Monday, January 6, 2003

Jon Udell: "All Consuming displays books mentioned on blogs in the last hour or week, summarizes and links to the citing blogs, and, using Amazon, Google, and other APIs, wraps book details, price comparison, and purchase apparatus around the discussion. Finally, it exports an RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed, an XML news-syndication format. As a subscriber to that feed, I'm reminded daily of the books being discussed on blogs. The reminders and the discussions they link to have raised my awareness of books and prompted me to buy them more often than usual." 11:07:29 AM

Ted Neward: "Keith Brown, the Dark Prince of Security, gave a talk to us on security and the need to take the red pill and stop running as root/Administrator..." This is something that Mac OS X forces upon you (root is disabled by default, but you can use sudo to run a command with root privileges). The difference between Mac OS X and Windows XP is that when you grant a Mac OS X user admin privileges, that gives them access to sudo (and they get a similar mechanism through the GUI: type your password to run an installer or change settings as the superuser). Under Windows XP, a user with admin privileges has access to the whole machine. But it's not hard to take those privileges away, and it is a good idea. I should take the red pill and see what happens... 10:22:08 AM