Technofobe

It was announced yesterday that Microsoft is purchasing Winternals. You can read the FAQs about it here and the press release here. This may mean that some of the awesome tools that I have been recommending that you can freely download from the Sysinternals site may be absorbed and become less easily obtained.

As I write this I am unable to hit the Sysinternals site. This may be because everyone is scrambling to download all the great free tools before the site is dissambled! Get your downloads while you can.

I came across this article while reviewing some Digg posts. In a nutshell, it looks like some Russians have come up with a way to have their malware be even better at avoiding detection than the normal run-of-the-mill rootkits. Ths new one called Rustock is polymorphic, scans for installed rootkits detectors, and changes it behavior accordingly. F-secure has apparently developed a tool to detect this called Blacklight.

Another scanner worth of mention here is Rootkit Revealer by Sysinternals. Sysinternals provides an awesome site with a bunch of free tools for all you windows sysadmins. I highly recommend checking it out. FYI, these tools were developed by the guy (Mark Russinovich) that discovered Sony's rootkit. Here is Mark's blog post that started all of the hubbub.

Anyway, the battle between the white hats and the black hats continue...

In case you aren't in the loop yet there is a video revolution going on in cyberspace right now. I am sure that you have heard about blogging if you are reading this blog. Thing have progressed quickly as they normally do on the net. Now anyone with a video camera and a few editing skills can put together a video blog.

There is now a plethora of online videos sites and average Joe is putting together videos. Everyone seems to be getting involved. And what I like best about most of these are that many are low budget amatures that have no acting experience that have put together some really fantastic stuff that would have never seen the light of day if it were not for the Internet. I find it quite refreshing to see some origional stuff that does not have to be filtered through the mainstream media houses.

Who needs to pay for cable TV when I can just download everything I want to watch to my computer and video iPod? This is the question that some people are already starting to ask. If you have a media center PC attached to your TV or home theater system you may already realize that the Internet will become the primary distrubution medium for most audio and video content. Believe that the current cable TV providers are concerned about their revenue stream.

As an aside, the biggest threat to all of this new video goodness is a debate over network neutrality that is currently going on in Congress. But that is a topic for a different post.

Ok, so enough of the preamble. Here are some links to get you started:

Wired had a fantastic article in the May 2006 titled, "The Wired Guide To The Online Video Explosion" that is certainly worth a read. Here is a link to the one-page overview of this on their site, however, if you have the means get the magazine and read the full article they have a long listing of some of the popular online videos.

Fireant and Democracy are a couple of popular aggregators. These are some programs that help you select, automate the download of, and play the video that you want to see. These are both free, thank you very much.

Here are a few video blogs that I enjoy regularly. Most of these are techie because, well, I am a techie... Anyway, in no particular order:

• CommandN -- This is kind of a tech news / tips video blog. Consistent and organized, weekly, roughly 20 minutes-ish
• Rocketboom -- This a popular and kind of quirky news and tech news video blog (several minutes daily) NOTE: The star of the show here was Amanda Cognden, however at the time of this writing there was a falling out between Amanda and here business partner so the future of rocketboom is currently in question.
• Hak5 -- The hosts of this show are admittedly fairly geeky (which is part of the appeal), however, they are obviously real techies and the content presented in their shows is excellent. Content is mainly technical hacks and mods. Normally 30-40 minutes, monthly.
• Zefrank's "The Show" -- This is a several minute a day dose of hilarity. This is a must see. However, be warned, he likes to talk politics and he is far from PC.
• Digital Life TV -- This roughly 45 minute show is normally released twice a week and Tuesdays and Thursdays. The two nerdy commentators have great information that is well presented. I believe this one is sponsored by Ziff Davis.
• MobuzzTV -- I'd call this a Rocketboom wanna-be, however, it is still enjoyable. Daily, 5 minutes-ish.
• Systm -- No, I didn't misspell it. Not sure how often these are released but the technical info is great.
• FromTheShadows -- Uber hackers with only 6 episodes so far. Interesting stuff.

I must mention YouTube and Google Video. There are lots of goodies to see here. I think YouTube gets something like 35,000 new uploaded videos daily. Insanity!

That is all for now. I hope you enjoy. Please post here with your favorite shows.

A friend a work pointed me to this site. I'm not sure why this is so fun, but I had to share...

Enjoy

If you haven't yet seen the new SUSE XGL interface you're missing something really cool. Check out this openSUSE site for more info. Also, if you don't feel like installing a full blown copy of linux just to see the interface you can try out the Kororaa Live CD.

To try to give this interface a description it comes with wobbly windows that are just plain fun to drag around the desktop. It can make some of the windows partially transparent so you can see what is behind. And arguably the coolest feature, is the 3D desktop where, for example, you can have 4 different desktops each on a side of a cube that you can rotate. Windows can even wrap around the edge of the cube.

Here is a video that I found on YouTube that shows off some of the cool features: