The English word virus comes directly from the Latin word Virus. The plural form, in English, is viruses. Here is what Miriam-Webster has for virii , notice that no such word exists in the definitive dictionary of American English. In Latin, there is no plural form. Here is the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Notice that virii isn't even a Latin word, and viri is Latin for men. Unfortunately I don't have access to the Oxford English Dictionary for definitive proof in British English like I do for American English.

A week or so ago, there was an article about InTuit'd TurboTax using DRM to write to the Boot Sector of the disk. I wrote their PR contact an email asking for their position on the matter. I've posted their reponse as a reply to the thread, and am posting it here as well.

Hello Mr. Georgeson,

First off I would like to sincerely thank you for coming to us and getting our side of the story instead of just making a decision from the horror stories that are out on the internet. Below I will give you some information that will shed light on said subject and if you feel that you must go else where for your tax software, then by all means do so. At least you will be one of the few who can say, I've heard "argument A" and I've heard "argument B" and my decision is.... You know what I mean? We at Intuit Inc totally believe in that the customer MUST do what he or she feels is right. As everyone knows, this is the first time ever that we have required a Product Activation and from listening to our customers, we are already working on a better way to enforce Product Activation instead of the way that is currently used. So we do listen to everyone and we do what we think is best for Intuit Inc and all of our customers. Please let me know if you have any further questions or comments or even ideas.

Don

Executive Response Team

Intuit, Inc.

Don_Support@intuit.com

The Macrovision SafeCast technology being used this year by TurboTax to enable product activation does write a small amount of data to an area of the first track of the hard disk that is not used by the Windows file system, as do a number of other programs and utilities. This data, which contains no personally identifiable information, provides a way for TurboTax to tell that it has already been successfully activated on a particular computer. It is placed in this area so that if a customer's license data becomes corrupted or is accidentally deleted, reactivation can happen automatically in most cases. SafeCast does not write to or change the hard disk's Master Boot Record or alter the partition table or other important data.

This technology in no way harms your hard drive or computer. Because we take customer concerns seriously, however, Intuit is already working with Macrovision to explore different solutions for future releases of TurboTax.

Here is a website that gave TurboTax a thorough test. http://www.pctest.com/intuit/index.htm

Again please let me know if you have any other questions.

Is it just me, or is 'cd /var/log; less secure' a rather unintuitive command to run when trying to fix up any security issues?

Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays to those who find such a reference to Christianity offensive). I'm just relaxing at home with my wife. My little sister got me the coolest thing: a bobble-head doll of Ash (Evil Dead and Army of Darkness). If I had a digital camera I'd put a snapshot on my web site. I was going to get a digital camera, but I think I'll get more use out of a new TV. Mine has to be reset every now and then (the picture size gets messed up, probably cuts off a third of the image overall). Hope everyone is having a good time. Peace.

i think i fully explained myself already.

ok. so I can do `netstat -lntp` as root on linux to see all TCP ports in the LISTEN state and the process that owns them. I thought it'd be cool to write w script to just get the PID of the process owning a particular port. The netstat listing give the PID/process name (ie 23918/java). I think this confuses AWT. `netstat -lntp | grep : | awt -F ' ' {'print $7'}` prints nothing. Printing $1-$6 works fine, it's just $7 that doesn't print, and I think it's because of the /. (no pun intendeg there) So I though "what about SED instead of AWT?" Well truth is I don't know SED regexps well enough. I tried s/^.* (\d)+\/.*$/$1/ since I think that's what I'd do in perl. But I don't think it liked the parens. Anyhoo. Anyone care to help me out?

Since I've been steadily increasing how frequently I comment, and even have a couple friends/fans (w00t) I figured I start leaving the occasional journal entry too. You know those CDW commercials shot from Fred's point of view as he walks through the halls and people ask stupid questions? I'm Fred (as I'm sure many other readers are). I work at a virtual company, nearly everyone telecommutes. We have a small office with like 4 people and a DSL line. This one guy keeps moving stuff (including the DSL equipment) and then they all call me when it doesn't work. If I had a nickel for every time he's unplugged the DSL modem from the phone jack, I might be able to afford a phone call. Have a good one. ;)