ADTMAG.com has an interesting article talking of the convergance of spyware and more sophisticated phishing attacks. They talk about the convergance of viruses and spam engines that happened in 2003 as a real shift in the dynamic of WHERE junk mail was coming from. Today botnets account for about 90% of the spam online, and of course, the botnets are the zombie armies that can be (and are being) utilized to bully web pages off the net, or extort large amounts of $$ due to denial of service attacks.
Month: June 2006
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The “secure software” dilemma
It’s quite a dilemma when a software product is billed as more secure than another…. several days back when Mozilla Firefox released v. 1.5.0.4 which fixed a number of security issues, I saw someone comment “I thought firefox was supposed to be secure.” I think there’s a misunderstanding when it comes to software. I think the misunderstanding is that one piece of software can be secure and another not. Out of the box. Let’s take a stab at clarifying…. Security is not a product, it’s not a feature, it’s a way of doing things. Along those lines….
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Windows Vista Beta download
Yes, this is legitimate and officially sanctioned. Microsoft is releasing the beta version of Vista Ultimate for download. This page gives details on the download. It is also possible to request a dvd. (The download is a dvd iso – a bit over 3 GB). It will expire June 1, 2007 (I assume Vista will be out by then…) It should be able to upgrade an existing XP install or do a fresh install (PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS WITH YOUR MAIN DESKTOP WITHOUT SERIOUS BACKUP FIRST.) It will be unable to roll back to the previous OS (fresh wipe and install would be required.)
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Firefox Sync plugin
Google has released a new plugin for firefox that synchronizes various settings from one pc to another making use of a google account. Essentially, it saves certain preferences from your browser to your Google account, then when the browser is launched again it retrieves any changes from the Google Account. This sounds like a great solution for people trying to keep bookmarks synced across multiple pcs. I wonder if it could track what extensions are installed and make sure you have the same set of extensions on all pcs?
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Microsoft Genuine Advantage phones home daily
Microsoft says they need to do a better job about disclosing this, but the Genuine Advantage tool contacts Microsoft daily. It doesn’t do this to track your browsing or downloading habits, but to check and see if it’s ok that it’s still running. According to this article, they have some concern that it might not work properly and wanted to be able to tell it to shut down if there were widescale problems with the proof of legitimate windows copy. I did glean a few more details from the article that correct an assumption that I made a week ago.
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Big trouble – you don’t have any viruses….
You know, I’ve seen soooo many antivirus vendors that are somewhat ethically challanged claim that cookie files are a big threat, or in worse cases files that the “free” antivirus test downloaded are dangerous “you should be glad we got here in time – where’s our $30 to fix things…” kind of message, but from a mainline, well known antivirus vendor you expect better…. Over at Spyware Confidential, after an online scan at a leading AV vendor, they’ve received a couple of emails explaining the great danger their computer is in after the scan turned up 0 viruses and 0 infected files.
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2,000 year old computer?
The Register had an interesting article on the analysis of what may get classified as the worlds oldest computer (2000 years old – Greek.) Apparently it’s been known for a while (discovered in an old shipwreck around 1900). It’s been called the “Antikythera Mechanism” and has more than 30 dials and wheels. Anyway, it’s currently been undergoing detailed imaging analysis which has uncovered some new clues which may reinforce a theory that it was designed to track/predict planetary locations (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were known to the ancient Greeks.)
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New malware sightings
Incidents.org had an entry in the last couple days on a malware infestation that was interesting and showed a couple things. 1) You can’t bet on antivirus to keep you safe (the initial installer was not detected by most AV vendors – suspicious by 1.) (If you think about it, this makes perfect sense – antivirus is reactionary and needs to have seen a bug once to recognize it again.) 2) Malware, once in the system, can bring all their friends.
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Microsoft should use a /home partition….
I saw this yesterday or day before… George Ou has said that Microsoft should move user data to it’s own volume (or partition). He is ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. I think these days the default install for any modern operating system ought to assume you care enough about your data to seperate it from the main OS. I find myself slightly annoyed at linux distributions that DON’T do this by default, although most will at least let you make changes to the partitioning in the install process. I had got to just assume this was the way things were since Mandrake always defaulted to seperate home and root partitions.
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Qemu 0.8.1 (with kqemu 1.3.0pre7)
While I was testing out the “single cut and paste” linux vnc remote desktop sharing script and x11vnc binary…. I spent a fair amount of time booting up livecd’s n qemu to test various distributions/ages of linux setups to see how compatible things were. I had not checked in at the qemu site in quite a while (a few months), but there was a new version out… in fact, I think 0.7.1 is what I was running previously, so I missed 0.7.2 and 0.8.0… Anyway, I’m running 0.8.1 now and I compiled kqemu as well (now at 1.3.0pre7)…. wow qemu has made great strides (with kqemu) since 0.7.1 ….