It’s funny how people can be so wrong sometimes. I invested in Apple almost 9 months ago and it has grown for me almost 134%. Plus it’s split one time. I can only think what it would be like if I would have invested in 2001 when it was at $7.00 a share.

Check out the story.

“Don’t buy Apple’s (AAPL:Nasdaq – news – commentary – research – analysis) stock. And if you own it, sell it. I know the company has a core following that is loyal, even cultlike, but the broader base of believers has been steadily eroding for years.”

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So, like, how many different consoles are working their way onto the market. I think it’s something like 3 (I’m not a console fan). It seems as though Microsoft wanted to steal the limelight and have their system out first.

There have been various reports of these xbox 360′s becoming the coined term, x-brick.

For those of you who are too lazy to look for the video, this is a direct link to it.

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So let me talk about the present state of things. I’m sitting and surfing away at my usual hangout…Crazy Mocha (of South Side). It’s a great place to get coffee, listen to music….and surf packets of information going across the network. What do I mean by packets…well packets are those little small bits of information which are passed between computers. They can contain almost anything–from this text to your passwords. So how do I know what is being sent from my computer. Well, Unix (*nix, Linux, etc) has the great ability to do many things, including the sniffing of packets. The best software title for this is Ethereal. Ethereal acts like a network sniffer, picking up all information on a network in real-time. It lets you analyze the information, see who’s doing what, etc.

So recently I decided to turn it on myself to see what I could find. I specifically wanted to see what was being sent from my computer, over the internet, while checking e-mail. What I found kinda made me feel like I had no security. I’ve heard many times over that some packets (specifically those in POP and IMAP e-mail protocols) were being sent from computers in clear text. That means that I can read them without any special software to decipher what the packet has stored in it.

So here’s what I did; I turned on the packet sniffer (setting it to specifically sniff my own computers packets). I watched what it was sending while checking my e-mail. After picking up the packets, I scanned them to see what was being sent. Low and behold, there was my login and password being sent in clear text. I couldn’t believe it! Following up on my fears of having my e-mail login information hijacked, I dropped an e-mail to my web-hosting provider. I explained my fears of having the password hi-jacked and asked what I could do. A person by the name of Joseph responded:

…please know that in all of our years of Internet work, we have never-even-once known of or heard about an email password snooped and stolen in transit. This would need to come by way of a MITM (man in the middle) attack which is technically extremely difficult when compared to all the other common ways that email passwords and access to email facilities are stolen. In other words, hackers these days are not very motivated to snoop your password on the wire because these hackers all over the world are receiving gigabytes of passwords on a daily basis from keystroke recording viruses which are very pervasive throughout the Internet right now.

These viruses usually come in by way of an Outlook email attachment, or are delivered via the web (usually via porn sites), or come in via a shareware installation. Once installed in the PC, the virus runs in the background recording keystrokes, then sends out the keystroke records to the hacker via email when the computer is on but not actively being used. The real trick with this is that no amount of encryption will help. The passwords are compromised right off the keyboard before any encryption can take place.

So what has this done to my actions in the coffee bar environment. Well, I found out how to access my e-mail over a web-based interface with SSL encryption support. This prevents my password from being sent in clear-text format…so there’s no worries there now. But the underlying question is, what can you do to prevent your e-mail login information from beiing hijacked. The best bet is to remain on a wired network, this cuts down on people being able to read you information. If you need to send e-mail, try to do it from a web-based interface with encryption. With encryption set, your password will be scambled.

That is it…I obviously will be doing more research to figure out different ways of protecting such information.

This guy has to be a complete idiot… I mean, when will the freaking record companies learn for christsake!

RIAA President Cary Sherman gave a recent college press-conference where he addressed Sony’s rootkit fiasco (among other things — the whole trascript is worth reading for a quick visit to the planet greed). His take? Other companies do the same thing all the time!

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As some may be aware, I recently stopped my job at invivodata. The primary reason for it all was my need to do better in school (which has already payed off by my doing pretty well at a neuroscience test — those things are damn hard). There are, of course, other reasons for my quitting, but I choose not to discuss those here.

I’ve discussed the point of passion many times before here on my blog. I possess this facet of life in many of the things I do…but right now I’m relishing in the fact that the only pressing thing on my plate is school. But the other half of this is a seemingly endless amount of time in which I need to keep myself occupied. So far, it hasn’t been that tough. I’ve been keeping everything moving in my head with teaching myself advanced topics in PHP, linux on my newly acquired laptop — given to me cause they didn’t know what to do with it anymore, and spending time with the girl.

Speaking of the girl, we have recently passed our one-year mark (November 11 being the time). I felt rather bad as I could not do all that much for Renee as I would have wanted to. Money is the pressing factor. I do plan on doing some nice things for her up and coming though. These things include a few nice things for christmas, ski-trip to Seven Springs, and a few others.