...]

About fifteen years ago, I made the mistake of posting an anti-software-piracy post on a Microsoft newsgroup — from my email account.

My email account that automatically added my email signature to my post.

With my real name.

And my home address. [more...]

I’ve been using personal computers since 1979.

I began by using CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple DOS, and other text-based operating systems on computers with monochrome displays, then moved on to the original black-and-white version of the Macintosh OS and the original version of Microsoft Windows.

I used to use computers with only 8KB of RAM; or two [more...]

According to Wikipedia, “The Rustock botnet (founded around 2006) is a botnet that consists of an estimated 150,000 computers running Microsoft Windows, and is capable of sending around 30 billion spam messages a day (each infected PC is capable of sending an estimated 25,000 messages a day). Reported estimates on its size vary greatly across different sources, with claims that the botnet may be anywhere between 150,000 to 2,400,000 machines. The size of the botnet is [more...]