Having been badly hit with a worm we did hire a security consultant, and the thing that was tickling me is how comes the worm wasn t hit by on access scan. His response was that as we were infected by a usb key (we re sure of this), there s something specific about usb which makes it so that on it the on access scan won t work, or at least wont work in time, if there s autorun on a computer the worm can be run, go to memory (it bypassed oas), steal some credentials, spread via network, save itself on computer drives with your credentials so it can survive a reboot. From there attach itself to critical windows services that can t be unloaded, attach itself to antiviruses so they don t see it. Spread some more.....

At first patents seems like a good idea, you do research, you don't want to get it stolen, you patent it to protect yourself and make sure you get some revenue from this in case somone want to use your idea. Now imagine i need to go from one side of my house to the other one, i find the shortest path, great. Then i learn that somehow another person has the same house, also had the same problem than me and patented this path thought his house. Would it seems even fair that because someone patented this path you couldn't use it anymore (without paying), after all you found it by yourself and didn't stole his idea, it just happen that for the same problem that many person may have there can be a single best solution. IT stuff is just about the same

If you live in France you get a my favorite ISP, (don t have any commercial relation but be one of his customer), free (appears at fbx.proxad.net on irc )who has what they call a freebox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox), which is one of the inventor as what we know now as triple pay for internet, phone, and video, and they offer as a small but good geek bonus an option like a sip account, wifi, and redirections of your phone line linked to your adsl account to that sip account you own. now if you have a phone on which the sip works (bought a n85 a week ago), then you can do what as you want, have a single device. However note that peoples still have 2 numbers to contact you and you still have 2 outgoing choices for phone calls. They got other bonuses like tivo like recoder with HD channels, about 180 channels, and phone to landline to 60 countries for 30â, good news server retention, usualy, 6MB adsl, ipv6, Gb sized mail with zimbra and web account with apache mysql. (note that they had to inovate and redo the dslam infrastructure to do that), hoo too much goodies. I even like their geeky tv ads, and i mean by anyway , long time ago in france when isp were charging us for internet access on top of the phone comunication fee (which was way higher than now), and free was the first to have no charge on top of the phone fees, and that's where they got their name and then their infrastructure and budget to do what they do now. Now also be prepaired to wait for 3 months to get your dsl line, because the historic operator always make a few errors when switching the connecting to their lines.

just to get the easy achievement

The original article says than: "second generation XO, which it claims will cost $75 " "To anticipate them costing $20 each is not out of the question." That's not a 12$ laptop, but then i guess the article submiter didnt read properly this part: "that can be the difference between earning $1 an hour instead of $1 a day." I guess that s where the 12$ comes from , but it s not the laptop price, but rather the eventual buyer's income for 12h of work at 1$/h