I’m sure you’ve heard about this by now… but if not….

There’s a 17 year old Canadian named Mike Rowe. He chose to register a domain for his design business, so he registered mikerowesoft.com (you can see where this is going can’t you?).

So… of course Gates and crew decide that it’s an infringement on their company name, and send the kid a letter stating that he must give up his rights to his own name. He asks them to make him an offer… they offer him 10 bucks for his name.. he replies with make it 10k (or $1,000 depending on which article you read)… a M$ accuses him of registering the name for the sole purpose of charging M$ a lot of money for it..

Yeah..cuz apparently windoze users often type in www.mikerowesoft.com when they really meant billgatesissatan err… I mean www.microsoft.com Hopefully, the kid will ignore M$’s attempts to buy his name.. and he’ll win the court case…

If you’re paying attention to all the stuff on the right, you’ll notice that this site is now a member of the iBloggers webring. Which is a webring devoted to people using iBlog (DUH! like I really had to explain that)

For those of you not familiar with a webring, its just a bunch of websites with similar themes that link to each other through another service. the iBlogger’s webring uses webring.com to ‘control’ the ring. Its easy to setup, and webring.com provides all the necessary code, so you can just cut and paste it into your website.

We’ve registered two domains. For the time being, both of them are mirroring the content here (via masking, I’m just pointing them to my .Mac account). So, for those of you who can’t remember http://homepage.mac.com/jackofspades

You can now use either http://www.theteppers.net or http://www.kaelkicksass.com

On a related note, I went through Godaddy.com for my domain registrations. They have the cheapest prices on registrations, plus some pretty decent web-hosting/email packages. Since Comcast’s TOS doesn’t technically allow me to run a server of any kind off my connection, I’ll probably go through Godaddy for hosting when we decided to do more then just redirect the domains.

Seems this site no longer shows up on Google.

Its really weird to. Yesterday, Janice and I were able to google for “Kael Tepper” and my Blog was the first result. She called her mom, and her mom tried to google from a Google bar for her version of IE for Windoze (5 or 6 I think). And she got no results. We stopped by there, and I tried the same search from Comcast.net’s home page.. and my Blog was the first result, but going to Google.com resulted in this site not coming up. We tried it later from my Mom’s house, and couldn’t find the Blog on Google anymore. So apparently, my Google listing was only good for a few days =)

This time its by Real Networks.

There are a couple of different articles about it… here’s a link to one on Cnet News.com. It basically boils down to Real Networks suing Microsoft for yet again flexing their illegal monopoly, this time be making it difficult for any other media players to compete against Windows Media Player (how appropriate that its abbreviated down to WMP).

Hopefully, the judge that hears this case, will find Microsoft guilty (since they’ve already been found guilty of being a illegal monopoly). I realize that Real’s lawsuit won’t result in M$’s monopoly being completely broken, but, since the US Justice Department wimped out, the only hope for any real punishment for M$ is the EU, and all these anti-trust lawsuits by individual companies, and that class-action lawsuit filed against them in California..

It finally happened! I’ve been Googled!

I don’t know when it happened, all I know is Janice and I were sitting around looking up public records on the internet (its amazing what you can find out… for example, did you know that there have only been 9 divorces filed by people with the last name of Tepper in the state of Colorado? and thats since like 1923 or something like that…

Anyway.. while we were looking around, I decided to do a search on Google for Kael Tepper, and my Blog was the first result on the page. Pretty Cool =)

I realize the actual article is a few days old.. I haven’t had time to post about it.

So, one of the windows apologists over at PC Magazine wrote an article about a vulnerability in MacOSX..

And when an article starts out with”…I was happy to learn earlier this month…” its pretty obvious that any “Journalistic Integrity” the author may have had has gone right out the window.

First, here’s the article itself hosted over at ABCNews. So go read it if you haven’t already. Now, since the article provides no means of feedback to inform the author (or PC Magazine, or ABCNews) of the factual inaccuracies that are present, I think a good place to send that feedback would be to the author’s publicly listed email address available here .

So.. what I’d love to know, is how does a flaw which involves your MacOSX box being on a trusted network (Home or office LAN for example) which then has to have a un-trusted machine take over DHCP duties for the network in order to affect your machine, come anywhere close to the number of “critical flaws” found in Windoze on such a frequent basis that M$ had to switch to a monthly patch release schedule to try and make it easier for their users to update regularly?

I mean think about it… if someone has access to your network in order to add a un-trusted DHCP server…you’ve got a lot more security concerns than what might happen if someone were to take advantage of this flaw (which is really just a over user-friendly feature designed to make it easier to set up and integrate networks… see this Apple kbase article on the work around)

And of course, like almost all Windoze apologists he uses the whole “There are no viruses for Macs because its such a small market”… Right, how about there are no viruses/worms/trojans for Macs (Of course..this statement excludes Microsoft Word Macro viruses) because OSX is built on a unix kernal, which has been around for years, and is constantly being updated to avoid huge security holes you can drive a Mack truck through (Internet explorer?) And because the Mac OS ships with all remote connection services (FTP, SSL, Web serving, File sharing, etc..) turned OFF, which requires a user who wants to use one of those services to TURN IT ON! as opposed to the Microsoft way of leaving the door wide open (all services turned on by default) with a big “No Security Here” sign hanging in the window…

an amusing article from The Register

The Register is reporting that after months of running Microsoft.com on Linux servers (you know..one of the operating systems that Gates and Ballmer say is less secure and reliable then windows) Microsoft has finally (a little before Thanksgiving) decided to go back to running their website using their server software…guess they finally got around to patching some of the holes in their software, so their machine can be connected to the internet with out constantly rebooting itself!

Crazy Apple Rumors Site comes of age!

Today, the folks over at Crazy Apple Rumors (link) made it to the big time of Apple Rumor Sites. It involves their story from yesterday, which “borrowed” an image from Apple’s current advertising… the changes to the image were incredibly hilarious… follow this link to read their story from today, which explains all the rumory goodness of it.

Congratulations to the folks over at C.A.R.S!