Computer Tips -Tech Info

Month: October 2006

  • Some days you really want to slap someone at Microsoft….

    So, I was formatting a drive the other day. It’s an external hard drive that will need to be readable AND writable by both Mac and Windows XP machines. So, the only choice (without paying for MacDrive to read/write to HFS+) is really FAT32. The drive is in the 250GB-300GB ballpark. So, I reference the maximum filesystem size and see that FAT32 supports up to 2TB filesystems. No problem. I was doing this from the Windows XP machine that would be one of the drives “hosts” and after much scratching around created and attempted to format the FAT32 partition – a LONG verification process ensued 30 minutes – 1 hour. After which…. “volume size too big” eh? Well… the format tool under Windows XP/2000 is crippled…

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  • Microsoft Internet Explorer patches for unsupported OS versions (Windows 98 and ME)

    For starters, if you’re using Windows 98 or ME still in a production system, you REALLY need to be looking at migration options and you should realize that the architecture of those systems is NOT conducive to a good secure platform. No XP isn’t perfect, but it is an improvement in many areas. That much said, if you don’t have too many choices and are wondering how you can protect the old system against the recent Windows Internet Explorer vulnerabilities…. here you go. The zero-day emergency response team has released a version of the VML vulnerability patch for older versions of Windows. So, if you REALLY need to patch an old windows 98 or ME install, you can give that a try. (No guarantees.)

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  • Firefox zero-day vulnerability (or is it?)

    I saw a comment somewhere else that zero-day was overused and in essense ANY previously unknown vulnerability in open source software is technically zero day… the intent here though is to use the word in this context…. “vulnerability has been released without giving the vendor an opportunity to patch…” Yes, the fun vulnerability weekend seems to be continuing – there’s a javascript zdnet has coverage it’s “impossible to patch” (?) from the individuals that have publicized it. The announcement came at Toorcon.

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