Bill Lindner

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reportedly decided that the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol reserves the right to seize -- for an indefinite amount of time and without probable cause -- documents and electronic media or copies ... thereof for further review, as well as make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." The documents and electronic media may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location. Translated, ... (view more)

The Inquirer has reported that there are heat issues affecting significant quantities of older NVIDIA G84 and G86 GPUs used in GeForce 8400M and 8600M graphics cards. The report from the Inquirer comes on the heels of earlier reports that NVIDIA had ... discovered a problem relating to "significant quantities" of older mobile GPUs. There is currently no word from NVIDIA as to what product lines are affected. In short, all the G84 and G86 GPUs are bad. All the mobile and desktop GPUs use the same exact ASIC , so expect them to go bad in mass quantities. According to the Inquirer, these ASICs have ... (view more)

While Microsoft excitedly tries to sway public opinion by touting that Windows Vista License sales top 180 Million units, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was busy smacking Microsoft down -- reportedly shipping PCs with a Vista Business license but with Windows ... XP pre-loaded in the majority of business computers sold since the June 30 Windows XP execution date established by Microsoft -- casting a lot of doubt over how many copies of Vista have actually been sold. In other words, Microsoft counts a sale for Windows Vista even though the computer manufacturer actually sold Windows XP. It's kind of ironic ... (view more)

In yet another case where government appears to be above the law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has issued a report warning that your printer may be spying on you. Some color laser manufacturers are encoding each page with identifying ... information -- secret code that could be used to identify the printer and, potentially, the person who used it. Without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. What's worse is that there are no laws to prevent abuse. There's little to stop the Secret Service from using printer codes to secretly trace the origin of ... (view more)

Since retiring Windows XP on June 30 of this year, Microsoft has been making a push to repair the reputation of Windows Vista while attempting to gain more support from small businesses. Eighteen months after Vista shipped, Microsoft finally ... confessed to what everyone already knew: Vista has problems. More accurately, as noted by Information Week, Microsoft is admitting that Vista had problems shortly after its release, but claims they've been fixed, so it's safe to switch to Vista now. It's not quite that simple though. A couple days ago Microsoft announced the launch of the Windows Vista ... (view more)

Get a load of this one, PC fans: Computer World reports that more than ever before enterprises are turning to Macs. Yankee Group research firm recently conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators, and found that nearly 80% of ... businesses have Macs in-house, almost doubling the percentage from users surveyed two years ago. Laura Didio from Yankee Group Research Inc. conducted the survey. Didio reports that a number of the businesses surveyed said they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed. Two years ago, 47% of those polled said they had Apple Inc. hardware in ... (view more)

June 30, 2008 is the day Microsoft is slated to discontinue Windows XP to make way for a new era in operating systems -- start bars will give way to wonky buttons and a refreshed design, stable operation will give way to frequent crashing, and XP ... will die at the hands of a misguided killer: Microsoft. (Source: itworld.com ) While Microsoft will have you believe Vista isn't so bad and it's the next successor to Windows XP, it's really not. Many feel that Vista is an over-bloated mess of code that features too many overzealous security prompts thanks to the 'security' feature known as User ... (view more)

A leaked internal report on a secret trial of eavesdropping and advertising technology from Internet Service Provuder (ISP) British Telecom (BT) reportedly shows that the system crashed some unsuspecting users' browsers, causing a small percentage ... of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance to believe they had been infected with adware. The January 2007 report (PDF), published by WikiLeaks shows what can happen when an ISP tampers with raw Internet traffic for its own profit. The leak was revealed weeks after Charter Communications told its users it would be testing similar ... (view more)

Some users of Windows Vista Media Center have been reportedly blocked from recording some NBC Universal TV shows, receiving error messages that read "restrictions set by the broadcaster and/or originator prohibit recording of this program" instead. ... One person prevented from recording the NBC shows is an IT director in Northern California who says this is indicative of why the current Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes are flawed. DRM schemes affect people who intend to legally consume content, with no intention of stealing the content. People intent on stealing content already have ways ... (view more)

Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft and current MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional), has reportedly published a tool designed to detect and fix PCs that may be susceptible to "endless reboots" if they ... are updated to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3). Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have yet to issue a fix or a patch for the endless reboots that, as previously reported by our own Brandon Dimmel, primarily affects HP machines running Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processors. Johansson posted a link to the tool (a small, 16K Visual Basic Script file ... (view more)