Thursday, September 16, 2004

IBM protects passwords with PC chip. New PCs will ship with a chip designed to thwart hackers--a hardware approach that's said to be safer than software. [CNET News.com] It looks like hardware acceleration of Security Features is starting to catch on in a big way. I am hoping Dell will get wise to this and will start doing the same. But it is smart of IBM to differentiate its laptop designs with a really useful feature that few are able to reverse engineer. I hope it catches on in the desktop arena as well. The costs will not be prohibitively large that's for sure, and anything that the hackers will have to slow down and address in order to find future exploits in the Windows OS. I'm hoping the only thing that's preventing the security chips from catching on is the familiarity the designers have with this new concept of a security IO chip. 8:25:35 PM    comment []

Report: Lightning and Battery Backup. more backup power system reports and notes, plus plenty of warnings about surge suppression and lightning strikes [MacInTouch] Once I thought I never need any kind of UPS with my Mac. But I think more and more it might be a good idea at least until I get my next Mac. That's two years off right now. Anyway surge suppression and line-conditioning would also be a big plus. I would probably have to spend around $164 to get ther right model for my G4. It's nice to know that APC's newer models work with the OS X 10.3.3 and will natively manage the UPS when it fails over. I always thought we were going to be left out of the UPS software market. But APC came to the rescue. Looks like I'm due for an XS-1000. 8:19:19 PM    comment []

Zope X3 3.0.0 release candidate available!. First Zope X3 release candidate available. [Zope.org] Wow! Hey lookee, lookee! A new re-architected Zope vers. 3. It's only onward and upward from here. Hopefully not too many "products" that work under Zope will be broken outright, or will be easily ported to the new architecture. It's going to be only bigger and better from here on out, and only higher performance and more secure. Unfortunately I won't ever get a chance to try it out and use it for any testing or experimental work. 8:15:20 PM    comment []