Jaqui Greenlees

Sadly, I will have to say that with ONE exception it is a no.

A simple test of their products that only one company passed.

I went looking for any home version of their products that would run on any operating system other than windows. After all, while the Macs, GNU-Linux, openBSD, freeBSD, netBSD, pcBSD, desktopBSD, Solaris, HP/UX, Aix … based systems cannot get damaged by the windows viruses, the people using them do send files to people using windows. Those files can contain malware, that the sender doesn’t know about. How could they know? it is next to impossible to find anti-malware software for home desktops, the most likely source for infected files to be transmitted to people on the vulnerable windows.

The options for Anti-virus for home users of these operating systes are two.

1) clam av, which unfortunately according to the latest testing results I know of, is only 43% effective.

2) AVG from Grisoft. They do have their proprietary, sale version only, software available for windows, macos and linux. They do have the avgfree for windows, but not for the other operating systems.

How did I run my little test? I contacted those AV companies that want people to contact them. [ no sign-up for membership / registration of product required to contact them, which is why Symantec / Norton weren't contacted. ]
McAfee never responed.

Comodo never responded.

AVG did, since I couldn’t find anything but windows links before contacting them.

Kaspersky did, when I complained they sent me a trial version link for windows and I don’t have windows. [ but Kaspersky's Linux version is the over-priced Corporate version, not a home system product so it's not actually one to be included as for home users. ]

Trend Micro, no way to cotact them via their website.

Since most of the AV companies have shown they want you to be at risk, if you are using windows, give your support to the one company that has shown they want to actually stop the malware completely. If you are running a Mac of Linux system, support responsible sofwtare companies that really do show they want to do the job right. The companies with all versions of their product available for more operating systems than windows.

I have not looked at the Free Credit Report services offered in different countries, but the one I just saw for here in Canada is just plain wrong.

freecreditreportsincanada

A website offering this service to us Canadians. They REQUIRE that you give them your credit card information… well, ok, that will help to get credit rating. Hold it a second, the page to put the information about the credit card is on the HTTP protocol, not the secured HTTPS.

The Lawyer that owns the site obvious is a shady one, She is PROMOTING both Credit Card Fraud and Identity Theft.

Well, I blasted them directly calling them stupid thieves for not using ssl for handling credit card details.

Then I reported them to the Local RCMP Headquarters, for Montreal Quebec.

It’s only “free” for 7 days anyways, after that they charge you 29.95 a month. And the only way to avoid this recurring charge is to PHONE THEM, within that 7 day period.

so it isn’t free even if they don’t cost you EVERYTHING by their lack of security.

I bet that if you look at the other services you will find many, if not all, of these issues are there as well.

bunch of criminals they are.

here, the whois search results for the domain:

http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=freecreditreportsincanada&tld=ca

I have been busy for the last while, in getting everything set up to run my own web hosting business.

The url for this company is http://runic-hosting.com

because of server configuration changes for this new venture, I had to re-publish the entire history of the blog.

all trackbacks to specific entries have been broken because of this.

the change, and re-organization of the site also cost all the comments on posts.

get yourself your handy hex editor, like the one that comes with MS Visual Basic.

fire it up and open the file open dialog.

browse to the windows\system32 folder

select the LegitCheckControl.DLL in there.

open it up.

reading the partial english in the right column, look for the LegitCheckWWd

read from there to where it displays SupressWarning.

That one section of the file logs in as administrator, if you are not, turns off warnings, collects data from your computer, sends that data to Microsoft, then turns warnings back on and logs off as administrator.

I could put all 4832 html pages of the file up and let you browse through them to find it, but it would be meaningless, since I could have inserted that into what I post. find it in the file on Your LEGIT version of Windows with MS Office installed.

Then decide, is Microsoft committing the same criminal act they were penalized for by the US Courts with the Windows 98 Update issue of sending information to themselves when you ran windows update in windows 98?

I can only see one reason that proprietary software companies, like Microsoft, Adobe, Corel and Autodesk do not release the source code for their products. Nope, it’s not as they say, to protect their intellectual property, it’s because they must have something to hide. After all, if they didn’t have anything to hide, like MALWARE embedded into their product(s) they would release the source code.

The recent Court decision supporting the claim of the busybox developers against a proprietary software company shows that intellectual proprty is protected when the software in question is open source kind of ruins the claim that keeping it proprietary is to protect intellectual property.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/10/31/monsoon-settles-busybox

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/oct/30/busybox-monsoon-settlement/

Since Richard Stallman and the FSF are so dead set against proprietary technology in an open source package, That would mean that Samba and G.N.O.M.E. violate the GNU-GPL V3 because of the anti-drm stance.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/23/74618_04OPopenent_1.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/15/lessig_stallman_drm/
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html

Samba duplicates a PROPRIETARY protocol. [ Microsoft's smb protocol ]

G.N.O.M.E. requires this proprietary protocol to function.

Didn’t I hear somewhere that Richard Stallman actually uses the G.N.O.M.E. Desktop Environment?
I guess he will have to remove his preferred ui to be in accordance with the GNU-GPL Version 3.

I guess that RHEL, Fedora-core, Centos, Ubuntu, … will have to be completely rebuilt to remove this GNU-GPL V3 violating software.

I am not promoting the use of proprietary technology, I myself do not use any software that is not open source, nor do I use any that requires any proprietary technology where I have the option. My wireless NIC has binary roms for it, though the drivers are GNU-GPL code. [ Ralink's open source drivers on serialmonkey.com ]

I guess NDISwrapper, wine, crossover office will have to be removed, they promote the use of proprietary technologies, in direct violation of Richard Stallman’s stand on proprietary technology on Linux*.

I personally will continue to develop open source software, and use the CCD Copywrite as it is less restrictive than the GNU-GPL in end use, while still requiring open source software to remain open source.
[ http://ccd.apotheon.org/ ]

UPDATE: December 21, 2007:

Microsoft and the Samba development group have reached an agreement where MS gives the documentation for the smb protocol to the Samba group, so this issue is now dead and buried.

The news article:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/122007-microsoft-samba-windows.html?page=1

* Linux being the name of the kernel itself, GNU-Linux being the name of the operating system commonly misnamed Linux.

We have all heard the term “Open Source” and most of us have used at least one open source program, but what is the real impact of open source software?

According to the European Union’s Enterprise and Industry report it is quite substantial ( see http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/studies/publications.htm the Economic Impact Final Report downloadable from there. I have also made it available: http://jaqui-greenlees.net/files/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf ( to save the EU the data transfer ) ) This report, while an in depth study, is focussed solely on the economic impact and ignores several key areas, while only lightly covering others.

The impact of Free / Libre Open Source Software on innovation and improvement in software s mentioned, but they don’t really cover some of the more significant events recently. Mostly because the report was finalized before the events occurred. One of the most significant was the release of Microsoft’s ® Internet Explorer 7 ®. The new features included in this product are a direct response to the success of the open source browser Mozilla Firefox. MS ® also included support for the open source gecko rendering engine that Firefox uses, for both it’s speed and it’s ability to handle Standards Compliant website scripts, which IE ® is known for failing miserably at.

The most important area that the EU report doesn’t really cover is the social impact that open source software has. Open Source Software has a huge social impact, for the simple reason of it is a community effort to develop open source software. The social and political borders that have limited “community” style interactions in the past were destroyed in the open source community. It doesn’t matter where someone comes from in the world, what their education is, what their political stand is, or religion.* What matters is who you are and what you can contribute. As Linus Torvalds has always said: “Show me the code”, his recent actions in submitting patches to the GNOME project to address some of the problems he commented on with GNOME are an example of this attitude. When he was asked for input on how to fix GNOME he just gave them “the code” to fix them, living up to the words he has used for years.

The open source community is comfortable with using collaboration tools online, and working with people from all over the world, the number of languages supported by open source software would not be as great as it is without the efforts of people who know these languages in translating the documentation, allowing for software coded right to display messages, menus and content in the end user’s language of choice.

Free / Libre Open Source Software is one half of the driving forces in the Global Community that has started ending the threat of another World War. Will anyone be willing to go to war with another country when the people in those countrys are regularly in collaboration online? Or in communication? A few short years ago it would have been unusual to find yourself in a discussion with someone on the other side of the planet about their local legal system, or the social scene in their town. Now, it’s common.

What? You don’t think Free / Libre Open Source Software had anything to do with that? Sorry, it did. F.L.O.S.S. is still the driving power of the internet, which is the other half of the equation in the Global Community.

Oh, no, Microsoft ® did not invent the internet, it was around in two different incarnations before Microsoft ® even started selling DOS. Microsoft ® did make it more popular when they integrated IE ® with Windows 95 ® making it far simpler for the average person to get online.

Instead of spending 90% of your time online dong the social web thing and blogging, use your preferred search engine and research the history of the internet and open source software, 60% of what Microsoft ® has done in the last 10 years is battle to keep up with open source software. A battle they are doomed to lose, not even Microsoft ® can afford to pay 20 million programmers to be at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is a rough estimate of the number of people actively volunteering their time and effort to an open source project at any given time.

* the religious wars over vi/emacs, gnome/kde, linux/*bsd, grub/lilo excepted