Filed under: Internet

Do you want to make more money? Sure, we all do! You can make more money quickly and easily by studying for a new career at home in your spare time.

Get your degree in professional internet surfing from myinternetdiploma.com! It's the hot new career! And you know that "study" talk we've gone on about? Pfft. Studying is for people who actually want to learn stuff. Where's the glory in that?

And spare time? That would imply that we have lives and other stuff we should be doing, and then we wouldn't really need an internet diploma.

The good news is, as long as you know how to type in your email address, and are then able to log in to the aforementioned email account by using your username and password... You too can get a degree in professional internet surfing. That's not all...

There are absolutely no tuition costs! Plus, putting it on your resumé is no problem. It's not a purchased degree, or an earned degree. That's right! You can use it where ever you wish because it is -- well, pretty much worthless?

So, yeah. Why on earth would you want to do this? Hey, search us. It's kind of funny. Totally pointless, but funny. For about two whole minutes, you know, as long as it takes for you to fill out the forms for your degree. No, wait, and then it's fun for another two minutes, when you view your degree. Then you realize that you have a molecular biology final tomorrow and reality sets in.

Why would the site owners want to do this? We imagine there is probably some harvesting of emails involved somewhere, but we're not sure. The few, the brave, the worthy DLS bloggers who have earned this prestigious honor didn't use email addresses that they check regularly. It is entirely possible that the folks behind My Internet Diploma are really into education, and want to bestow its virtue on everybody.

The "No Surfer Left Behind" Act has a nice ring to it, in that case. Otherwise, make sure your spam filter is up to snuff.

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Filed under: Fun, OS Updates, Linux, Novell, Open Source

The people at the OpenSUSE project are so excited about their recent 11.0 release, they're ready to share the love with a lucky Download Squad reader! And it's not that garden variety elementary school crush sort of love, either. It's the bona fide, dyed in the wool, hand-holding sort of love, complete with instruction manuals, quick start guides and 90 days of end-user installation support bliss!

The OpenSUSE 11.0 boxed version is especially nice for new users, not only because of the support and great manuals, but because it has every iteration of OpenSUSE 11.0 you could ever imagine. Need the x86 version? There it is! Got a 64 bit processor and a ridiculous amount of RAM to support? Hey, the 64 bit version's there too!

There's the usual Linux suspects, too, of course: KDE, GNOME, Xfce, OpenOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Amarok, firewall software, and AppArmor. But lest your heart become overwhelmed, there are a few hoops you have to jump through to get up close and personal with the OpenSUSE 11.0 box set of love.

In order to win the OpenSUSE 11.0 team's heart (or at least the fruits of their labor):

• Open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older
• Leave a comment on this post and tell us what you like best about free speech and/or free beer (and keep in mind that our moms visit this site, so go easy on the free speech concerning the free beer, okay?)
• Contest is open until 11:59 pm Eastern Time, June 26, 2008
• You may enter once.
  
• One winner will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize is one boxed copy of OpenSUSE 11.0, including manuals and 90 days of end-user installation support. (valued at $60)
• Click here for complete official rules.

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Filed under: Developer, Macintosh, Shareware, Beta

One of the fundamental tools for developers is not just their development environment of choice, but also their version control system of choice. The debate over just which version control system is undoubtedly set to rage on for eternity, however one of the more popular systems is Subversion. On the Mac, up until now there's been a number of choices: Terminal (command-line) which is built into the OS and includes Subversion as part of OS X Leopard, svnX - another open-source graphical user interface, or using the built-in Subversion support in Apple's OS X development IDE Xcode.

For some of us here at Download Squad, a fear of the command-line, compounded with a little loathing of the svnX interface made the announcement of Versions.app - over a year ago - more than a little exciting. Promising an elegant and truly OS X interface to work with Subversion, it's taken a long time to come to fruition - however the betas to date do appear to deliver.

After having used Versions on a daily basis since its debut 2 weeks ago, it's certainly showing a great deal of promise - and makes version control far friendlier. As others have noted, the application not only makes working with existing repositories easy, but also has quick links to Subversion web-service Beanstalk, allowing you to easily create a new online repository and add it to Versions.

Pricing for Versions will be set 'when version 1.0 ships', and currently all (free-to-use) betas expire on July 1st.

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Filed under: Business, Finance, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, the concepts are pretty much the same. You follow someone with interests that intrigues you, see what their doing, what their saying and sometimes you do what they say. Now what if they told you where to spend your money, would you? Covestor thinks so.

Covestor takes the social networking formula and applies it to the stock market in a 2 part system. The first requires members with some sort of investment background (we'll call them experts) to build portfolios. The second has average users reviewing these members and if they like what they see, they follow them.

If these experts buy or sell a certain stocks, users get to see that and choose if they would like to buy or sell along side their experts. Covestor is currently working on a fully automated system as well. You'll just be able to put down a bunch of cash and the system will invest your money as your experts invest. Of course as an expert you get a percentage of the action, since people are following your advise.

So is this the next step in social networking? We already take advice on what to wear, where to go and what to eat. Why not take it a step further with having strangers tell you what to do with your money?

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Filed under: E-mail, Yahoo!

There are plenty of ways to get a custom email address. You can sign up for service with Mail.com and choose from a number of custom domains. Or you can register a domain and use Google Apps to link it with an email account for free. But if you're a Yahoo! Mail fan, you might find that getting the domain name you want isn't the hard part. It's getting the prefix.

About 266 million people use Yahoo! Mail, which means the odds of getting an address like john@yahoo.com are pretty poor at this point. Today Yahoo! made things a bit easier by opening up two new domains, @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com.

If RocketMail sounds familiar, that's because it's the name of a company that Yahoo! purchased in 1997. The first version of Yahoo! Mail was built on technology developed by RocketMail earlier in the 1990s. You can snag an account using one of the new domains by visiting the new signup page.

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Filed under: Design, Fun, Web services, web 2.0

NewsGator, the company behind award-winning RSS readers FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and NewsGator Go!, has just released an update to its widget platform, in the form of Editor's Desk 2.1.

Editor's Desk is a web-based tool for creating widgets that can display dynamic content (using RSS) that can then be embedded into your website, Facebook page (as an app), Blogger, TypePad, NetVibes, iGoogle,Pageflakes, Live.com and Live Spaces.

Version 2.1 boasts an improved interface that is not only better looking, but easier to use. Version 2.1 has also added two new widget templates, a search tool (for premium subscribers), the ability to clone widgets and a way to monitor the feeds within your widgets for problems.

We played around with the new version of Editor's Desk and were impressed with how easy the whole creation process really was. To create a widget, you can either add your own RSS feeds or choose a collection of feeds from categories provided by NewsGator. The free version of the service only provides minimal customization options for your widgets, you can select from a set a templates and then modify some of the colors, but if you pay for the premium version of the service, you can customize the CSS and HTML of the widgets. Some companies like USA Today and The Discovery Channel have already done that with spectacular results.

Continue reading NewsGator launches Editor's Desk 2.1

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Filed under: Security, Macintosh, Apple

Yesterday, an anonymous Slashdotter posted about a security vulnerability in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 that could allow a maicious party root access to your system. The vulnerability, which works by running an AppleScript on behalf of Apple Remote Desktop Agent, which because of the way ARDAgent works, sets the user ID to root. From there, any subprocesses are running with root privledges, without requiring a user password, and in the wrong hands, the results could be very, very messy.

Taking into consideration that several additional factors would have to be involved in order for any damage to unfold -- either physical access to the machine or a remote login under the same account that is currently in use or the end user would have to willingly run a malicious application -- this is still disconcerting enough for us to want a quick and effective resolution.

Luckily, there is a very easy way to protect your system from being affected. It turns out, if remote access is enabled under the Sharing pane in System Preferences -- even if no other users are permitted to administer or access your machine -- you're in the clear.

TUAW has a visual walkthrough on how to apply this workaround for both Tiger and Leopard users, but the fix is pretty simple. In Leopard, simple enable Remote Management feature in the Sharing panel, don't select any of the options and then select "apply to only these users" without defining any users. Now, if the potentially damaging script is run, your system will report an error instead of setting itself as root. Plus, if you do have a system that is managed remotely, that person can still acess your computer (just make sure they are listed in the "allowed users" panel).

If only all security threats were that easy to fix!

Thanks Mike, Robert and Scott!

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Filed under: Fun

Tag clouds are a great way to visualize content. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us as well as a little blog called Download Squad use clouds. The larger the word, the more popular it is compared to the rest.

Now what if you wanted a cloud of your very own? One way to go about this is to enlist the help of Wordle. Put in a bunch of words or enter your del.icio.us user name and based on the information you've provided Wordle will generate a cloud for you.

The clouds generated by Wordle are for display purposes only. You won't be able to click on a word and have it go to a particular site. It's just mainly for fun. And you got to admit, a bunch of words all mashed together looks rather interesting.

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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Mozilla, Freeware, Social Software, web 2.0, Browsers

It's been a while since we've seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Start Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an amazing variety of start pages to choose from, we've never found any of them to be particularly compelling.

Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a start page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It's actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.

Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we can offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.

Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it's also dangerous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.

But once it's all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven't been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that's certainly something.

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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Microsoft

Back in 2006, Microsoft decided to kill its MSN Music store. But MSN Music customers didn't have anything to worry about, because the songs they'd already legally purchased would be theirs to play forever. Sort of. In April of this year, Microsoft announced that it would be pulling the plug on its DRM servers for MSN Music. That meant that once you authorized your purchased music you'd be able to play it to your hearts content on your existing computer. But if you want to buy a new computer and transfer your music collection to the new PC, you're out of luck.

Needless to say, this was not a popular decision. And now it looks like Microsoft has reconsidered. Rather than shutting down the DRM servers in August, the company plans to keep them up and running... through at the end of 2011. Microsoft may decide to keep offering the service after 2011, but nobody's making any promises at this point.

We can understand why Microsoft would want to shut down the DRM servers. The company isn't making money by selling music through the MSN Music store anymore. So why waste the money on keeping the servers up and running? But that's the problem with DRM -- it doesn't go away. So if you're going to commit to selling music that comes with a set of heavy restrictions, you'd better be prepared to offer long term support.

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