Adobe UK vs US Pricing
I purchased a copy of Adobe's "Creative Suite 3 Web Premium" today, but I did so via the Adobe US store rather than the UK store and saved £604/$1209 by doing so.
Adobe sell the product for $1599 on the US site coming in $1,209 cheaper than the UK store list price of £1404.02 ($2,808). Even without VAT (UK Tax) the product is £1,195 ($2,390) from the UK store, a $790 premium over the US price.
You will need a US credit card / billing address to purchase from the US store.
I'm sure if Adobe ever comment on the matter they will come up with something along the lines of "UK support costs.....". Well I don't know about any of you, but I have never in my life called any sort of software technical support line.
Shame on Adobe for charging Brits nearly twice the amount that they charge people in the US.
Yahoo Mail, a Cesspit of Spam
Need I say more? Yahoo mail doesn't seem to be able to filter out the spam very well at all. Perhaps Yahoo thinks that I might benefit from various drugs and a few Nigerian 419 scams.
If you're not using gmail yet then you should be. I have been using gmail for about a year now and have not had any spam get through to my inbox, nor have I had any emails incorrectly marked as spam.
Encryption Keys Cold Boot Attack
If you are using an encryption program like TrueCrypt to keep your hard drive data encrypted, you should power down your PC when ever it is not being used.
A recent video, by researchers at Princeton, demonstrates how an attacker can recover the contents of RAM from a running machine, or even one that has only been shut down for a short period of time. If you have your encrypted drives mounted at the time of the physical attack then the encryption key can most likely be recovered from the memory image.
People, including most experts, previously believed that RAM instantly lost all of it's data when power was removed. This appears to not be the case with most DDR RAM, with memory taking a few seconds to several minutes to fade away.
Check out the video below for more information and a demonstration of the attack. Be sure to put your RAM modules through your shredder if you suspect an imminent physical attack.
rsync error code 5, wrong password
I just got the following error whilst trying to make an rsync transfer:
rsync error: error starting client-server protocol (code 5) at main.c(1296) [sender=2.6.8]
I couldn't figure out what the issue was for a little while, I tried running the rsync command several times and entered the password when prompted. Unfortunately the error message provided (code 5) didn't really help. It turned out that I had CAPS LOCK on and the password I was entering was incorrect. Silly mistake, but hopefully this will save someone searching for this rsync error some time.
Revver.com Sells To LiveUniverse
Revver has apparently sold to LiveUniverse (Brad Greenspan's operation) for less than $5m, at a considerable loss to investors.
"Online-video company Revver Inc., which has tried to stake out a niche by broadcasting only material that doesn't infringe on copyrights, has been sold to online-entertainment network LiveUniverse for less than $5 million, people familiar with the matter said.
The sale is a blow to Revver's investors, who had sunk $12.75 million into the Los Angeles company. The deal demonstrates the difficulty many online-video start-ups are having competing with Google Inc.'s YouTube."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120337555935275417.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Things are certainly tough in the online video world right now, and will only get tougher as Google continues to crush all competition.