Computer Tips -Tech Info

Not long ago, I switched from Evolution to Kontact as my primary mail/calendar/addressbook/etc…. program under linux. One of the nice things about the Kontact suite is that you can either open up the “umbrella” application kontact or, the individual applications. I like the fact that they can still be used standalone. So, I was a bit frustrated to find every link for each of the components to bring up the “umbrella” kontact application, instead of the standalone….

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It seems the WMF patch that was recently released for Windows 2000 and XP (and 2003) has been ported to Microsoft Windows Vista Beta…. This makes it the first security patch for Vista. eweek has an article on the issue. So, if you’re beta testing Vista, get it updated ASAP. Hopefully though, if you’re beta-testing it’s not a production machine and no great loss if you get infested with beaucoup spyware….

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I’ve posted several things over at the onlineradiotv.com site. For starters I’ve got links to a few international (shortwave) broadcasters live audio streams and where available their “latest” english news update (and in some cases spanish and other languages.) I’ve also started posting some bash scripts there that can directly start mplayer streaming a feed.

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There’s another patch for those Win98 users that are nervous about the WMF vulnerability that was announced at the tail end of the year. This site has made the patched version of gdi32.dll available to any and all. Their patch is open source. They basically say “it works for them…” no warranties. Steve Gibson has also said that he’ll be writing a Win9x patch.

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I found a couple of interesting presentations on network security related topics. Primarily these are about using the internet and search engines for gathering information on specific “targets”. Their very interesting from a “self analysis” point of view as well.

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According to the securityfix, Florida leads the nation in the number of networks with signs of computers infested with the sony rootkit. In total, 12,588 networks in Florida seem to have computers with the rootkit. Now, these numbers could reflect as few as one machine per network….

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I’ve probably mentioned before that I like the compactflash format for “digital media”. My camera uses Compactflash, so does the nexia audio player I use and the old used pda I’ve got, uses compactflash, so…. I have a variety of cards around, I’ve got an 8MB, 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 512MB and 1024MB card around somewhere. With all those cards and just three devices…. well, when I started thinking “usb memory stick” to replace floppy discs to move files from one machine to another… I thought, why should I pay for something with the memory built in… so, I found something that did well….

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Brian Krebs has a post today on a Windows wireless networking “feature” which can be somewhat of a security risk. You see, it seems that With wireless networking enabled, Windows remembers the last wireless SSID that you connected to, so let’s say you were at a public Wireless access point called “Bob’s hotel” and you carry your laptop somewhere else. When the machine boots up, Windows tries to find “Bob’s hotel”, but of course, it’s not available at this other location, so… it assigns a 169.254.x.x ip address and broadcasts looking for “Bob’s hotel” the most recent wireless lan.

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Microsoft is disputing claims by Steve Gibson, that the WMF vulnerability was an intentionally placed backdoor. There is a response to the claims in the Microsoft Security Incident Response blog. Apparently since the SetAbortProc procedure relates to printing, previous versions of Windows ignored the call unless printing was involved. (Why did windows start paying attention to it otherwise?)

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Mandriva 2006 released without Mozilla Firefox 1.5, it came with 1.0.6 (which included security fixes and other patches from 1.0.7)…. anyway, source rpm’s for Firefox 1.5 became available in cooker, so I’ve built rpm’s for Mandriva 2006 for easy management on my systems. I’ll post links here as they may be of use to others as well. …. These are provided as is, with no warranty express or implied, etc. etc. etc. The src.rpm is straight from cooker, so, if you like, you could build it yourself….

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