Computer Tips -Tech Info

For those of you that aren’t aware…. Bleeding Snort is a collection of “bleeding edge” snort signatures. Snort is an intrusion detection framework. This note is by way of SARC that the bleedingsnort.org domain is now no longer under their control. bleedingsnort.com is and continues to be their official domain. Unfortunately it appears as though the .org address may now be used as a host for malware. (It’s at least currently serving up ads to leech off the mistaken traffic.) SOOOO…. bottom line – bleedingsnort.com is the official site for the Bleeding Edge Snort project. More details here.

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Lately, I’ve tried to make use of my phone’s voice command system for calls. I’ve had a couple long drives and used a headset and tried to do something that works better without the headset…. “Name Dial”…. “please say the number” (sigh…) “1234567” “did you say 3225467?” “NO” “did you say 3225468?” “NO!” 5 miles later….. for the 5th time…. “Name dial”…. “please say the name” (finally…) It reminded me quite well of using what was a demonstration program from Microsoft that would type as you dictate. Ah, fabulous, science fiction meets reality. I tested and, it was, PAINFUL to use. “Now is the time…. no delete word no…. don’t type that.. no you stupid. NO stop. delete… not oh….” Well, it’s reassuring to see that Microsoft has problems with using Voice Dictation too. The video is hosted at Google videos and is a “demonstration” of voice recognition technology.

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Well after a bit of a roundup of some of the security news items the last week, it’s time to sum up the Google front…. Googling Google tells us that Infinite storage is on the horizon…. they cite a translator that has done work for google. He has been asked to translate “The result?… from today we are starting our infinite storage plan” Now, they surmise that this could be related to the “platypus” project which has been known as gdrive which appears to be an online file synchronization/backup solution. It could be and would certainly be interesting. However, it could be a gmail upgrade for that matter.

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Well, let’s start with the extensions first. Like ANY software, you should be cautious installing something from an untrusted source. If you think an extension looks neat and cool – look for reviews and third party information before installing it. That much said…. never install an extension that comes attached as an unexpected email…. Apparently, just that has been happening a password stealing trojan has been showing up as an email attachment that appears to be a firefox extension. OK – quick review – what’s the weakest link in computer security (grab mirror and look….) Now… Mozilla has also released some security updates for Firefox….

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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 failed to display averyjparker.com … other sites hosted on the same server worked, but I got a page not found for that domain. More testing there to come.) Microsoft has noted that not everyone will want all their pcs to automatically update to IE7 and so… They’ll issue a tool to block that update if one chooses.

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I’ve been out of town for several days (about 4) and came back to a dying hard drive and a two day project, so…. I’ve not been able to get any updates here for a bit. So, hopefully I can start playing catchup this morning. Although, I likely won’t get through everything that I’ve saved to consider posting until tomorrow. (Updated Mozilla-Firefox will likely be a bit.)

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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 lot of x-crossover **.desktop files and deleted x-crossover-jpg.desktop We’ll see if that works on a logout/login. YES – that worked…. I should also note there are a lot of x-crossover file associations in that folder and if one conflicts, I suspect others may. The effect of this problem was that previews didn’t work in konqueror, neither did image recognition in a couple of kde related programs.

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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 the kmz on a laptop, but it looks like the video on that machine may not be up to snuff…) Anyway. I have this chat.kmz file and wondered how can I just get a list of places and gps coordinates out of this.

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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 always be cautious with receiving file attachments. ANYTHING unexpected, even from a trusted source, should be verified “out of channel”.

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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 you have to do is search by a virus name and find matches. I can see where this is useful for research. What I DON’T understand is why Google doesn’t integrate scanning of content into the googlebot indexing. It would take a lot of processor power. Well…. I think Google would come close to having enough to take a stab at this. I think they should AT LEAST…

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