Ubuntu Breezy Badger Development Starts

Now that version 5.04 of Ubuntu Linux has been released, it’s time for me to once again throw caution to the wind and move on to the next development version, codenamed “Breezy Badger”.

Doing so is as easy as a simpled find-and-replace search on your sources.list file, replacing “hoary” with “breezy” and issuing a simple apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade command. The whole ease of the apt-get upgrade experience is one of the very reasons I love Ubuntu.

Right now there’s little changes between the new stable branch and that of testing, so only a few packages have been downloaded and updated, but I’m sure I’ll get some show-stopper breakages coming soon as the bleeding edge moves forward.

Return of the Burger King

The Burger King

If you watch any amount of American television lately, you’ve probably caught one of Burger King’s new ads featuring the over-sized plastic-headed King appearing in unsettling places, such as next to the customer in bed or just outside their window.

MSN’s Slate has an article up explaining the return of the Burger King as part of the company’s edgier marketing campaign that’s included recent hits like the Subservient Chicken web site.

Long live the king!

Are TurboTax and TaxCut Watching You?

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article written by David Lazarus in which the author claims that users of the online versions of Intuit’s TurboTax or H&R Block’s TaxCut software are tracked during their filing process through the use of web bugs.

Both Intuit and H&R Block claim any data collected is used only in quality assurance purposes, but some privacy advocates are unconvinced that either company will not be tempted to sell such data to a third-party marketing firm in the future, particularly when both use the services of DoubleClick, a company that has sparked previous privacy concerns to process the data coming from the hidden trackers.