Computer Tips -Tech Info

I’ve been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as “Internet explorer cannot display the webpage.” The error page goes on to suggest a number of connectivity or availability problems. I even tested side by side with Firefox which WAS able to display the page and Explorer 7 which wasn’t. I thought it might just be a rendering bug of some sort, but today got a chance to try IE7 on Windows XP (RC1). So… the problem is still there, I can find NO other browser exhibiting the same behavior. It affects averyjparker.com, northcarolinagenealogy.net and southcarolinagenealogy.org, but NOT onlineradiotv.com (which all by the way are hosted out of the same VPS – so I know the VPS is up and the database server is just fine….)

Read the rest of this entry »

So, in the last article I detailed a solution to getting a legacy application to run under a limited user account in XP. This legacy application wasn’t working correctly without administrator priviliges and in this situation, upgrading to a newer version wasn’t a great option. So, I created a new user account with higher priviliges and used runas to launch the application with greater priviliges. But that left me with another problem…. how do I hide the new priviliged user from the Welcome screen?

Read the rest of this entry »

Several months back I had to figure out a way to get Create a card gold (5.0?) run on an XP system. The only real problem was that I had setup the account with limited user privileges (shared machine, several users, all with limited account priviliges.) But, somehow the program didn’t work well without administrator priviliges. Giving the account full administrator priviliges all the time was not an option and try as I might, I couldn’t find the right program directory to give expanded permissions that would solve the issue.

Read the rest of this entry »

Numerous bug fixes – MAKE CERTAIN PREVIOUS VERSIONS ARE UNINSTALLED. uninstall instructions

Sun’s Downloads page

   Send article as PDF   

The Java Runtime Environment from Sun has a vulnerability that’s due in large part to a poor approach to updating it. IF you have not uninstalled previous versions of the JRE on your PC, they are likely still there EVEN after an update AND to make things even worse, a specially designed website could specifiy the version of the JRE to use in dealing with java components on the page. Sun’s advisory here on the issue. The story is from the SecurityFix and I’m bothered by the same point that get’s Brian about this update….

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s really good to see one chalked up against a botnet operator. Friday, a former botnet operator was sentenced to 37 months in prison for breaking into 100’s of thousands of computers. There NEED to be more stories like this. Unfortunately though, with a possible benefit of making $6,000-10,000 per month being a botnet herder…. and only 2 high profile arrests and convictions, I don’t know if this will discourage ENOUGH people from this kind of activity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sendmail 8.13.8 released 8/9/06 various fixes including DoS fix

Download

   Send article as PDF   

I’ve got to admit, I hadn’t caught the notice of this until it was at incidents.org. I don’t currently administer sendmail on any machines, but…. Sendmail released version 8.13.8 on August 9th to address several issues (including a DoS vulnerability). It was possible for a specially crafted email to trigger the problem.

   Send article as PDF   

This incidents.org article the other day caught my eye. It talked of a utility calledliveview that could take a hard drive (or image of a drive) and make it into a virtual machine for use in vmware (saving all changes to a temporary file so the original structure of the disk/drive image is not touched.) It looks like you need to have Windows as your base platform, but it looks as though it would be a useful tool. Windows Incident Response possibly saw the same note on Incidents.org.

Read the rest of this entry »

AT&T has had a breach of data that revealed information on as many as 19,000 individuals that had used their online store. It appears that credit card data is what was stolen, it happened over the weekend and AT&T says they detected the breach “within hours”.

   Send article as PDF