Computer Tips -Tech Info

The news has come that Internet Explorer 7 will come out as a high priority security update when it’s released later this year. This should mean good things for the folks that are still using IE6 as it will bring quite a few security enhancements. (On a side note, my test of Vista with IE7 […]

I noticed this evening that I wasn’t getting the usual thumbnails of jpg images in Konqueror (KDE’s file browser.) On investigation, there were error messages like this…. konqueror: WARNING: Pixmap not found for mimetype application/x-crossover-jpg being given. So, I looked in my home directory’s kde folder (.kde) and deeper in .kde/share/mimelnk/application There, I found a […]

We’re planning a quick trip out of town and I’m using the lowly free version of Google Earth that doesn’t integrate with a GPS device. So, I had got a series of places tagged in “My Places” and had sent the kmz file to myself via email. (My primary intent was to try and load […]

Here’s the link to Microsoft’s advisory. The main workaround seems to be…. Don’t open or save powerpoint attachments that you receive from untrusted sources, OR that you receive unexpectedly from trusted sources…. So, the only real workaround is what SHOULD be common practice. Whether or not there is a vulnerability in the news you should […]

The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. Of course, this will be partly limited by Google’s indexing which recently has not been quite as thorough as before, but… all […]

Sysinternals.com is a GREAT source of free Windows utilities (rootkit detector, process list, list of files being used by a process, etc….) Today the news started to spread that they’ve been acquired by Microsoft. Am I the ONLY person that has had an urge to download their entire free utility library?    Send article as […]

Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables. For starters, I’ve tested this on a test system that started out with NO iptables rules, and then moved on to an IPCop install (the vmware download from vmwarez.com…) I’ve detailed previously one dilemma that I had with regard to my own cable connection which made me question how […]

SANS has a story on another local kernel vulnerability for linux. I’ve got to say that I typically haven’t looked as much at “local” vulnerabilities on this site as I have talked about remote vulnerabilities. Usually local vulnerabilities are flaws that allow a user that’s already logged into a system to escalate their user rights […]

Linux has full support for so many file systems. Fat32, which is the filesystem of the Win98 and ME systems has had full read-write support as long as I can remember, but NTFS has not. In fact, NTFS has had read-only support in the main open source driver, but NO write support. (Or at least […]

Yesterday I had a bit of a realization. I had just been looking at a wireless router/firewall setup and was thinking about the firewalling rules (which seemed to be geared at the WIRELESS lan… i.e. blocking that activity on the Wireless segment.) You know, traditionally firewalls have had the attitude of defending the internal network […]