Pittsburgh Post-Gazette TechMan column

Source: Pittsburgh Post-GazetteOct.儲存 22--Thanks to a Kickstarter effort that raised almost $40,000, the legendary Homebrew Computer Club will meet again.The club was started by Gordon French and Fred Moore in 1975 and met at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park, Calif. It was an informal gathering of computer hobbyists in the days when computers were still room-sized and owned only by universities and corporations.Many significant people attended the meetings, including Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and legendary hacker John Draper.Mr. Wozniak showed the Apple I that he had built in Jobs' garage there, and Mr. Gates sold punch tapes of the Basic language he had created for the Altair, often cited as the first personal computer.It was in the club's newsletter that Mr. Gates published his famous "open letter," which lambasted the early hackers for pirating commercial software programs.Many consider the first meeting of the club to be the most significant moment in the history of personal computers.The reunion will take place Nov. 11 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Tickets are being sold on Kickstarter. The money raised will be used in part to make a documentary of the event.Disconnected: Will you need to say goodbye to that phone that hangs on your wall or occupies a spot on your desk?The New York Times reports that Verizon is not reinstalling the phone system in Mantoloking, N.J., destroyed by Superstorm Sandy. Instead it installed a wireless system it says is better. An omen?Already 40 percent of U.S. households have only wireless phones. Carriers armini storage "itching to rid themselves of the cost of maintaining their vast copper-wire networks," the Times article said.Danger ahead: Famous hacker-turned-security-consultant Kevin Mitnick, speaking at a conference in London recently, said branded antivirus software is useless in stopping most intrusions, according to the website Computing."The only thing McAfee is good at is making videos," he said.Mr. Mitnick said vulnerabilities in applications and social engineering are the most fertile areas for hackers.He said hackers use LinkedIn to find an employee's partners, customers and suppliers, then email infected PDFs that look like they come from one of these known associates, thus convincing them to open the infected document."And once they open it, game over," Mr. Mitnick said.On sale: ZDNet reports that chipmaker Intel's CEO, Brian Krzanich, says that he expects computer sellers to push prices down over the coming weeks resulting in $99 tablets, $299 laptops using Intel's new Haswell chip, and $349 2-in-1 hybrid tablets and notebooks for the holiday season.Website of the week: On whatshouldireadnext.com, you enter a book you liked and, using a database of readers' favorite books, it provides suggestions for what to read next.Quote of the week for The Dudegeeks: "Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules." -- Walter Sobchak in "The Big Lebowski"Send comments, contributions, corrections and condemnations to pgtechtexts@gmail.comCopyright: ___ (c)2013 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Visit the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at .post-gazette.com Distributed by MCT Information Servicesself storage