Kilo Seven

I have a question I'd like to ask of techno-seniors: Which Linux apps (besides the obvious, those labelled as magnifiers and such) would be superior for Seasoned Citizens? Which distro has the best interface? Saw this ad (below) in Readers' Digest and it led me to wonder how much better Linux could be for folks who are new to PCs.  The price of a rebuilt PC at FreeGeek is appealing to folks who know they're not making any more money and must live on what they've earned in a lifetime of work, and the anti-virus, anti-spyware, updating, and general stability of Ubuntu-Kubuntu-Lubuntu are far superior to Windows, as is the Ubuntu Software Center.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/07/yet-another-privacy.html Will a day go by _without_ a Facebook privacy breach?

Tabbed browsers, like IE7, Opera, Firefox and Chrome are wonderful things, but dangerous if you use Facebook, for that social networking business is now shoehorning business apps into your profile if you do so little as log into Facebook then visit another site while Facebook is still open . MacWorld adds: You don't have to have a Facebook window open, you don't need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there's no notification, and there doesn't appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook's byzantine privacy settings. OK, from now on, I will use one web browser (Chromium? Firefox? IE?) to visit Facebook, purge its cookies and cache on every shutdown, and my favorite browser (Chrome) to browse to everywhere else. That will keep Facebook in its place.

$24 in China will get you a WiFi hacking kit designed to automate cracking WEP and WPA passwords. As the Network World article reveals: To crack a WEP key, the applications exploit weaknesses in the protocol that have been known for years. For WPA, they capture data being transmitted over the wireless network and target it with a brute-force attack to guess the key. Want privacy? Go to WPA2 security, or use a long WPA password with upper case, lowercase, numbers and punctuation. WPA2's a lot better...

Need to find an old Radio Shack catalog? Don't head to the garage (the XYL threw them out, anyway, during spring cleaning). Instead, see them online at http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html