More on WordPress 2.0

December 20th, 2005

I’m finding a bit more about the upcoming WordPress 2.0 release. I haven’t had time to test the RC in the 5 minutes since the last post, but I have been able to read a few sites. It looks like most of the big changes are “under the hood”, which sounds promising. It sounds as though more interesting extensions might be more easily do-able…

Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress 2.0 getting close

December 20th, 2005

I see in the dashboard that the third and (last?) release candidate for WordPress 2.0 is officially out. There is word that the final may come Wednesday or Thursday of this week. I haven’t had much time to see what features may be new… but if possible I may try it out this week. I don’t know of any security related problems with the current version that would require an urgent move.

Read the rest of this entry »

How embarrasing… Computer security firms database hacked

December 20th, 2005

The Washington Times, has a story from Brian Krebs of their Security Fix blog about …

Guidance Software — the leading provider of software used to diagnose hacker break-ins — has itself been hacked, resulting in the exposure of financial and personal data connected to thousands of law enforcement officials and network-security professionals.

Read the rest of this entry »

Network Security guide for the home or small business network – Part 8 – Don’t be afraid to ask for help

December 20th, 2005

Deep breath time. We’ve covered a lot of good topics and it’s important at this point to take a close look at what we’ve talked about and think. “Am I overwhelmed?” If so that’s fine. Maybe you don’t have enough time to think about all of this network security stuff. Maybe, no matter how hard you try it doesn’t make sense.

Read the rest of this entry »

Shortwave Listening antenna

December 20th, 2005

Ok – Now I’ve mentioned the Sony shortwave radio a couple times. It comes with a little (maybe 23 foot?) random wire antenna that really boosts reception over the internal “whip” antenna. In fact, I like using a wire antenna instead of the built in whip when possible. Let’s face it, the radio signals that you’re trying to pickup when listening to shortwave are MUCH longer than that whip antenna, in ideal you should have a bigger antenna.

Read the rest of this entry »

Disinfecting a PC… part 7

December 20th, 2005

Ok, another reboot after the BHO cleaning. Things are a good deal more responsive now, less disc swapping going on. (I suspect that those three missing BHO entries may have been causing the slow down, but I don’t know.) Installing wintop so that processes can be monitored. Also, getting spybot S&D *(search and destroy) installed and copying update from disc. The system is pretty much won at this point, I don’t see anything running that I haven’t LET run at boot, everything that I had as suspect has been disabled, now it’s just a matter of cleaning up the remnants and leftovers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 7

December 20th, 2005

Ok – Nvidia driver was an easy one, download the latest from nvidia.com stop the X server, run sh NIVIDIAlongfilename.run, hit enter a few times, wait and eventually…. restart the X server log in and glx hardware accelerated goodness awaits…. Really and truly that was simple (a lot simpler than what I had tried with the urpme/urpmi of the nvidia rpms.) I should have just done that when the urpmi didn’t seem to have things working.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 6

December 19th, 2005

OK – there may be those that read the last entry and had some obvious “oh, you ought to look in the ***** directory for menu information.” On the issue I ran into with missing menu items after the upgrade. (And even after moving my .kde folder to .kdeold and logging back in.) OK – it’s been a while since I’ve taken a long hard look at HOW menu’s are built in Mandrake (Mandriva)….

Read the rest of this entry »

Another example of how we’re vulnerable for identity theft

December 19th, 2005

The SecurityFix is reporting on a security breech at reevesnamepins.com a company that supplies (among others) law enforcement personnel. Apparently, CardCops (which monitors for possible stolen data), discovered names and addresses of several law enforcement officers from across the country. The common denominator seemed to be recent orders at reevesnamepins.com and the company has confirmed a recent security breech.

Read the rest of this entry »

More wolves in sheeps clothing – rogue or suspect antispyware

December 19th, 2005

(or for that matter, rogue or suspect antivirus.) What’s fascinating about this category is most of these products either use security vulnerabilities to get into a system, or merely convince a person browsing the web that they’re the right tool for the job. Kind of like virtual con-men in a sense…. Anyway… Spyware Confidential has a listing of the top 10 rogue/suspect antispyware programs. Some familiar names are mentioned…

Read the rest of this entry »