About a week ago I was playing some music using Apple's iTunes when my Averatec laptop suddenly froze: Only the 5-second power button push could put the machine out of its misery. Although this was the first time iTunes froze on me that way, having Windows machines seize up like that has happened enough that I thought nothing of it. That is, until the odd behaviors started...

• A longer than usual boot time.
• Sporadic bursts of high cpu activity coupled with a disk I/O rates for no apparent reason.
• And worst of all, iTunes started stuttering on playback of any song regardless of other activity on the laptop.

Blocking those nuisance phone calls that clog up your answering machine and make you get up from the dinner table has been of interest to anyone with a phone for quite some time. Now that it is becoming that much easier to originate such calls using Voice over IP technologies, the e-mail SPAM phenomenon is likely to play itself out in the telephony space as well. Thus SPIT will be the next frontier in the well-connected home's fight to maintain its boundaries.

As I see it, e-mail SPAM fighting techniques fall into two main camps:

• Know the Sender
  Under this appraoch the focus is not so much on the content as it is on identifying and classifying the senders of e-mail. Any e-mail from a source not deemed trustworthy is relegated to SPAM status.
• Tag the Content
  Using a variety of statistical methods these solutions inspect all incoming messages assigning each a SPAM likelihood percentage. Those that fall below the threshold are routed into a SPAM holding bucket, the rest get through.

However, callers can only be identified by way of their caller-id (CID) and unfortunately these caller-id values are easily enough spoofed:

• Orange Boxes
  These devices send call-waiting caller-id signals from the caller's side to the recipient once the call has been picked up. Thus it is not perfect but it can still be used to trick people.
• Insecure VoIP Providers
  There are some VoIP providers who will let the subscriber control the outbound caller-id number albeit not the name. This technique makes the calls indistinguishable from the real thing.

With the stage set and the "caveat emptor" in place, read on to see what individuals with VoIP service can do to cut down on unwanted and unsolicited telemarketing phone calls using the only weapon currently at hand: caller-id.

With USB thumb-drives, pen-drives, diskonkey drives becoming as ubiquitous and cheap as they have, the general solution to one of them "dying" is beginning to follow that all too familiar consumer-society pattern of "throw away and replace". How many of these little, vendor-logo emblazoned gizmos do you have lying around that at some point just stopped working? Earlier today, in the midst of trying to rescue some data from an otherwise corrupted Windows XP install yet another of my thumb-drives failed:

• Windows XP claimed the drive was no longer formatted but when I gave it the OK to re-format, it proceeded to claim the drive was write-protected thus preventing me from doing anything useful with the device.
• Linux similarly was of no help in that it entered a never-ending loop trying to talk to the device only to give the error message:

  USB device not accepting new address
  

  all the while proudly showing off its ability to follow a strictly monotonically increasing series of addresses.

List of vendors and their associated driver support information gleaned from the net.

• Lucent / Agere WinModems. Unfortunately, this chipset/driver combination does not support multiple instances.
• PCTel chipsets have found their way into a large number of systems. The best source for drivers appears to be at the PCTel section of the Technion University website.
• Rockwell
• Conexant chipsets have Linux drivers built for them by Linuxant. Just as every other soft modem vendor out there, Conexant is not making the entire driver freely available and thus the purists will have to put up with the tainted kernel complaints. Acoording to the Linuxant INSTALL page for the HCF controller-less driver, multiple instances will work fine. However, seeing that nothing is free, this driver costs money to operate at speeds above 14.4Kbps!
• Motorola provides its own (tainted) drivers for the SM56 family of modems
• Cirrus Logic CL-MD5620DT
• Intel MD5628D-L-C and DQ82536EP chipsets
  Pre-compiled binary drivers for any number of Linux flavors can be downloaded from Intel, but please leave a message for them complaining about the lack of source code!

A good summary of the state of Linux support for WinModems is also available at Modemsite.com although you cannot download anything from them without paying a subscription fee.
A well-maintained, open site on all things LinModem is maintained by Jacques Goldberg at Technion University in Israel.