Computer Tips -Tech Info

The computer security landscape today is such that pretty much ALL software, whether it’s Operating System, Office Suite, Web browser or device driver is at any given time “the weakest link”. One of my dreams as someone that does IT is “what IF there were an easy way to keep track of updates for software?” In fact, I would LOVE to see some sort of open source, rss based way of distributing news of updates. The way I see it working is as follows… The software writer has an rss feed reserved for product updates (one feed per product possibly?) This isn’t cluttered up with anything else, only things like…. Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 – stability update – download link. Nice and simple, so that you could setup your feed reader to check the feeds of software that you use in your situation.

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Surprise…. The AP is reporting that the music industry is suing limewire. There are several companies involved and they’re seeking compensatory and punitive damages. They argue that limewire encourages and has used the infringement of copyright to “build their business”.

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Incidents.org has some reports of false positives reported by Grisoft’s AVG antivirus running on Windows XP (SP1)…. The false positive was with a file named C:\i386\REG.EXE which is a legit file from the Windows XP SP1 install. No other news or details on this as of yet.

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The Channelinsider is reporting that Lenovo will be the first tier one OEM to preinstall a linux distribution on generally available PC’s. For years, you either had to order large volume, or find a smaller name system builder to get linux preinstalled. Now, Lenovo will start offerning Novell’s Suse Linux on their Thinkpad T60p mobile workstation.

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SunbeltBlog is talking about a new sign that Google is stepping up to try to protect users against potentially malicious sites. They have a screenshot, which I was able to verify, that gives a warning before allowing a user to proceed to a page that “Warning – the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!”. Very good, I suspect they’re either tagging sites based on certain keywords or perhaps even binary blobs found?

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The Register sums up the Black Hat briefings pretty well. The Operating System level has received a lot of scrutiny in recent years for security flaws and as a result there has been a good deal of improvement there and so now, researchers are heading to the low hanging fruit of the REST of the software stack, be it the drivers, or browsers, or office software. Another area of software were those class of programs that run checking for updates for OTHER software. It’s time to realize that most ANY piece of software could compromise system security and updates need to be expected for most any part of the “software stack”.

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There were demonstrations of some nasty javascript attacks at Black Hat as well (as if the wireless driver issues wasn’t a big enough problem…) Javascript is a powerful language and can be used for many things, but in these demonstrations, it was used to track recently visited sites (by the browser victim) and identify the IP address of the victim on the internal LAN AND to alter firewall settings. From the way I read the article at the Security Fix – this is changing HARDWARE firewall settings.

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“All you need to know about network security in one chart!!” I found an ad for this at javvin.com In addition to the “network security” charts…. they have other references…. “network communication protocols map”…. These look like they’d be good references. It looks as though they may have other good references too. Anyone have any experience/comments on their products?

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I saw this by way of SunbeltBLog yesterday…. workfriendly.net…. you basically enter a web address and choose which “microsoft office theme” you want to use and the page is presented as if it was just a text document (backgrounds/images seem to be stripped) in Word. (Complete with toolbars…) Links still work. Some people have a lot of time on their hands….

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August’s advance bulletin of Microsoft updates is already up. Tuesday of course is the monthly Microsoft patch day. It appears as though there will be 12 updates this time around. As usual, it could be that individual updates fix multiple problems. 10 updates will affect Windows at least 1 critical, will require a restart. 2 updates will affect Office, at least 1 critical, MAY require a restart. Also the malicious software removal tool will see an update.

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