WordPress users beware of 2.6 upgrade issues

If you couldn’t get to my site for a couple of hours this evening, you caught me in the middle of upgrade issues with the latest version of WordPress. 2.6 was released a little early and unfortunately at least one critical bug was left in. Thankfully the workaround is fairly painless. If you have a WordPress powered blog and haven’t upgraded to 2.6 yet, I’d wait for the 2.6.1 release.

Beware of those promoting kill switches as enhancing security

Security Matters: I’ve Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch

Bruce Schneier is a wise man and it would be wise to heed his warning on this topic. The presence of remotely accessible kill switches in electronic systems is an extremely dangerous idea. There are a lot of people who would love to have total control over every facet of your life. The more connected you are, the more vulnerable you may be in the future. (and arguably today as well) One of the things that’s always turned me off about OnStar is the big brother aspect of it. The same for Lo Jack. While it would certainly make those in control happy, the potential for abuse is too great to ignore. (and too great for human nature to resist IMO…)

Apple finally fixes Leopard with 10.5.3 update

It’s taken a little over 6 months, but Apple has finally fixed some of the nagging issues in their flagship OS. I’ve loved the Leopard experience thus far with one small exception, browsing windows shared folders. So long as you were only browsing folders with a few files, there was no problem. If you’re like me and you tend to archive all your digital photos on one machine and share them over the network this was a real problem. Just attempting to open one subfolder in my digital photo library meant looking at a spinning progress wheel for anywhere up to 20 minutes. Yikes! With 10.5.3, that’s all history. This is great for me because the the new photo browsing features of Leopard are just wonderful. Thank you Apple!