The archives of VGRC are vast, filled with articles dating back to 2003. One of the things I've been doing lately is cleaning up old articles and silently adding them back to the site for posterity. However, some of them deserve to be featured on our home page once more. So that aside, for those who missed it the first time around, check out our inaugural "Grudge Match." Sega CD versus PlayStation 3 after the jump.

Whenever there is a trend, there will always be somebody to spoof it. Such has been one of the mantras of culture jamming: Use parody as a form of critique. Abbie Hoffman went to his trial dressed up in judicial robes to poke fun at the judge. Sub Pop sales rep Megan Jasper once fed eager reporters from the New York Times the scoop on "Grunge Speak," that was only revealed as hoax after the newspaper printed an entire column on the topic. Or Trent Reznor's Strobe Light, a not-so-subtle critical take on Chris Cornell's latest solo album disaster with Timbaland. Well, Steal This Computer Book is kinda like that.

Quietly slipped into the section at your bookstore where they place all the "For Dummies" computer manuals and security books, Steal This Computer Book is, on the surface, a parody of the internet security frenzy, which, if you catch the hype-driven stories of "rogue computer hackers and e-terrorism" on the mainstream news media, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Steal This Computer Book delves not only into real-world security issues, but into the hacker mentality in general. Presented in the form of a technical manual, the book is divided into chapters, each discussing a specific topic, ranging from viruses and malware to filesharing to identity theft to con artists and much more. However, rather than approach these topics with a particular point of view, Wang describes them objectively in plain english so even some of the most novice users can get an idea of how things work. For example, when talking about trojan horses, Wang explains the basics of how they operate and how they get into your system, followed up with how they are created.

As a server administrator, needless to say I have to be familiar with the Linux platform. Linux servers are known for being secure, and if it was properly configured then you can trust that it will work without giving you a lot of hassles.

However, despite the fact that every server I work on runs Linux (typically CentOS or some flavor of BSD) none of my home or business computers do. At the office, there's a couple Linux boxes that I'm tasked with maintaining, but none of my own PC's actually run it.

In fact, my experience with Linux as a desktop computing solution has been largely negative. Most pre-configured distros these days come with a lot of extra crap that bogs down your system, especially older systems. You could run an older version of a major distro, but then you run the risk of having unpatched software vulnerable to all sorts of security risks. Even lightweight distros come with unnecessary extras or are configured all weird so if you attempt to change shit and you don't know what you're doing, you can fuck your entire system up.

This is especially a problem if you're still just trying to learn Linux and you have no idea where to start, because you start working with the pre-configured GUI, which as for anybody who knows even just a hint about Linux, is NOT what you want to become accustomed to if you plan on using Linux even only somewhat effectively.

Then I discovered Arch.