…we wanted to present ourselves as a model for you. - 2 Thessalonians 3:9

I didn’t feel well. I felt sick and cranky. My wife accompanied me to the emergency room of Medical City. There I waited for my turn for the doctor to see me. It was sheer grace that I didn’t loose my cool. As I recall, there was quite a number of people in the same room.

One of them was a lady who stared at me as she smiled. It was one of those smiles that made me fell strange. What is she smilling about? Do I look funny? Can’t she figure out that I’m sick?

In the world of comic books, every bad guy is an evil genius.

On the Web, hackers, spammers, and phishers may be evil, but they’re not required to be geniuses. They can make a healthy living just by exploiting known security holes that many users haven’t bothered to patch. Or by relying on the propensity of millions of people to do things they’ve been told over and over not to do.

The silver lining is that you don’t have to be a genius to avoid these common attacks either. Many small businesses can implement a few simple fixes to avoid most of the bad stuff out there.

Canonical is the latest Linux vendor to patch a vulnerability in the open-source operating system’s kernel that could have left the door open for hackers to find their way into users’ machines.

In an email sent overnight on Monday, the Linux vendor warned users to update all machines running recent versions of Ubuntu, ranging from 6.06, which was released back in mid-2006, to version 8.04, which came out earlier this year. The problem also applied to other versions of Ubuntu such as Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu.

Psystar, the Mac-clone manufacturer that is currently have their pants sued off by Apple is planning a countersuit according to online reports. The company is claiming that Apple’s software license is a violation of anti-trust laws. The company further claims that Apple inflates the prices for its hardware and the EULA unfairly prevents other companies from competing with Alternative systems.

This case is extremely important to the technology industry, and one that Apple desperately needs to win. Not only with this affect Apple, it will affect all software and hardware companies from this point forward.

Attacks in the wild are under way against Linux systems with compromised SSH keys, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is warning.

The attacks appear to use stolen SSH keys to take hold of a targeted machine and then gain root access by exploiting weaknesses in the kernel. The attacks then install a rootkit known as Phalanx2, which scours the newly infected system for additional SSH keys. There’s a viral aspect to this attack. As new SSH keys are stolen, new machines are potentially vulnerable to attack.

Adobe Systems has announced major updates to its Photoshop Elements suite of video- and photo-editing software, including online sharing and mobile-phone options. In beta now, the software is expected to be on retail shelves in early October.

Photoshop Premiere Elements 7 adds significant features to video editing, while Photoshop Elements 7 incorporates major enhancements to the photo-editing program. Mobile features cover only a limited number of phones.

Firefox 3.1 could run web apps almost three times faster than previous version, according to the Mozilla Foundation.

The speed boost is the result of a new feature called TraceMonkey, which promises to dramatically speed up programs written in JavaScript. JavaScript is used to deliver a number of web-based applications including Gmail. Unfortunately, the poor performance of JavaScript means these applications often struggle to run with the same responsiveness as a desktop application.

This had led to developers moving to alternative platforms such as Flash. However, TraceMonkey adds native code compilation to Mozilla’s existing SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and Mozilla is hoping the performance boost will redress the balance

Mozilla released an experimental browser plug-in Tuesday that aims to connect the Web with language to help users perform common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

Ubiquity, created by Aza Raskin–son of Apple Mac pioneer Jef Raskin–is a command-line interface that allows users to use plain language to manipulate Web tasks, such as mapping, translation, shopping, or retrieving entries from Wikipedia, Yelp, and Twitter. The free Firefox plug-in allows for the creation of “user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs,” according to a post on Mozilla’s site Tuesday. “In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.”

Steve Jobs is still parking in handicapped spaces at Apple, according to a new snap posted to Flickr.

Snapper Rana Sobhany spotted Jobs’ Mercedes SL55 AMG parked in a handicapped spot at the Apple campus over the weekend.

“Mercedes? Check. No license plate? Check. Handicap spot? Yep, this is Steve Jobs’ car!!!” she writes.

Jobs, of course, has a long history of parking in handicapped parking spaces at Apple. The reports go back years, and have recently been documented on Flickr.

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.