Computer Tips -Tech Info

Month: November 2005

  • Beware web links from untrusted sources

    There are flaws in Opera and Internet Explorer which could allow URL’s in the address bar to be obfuscated. One of the safest approaches is to be wary of web links from unknown or untrusted sources. To quote….

    Claudio “Sverx” has discovered a weakness in Opera and Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to trick users into visiting a malicious website by obfuscating URLs displayed in the status bar. The problem is that the browser fails to show the correct URL in the status bar if an image control with a “title” attribute has been enclosed in a hyperlink and uses a form to specify the destination URL. This may cause a user to follow a link to a seemingly trusted website when in fact the browser opens a malicious website.

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  • More google news sitemaps….

    What are they trying to prove??? Okay, Google Analytics rolled out (slowly) earlier this week and is just now catching up on reporting data. It looked like one of the rockiest initial Google releases to date. This morning came the news of Google Base a way to submit and search, well, sets of information that you’d commonly see in a database. NOW, this afternoon I read that Google Sitemaps has added statistics and tracking information….

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  • Google Analytics under the microscope

    I’ve spent some time this evening looking at Google Analytics. (Now the data is being collected.) And I’ve got to say I’m impressed with the scope of what I’m seeing. First, since last night, more stats have been collected, there seem to be some missing from today yet (maybe ~12 hours behind at the moment). When I signed up, I went ahead and created profiles for 4 websites that I run to have some different things to look at. I’ve spent about 30-45 minutes looking through the stats for just one of those.

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  • Google Base is now available

    Sometime back, there was talk of Google Base, a databas-ish product coming from Google. Let me let a summary from their blog explain it…

    Rather than impose specific schemas and structures on the world, Google Base suggests attributes and item types based on popularity, which you can use to define and attach your own labels and attributes to each data item. Then searchers can find information more quickly and effectively by using these labels and attributes to refine their queries on the experimental version of Google Base search.

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  • Google Analytics stats start to trickle in

    I’ve just logged back in at 1:11 AM EST, 11/16/05 and am seeing the stats from the 14th come in, some from the 15th. It looks like Google Analytics is starting to catch up. I suspect they’ve been working overtime to try and beef up the server resources dedicated to this project, hopefully things will continue to improve. I hope the former paying customers are going to get good treatment here….

  • Google Analytics update

    Well, I mentioned the release of Google Analytics yesterday which really looks promising. At this hour I can still say it looks promising. I had a funny thought after trying several times yesterday to get set up… it was a “good going, you just broke google” kind of thought. It was pretty clear that demand was VERY high for the service (what they’ll be providing for free used to be a fee service.) But it looks like Google has been really caught off-guard by the demand. As I don’t have any data yet, and it appears I’m not the only one.

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  • tightVNC Windows 1.2.9 installer

    Temporary Quick download link for tightvnc-1.2.9 installer for windows. Use the first link to download the copy I’ve mirrored for the moment, or try downloading from www.tightvnc.com if there are any troubles with this.

  • Sony DRM Rootkit — it’s worse

    I did this as updates to an earlier post, but it probably deserves it’s own post now. The morning brought us the news of SERIOUS flaws in the Uninstaller ActiveX control for Sony’s DRM, then came news of ANOTHER flaw, this one a privilige escalation “attacker can take control of PC” vulnerability in the DRM rootkit (XCP) itself. The other bit of news to come has been the extent of the install base of XCP.

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  • Text adventure Games still around

    You are in a small hallway, there are doors to the North and West….

    The Wall Street Journal Online has an article about the continued existence of the text adventure games. You know the genre, before the advent of 3d graphics, role playing games were basically interactive novels of a sort. Read, then type “look north” or something, “open door” “go north”, etc… and be presented with more text.

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  • Lynx web browser vulnerability

    Incidents.org is reporting on an advisory for users of lynx. For those of you that don’t know lynx, it is a text based web browser used in text only terminal environments. I’ve used lynx from time to time to see what websites look like to a text only reader to help design towards better accessibility. Anyway, the three of you using it to browse the web with need to upgrade… (please, it’s a joke…)

    The vulnerability is described at idefense.com. It appears that a new development version of lynx has been released which fixes the problem. (Development version 2.8.6dev.15)

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