IBM is getting to be an even cooler company. By embracing Open Source IBM changed my view of the company, and now they have given free access to 500 patents. Rock on! This is a statement from one of the biggest patent holders in the world. Software patents is bad for you.
IBM
It’s a real secret
Back in 1982 I used to work for Apple answering Apple II support questions by phone. A couple of times people would call and ask questions about the Macintosh. This was two years before it was released! I guess Apples confidentiality is a lot better today.
First Mac rumor on the internet.
Usenet – The forgotten network
Photo by Paul Hammond
It’s been awhile since I last logged on to Usenet to read some groups and to download stuff. I found this great application called Unison from a company called Panic. And it’s great. I even signed up for a Usenet account from them when buying the software. I now have a 10mbit line at home, and no Usenet provider has been able to provide a fast enough service to me, until now. Impressive stuff. The only downside with the account is that you only get 10gig of download. Now, that may sound like a lot, but I get through that fast.
The program feels like a native Mac OS X application, and it’s written in Cocoa. It’s reasonably fast to search, and the user interface is easy to learn. The same goes for saving links to different newsgroups.
Thumbs up for this one!
Little Snitch makes sure Mac applications doesn’t call home
Little Snitch keeps you covered
Use Little Snitch to monitor what developers of programs sends home. Then you can stop that specific traffic. More and more programs phone home with information to the software company. Sometimes it’s harmless, like checking if a newer version is available, but sometimes they also send data like serial numbers and your registration information. So is there a way for you to control what programs can do? Yes, there is! There’s an excellent program called Little Snitch that monitors all communication from applications on your Mac OS X machine and asks you if the information is allowed to be sent over the internet.
Great stuff! And you can tell the program to remember settings so you can allow regular communications to get through.