PayPal is a great service for enabling both businesses and consumers to buy and sell goods and services online without exposing private financial information to the other parties in a transaction. As a consumer, you can safely purchase goods and services online without exposing your credit or debit card information to be recorded and possibly misused. As a business, you can be paid for your goods or services using the Web or email without the need of storing your customer’s private financial information.

A big concern with PayPal is that anyone who knows the password of your PayPal account can access the financial services that you have authorized to be used with PayPal. For consumers, this means that unauthorized purchases or cash transfer may be performed from your credit cards and bank accounts. As a business, unauthorized PayPal access can be a source of fraudulent purchases. Password security is always the responsibility of the PayPal account holder; but now PayPal has a service to make the disclosure of your PayPal password an almost insignificant threat.

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For people who have been waiting for Half-life 2: Episode 2 to be released, you may now pre-purchase the Orange Box package on Steam. The Orange Box contains Half-life 2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Portal, and the long awaited Team Fortress 2 (and you thought Duke Nukem Forever would be out first, eh?). Pre-purchasing the Orange Box allows you to pre-load the HL2 content to your computer and be ready to play when it is released on October 10, 2007. You are also allowed to participate in the TF2 beta starting Monday, September 17th. Individually these games are $130US, but the Orange Box price with pre-purchase discount is only $45US. If you haven’t yet jumped on the Half-life bandwagon yet, other Half-life 2 packages with Counter Strike, Team Fortress Classic, and all of the original Half-life releases are available too.

Also guaranteed to delight TFC aficionados is the release of Fortress Forever, a free Team Fortress Classic mod for Half-life 2. The updated look-and-feel of HL2 with the very familiar classes and maps of TFC make FF impossible for nostalgic TFC gamers–such as myself–to resist. (I think the Half-life deathmatch servers are going to be very quiet from now on.) You can download Fortress Forever from FilePlanet. And if you can’t remember the last time that you updated your ATI or nVidia graphics card drivers, it’s time.

If you see DarthDemo on a FF or TF2 server, be sure to say “Hi!” and I’ll be happy to frag ya! ;)

I’ve been testing software using 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate Edition running in VMWare 6 on a Dell 64-bit server. I connect to the server using Remote Desktop, logon to my account, run VMWare, and start the Vista virtual machine. My problem is that with this setup the mouse in Vista is very draggy and quite annoying to use. This is the behavior that you would expect when running a remote access application over a low-bandwidth, high-latency network connection. But I’m running on a gigabit LAN and connecting to a server in the next room! What gives?

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As an academic student of Information Security, I am very happy to announce that my school, Capella University, has been named a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAE/IAE) by the National Security Agency (NSA) for the academic years 2007-2012. To earn this status, Capella’s information technology programs, curriculum, and faculty passed a rigorous review demonstrating a commitment to academic excellence in information assurance education.

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I noticed today that the clock on my Windows XP computer was five minutes slow. I always know the correct time because I have one of those “atomic clocks” hanging on my wall that synchronizes itself to WWV every night. My wall clock’s time also matched the correct “Verizon time” displayed by my cell phone. The strange thing was that my Windows XP computer was also configured to synchronize its own clock with an Internet time server maintained by NIST. So why did my Windows XP computer loose five minute?

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