Author: Avery

  • Google news rss feeds update

    I was just at google news and noticed that they’ve apparently fixed the headers of their pages so that the “Add live feed” button automatically displays at the bottom of the firefox browser window when you browse their page. (I’m currently browsing it for a search.) Nice work Google…. I know when it was first announced this feature was not working which left me feeling as though it was slightly limited in it’s usefulness.

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  • Western North Carolina Earthquake

    We had a slight earthquake around here in the last half hour. It sounds like Buncombe and Madison Counties felt it. The summary from USGS which I’ll include at the end seems to say it was 3.8 on the Richter Scale and centered near Hot Springs. We don’t get too many quakes in the Western NC area, but there is the Brevard fault that runs through the area.

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  • Porn Spam indictments…

    The Security Fix is reporting that the Justice department will imminently indict four people accused of sending large volumes of porn spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM act which requires explicit junkmail to be specifically labeled “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” in the subject line.

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  • Like flypaper for malware..

    The diary over at the SANS Institute mentioned an interesting program today. Nepenthes is a program that can simulate a vulnerability so that it can collect samples of malware trying to exploit that vulnerability.

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  • Make panoramic pictures with a digital camera (or any other)

    There’s another great article at newsforge this evening. I remember seeing some time back a camera which took panoramic pictures. The photographer would hold it steady over his head and the camera would slowly circle around to get a 360 degree photo. In fact I think I remember seeing a large group picture where someone played with the idea and ran around to be in the picture twice.

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  • Open Source Word Processor Roundup

    Newsforge has a comparison up of three open source word processors. Abiword, Kword and the beta release of the write component of OpenOffice.org 2 are compared in this review. Abiword and OpenOffice.Org should both be available for Windows or Linux (or Mac) and Kword is primarily Linux (Mac OS X packages are available though.)

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  • Nasty regedit bug

    This is unusual, but it sounds like there is a bug in regedit (and regedit32) which prevents the displaying of unusually long registry keys. Now, that sounds innocent enough, it also prevents the viewing of keys entered under them. Again, ok not a crisis. Imagine if you had an extremely long registry key entered in the ….software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/run area? Annoying maybe? Ok, what if it were put there by malware? Oooooooh… that would be bad….

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  • Google to acquire evil from Microsoft?

    I’ve seen this article referenced a few places today, but there is a piece at the New York Times, essentially the piece says that Microsoft can relax, it’s time for Google to be the villain. There’s a joke that went around sometime back (maybe at April fools?), joking about Microsoft about to buy exclusive rights to evil from the devil. That supposed article interviewed the devil and had him recounting what a good offer Microsoft had made for the rights…. anyway…

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  • Another Dumaru variant

    Sunbelt has found another keylogger in the dumaru family and has updated their free tool to scan for it and clean it up. This is the same family of trojans/keyloggers that contributed to the large ID theft discovery they made earlier in the month.

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  • Wishlist of spyware slime….

    The sunbeltblog has uncovered a fairly interesting document. (Dated May 16 and originally in Russian) which appears to be the wishlist of a spyware criminal. (Slime was my own definition…)

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