Computer Tips -Tech Info

Google has announced Google Pack available for download It sounds as though there’s a nice bundle of Google (and non-google software) included (Google Desktop, Earth, Picasa, Toolbar for IE, Google Pack Screensaver, Acrobat reader, Norton Antivirus 6 month trial, AD-aware SE personal, firefox with google toolbar.) It sounds as though there is an update manager that can keep all the “google pack” components updated and there are rumors of other applications being made available in the not so distant future (OpenOffice for instance.)

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More sites that claim to be windows security center or the like are popping up… a list:

securitycaution(dot)com
dnserror404(dot)com
todaywarnings(dot)com
updatesystempage(dot)com
yoursecuritysystem(dot)com

From sunbeltblog.

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You know you would think that www.google.most anything would be legit, but.. sunbelt has been given a heads up, that a site posing as Google Belarus (www.google.by) is not actually a google site. It has ads on the main page. Google is looking into legal options it sounds like.

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Sometimes machines stop working, or you install a new piece of hardware and just can’t boot again. That’s when you have to get back to some basics to troubleshoot what the problem is. Yesterday I saw a machine that wasn’t booting. It would display the splash screen and then power down. They had a new video card on a previous diagnosis using the indicator lights on the back (Dell). The add on card seemed to work, but the system was just not booting. Someone had suggested to them that it was a power problem.

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Our “good friend” spyaxe, which is one of the “wolves in sheeps clothing” that masquerade as security software, but in actuality are delivered WITH spyware, has a new clone. Apparently SpywareStrike is making the rounds, and has a website which is identical to the SpyAxe site and it looks to be the same program. The only thing that appears different is the new name. I guess with all the publicity over the spyaxe name, they figured they wanted a fresh start for the new year.

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I started using this program after frying a hard drive in 6 months. It was on the server and serving up Audio 24/7 and it was sandwiched between a cdrom drive and another hard drive. There was no air flow around the hard drive and subsequently it had a very short and very rough life. When it started failing at 6 months, I started investigating the possible cause and how to keep another for failing so quickly.

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This is one that I run into from time to time. Most laptops the last year or two (actually maybe a bit longer), have built in wireless networking. This is great and makes for easy access to wireless access points just about anywhere. In fact, most current operating systems (Windows XP included) usually do a great job of detecting available networks. (Sometimes they do too good a job which is why wireless security is an issue, but we’ll save that for a future post.) I’ve run into several laptops over the last few years though that supposedly had wireless networking, but the user hadn’t been able to access any wireless networks with the laptop. Usually it’s an easy fix….

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For the last week, I’ve seen various headlines referring to a report from US-CERT that indicated 2005 had 5,198 security flaws reported. Out of those 2,328 were reported for Linux/Unix, 812 for Windows and 2,058 affecting more than one operating system. Now, I’m seeing all sorts of headlines about how Windows is more secure than Linux based on this report. (?!?) Did anyone reporting “windows more secure than linux/unix” actually read the report, look at some of the details and compare with the Technical Cyber Security Alerts?

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Sounds like this patch Tuesday will have a couple of updates in spite of the early release of the WMF vulnerability fix. Thanks to Microsoft for yielding that fix as soon as the testing was done. I would hope that it wasn’t just public pressure, but a sense of what the right thing to do is when there are exploits actively targeting a vulnerability.

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Microsoft has released the patch for the WMF vulnerability that’s been all over the news early. It was released to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com ahead of the previously announced January 10th “patch Tuesday”.

Congrats to Microsoft for getting this out the door early. That should go a long ways to blunting the attacks that are making use of this vulnerability.

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