The news has come that Internet Explorer 7 will come out as a high priority security update when it’s released later this year. This should mean good things for the folks that are still using IE6 as it will bring quite a few security enhancements. (On a side note, my test of Vista with IE7 failed to display averyjparker.com … other sites hosted on the same server worked, but I got a page not found for that domain. More testing there to come.) Microsoft has noted that not everyone will want all their pcs to automatically update to IE7 and so… They’ll issue a tool to block that update if one chooses.
Category: Computers
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Konqueror 3.5 not recognizing JPG’s
I noticed this evening that I wasn’t getting the usual thumbnails of jpg images in Konqueror (KDE’s file browser.) On investigation, there were error messages like this…. konqueror: WARNING: Pixmap not found for mimetype application/x-crossover-jpg being given. So, I looked in my home directory’s kde folder (.kde) and deeper in .kde/share/mimelnk/application There, I found a lot of x-crossover **.desktop files and deleted x-crossover-jpg.desktop We’ll see if that works on a logout/login. YES – that worked…. I should also note there are a lot of x-crossover file associations in that folder and if one conflicts, I suspect others may. The effect of this problem was that previews didn’t work in konqueror, neither did image recognition in a couple of kde related programs.
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Pulling GPS coordinates from Google Earth kmz files
We’re planning a quick trip out of town and I’m using the lowly free version of Google Earth that doesn’t integrate with a GPS device. So, I had got a series of places tagged in “My Places” and had sent the kmz file to myself via email. (My primary intent was to try and load the kmz on a laptop, but it looks like the video on that machine may not be up to snuff…) Anyway. I have this chat.kmz file and wondered how can I just get a list of places and gps coordinates out of this.
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Microsoft Issues advisory on Powerpoint flaw
Here’s the link to Microsoft’s advisory. The main workaround seems to be…. Don’t open or save powerpoint attachments that you receive from untrusted sources, OR that you receive unexpectedly from trusted sources…. So, the only real workaround is what SHOULD be common practice. Whether or not there is a vulnerability in the news you should always be cautious with receiving file attachments. ANYTHING unexpected, even from a trusted source, should be verified “out of channel”.
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Google search for malware accessible to all…
The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. Of course, this will be partly limited by Google’s indexing which recently has not been quite as thorough as before, but… all you have to do is search by a virus name and find matches. I can see where this is useful for research. What I DON’T understand is why Google doesn’t integrate scanning of content into the googlebot indexing. It would take a lot of processor power. Well…. I think Google would come close to having enough to take a stab at this. I think they should AT LEAST…
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Sysinternals/Wininternals acquired by Microsoft
Sysinternals.com is a GREAT source of free Windows utilities (rootkit detector, process list, list of files being used by a process, etc….) Today the news started to spread that they’ve been acquired by Microsoft. Am I the ONLY person that has had an urge to download their entire free utility library?
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IPtables magic, or… Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables
Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables.
For starters, I’ve tested this on a test system that started out with NO iptables rules, and then moved on to an IPCop install (the vmware download from vmwarez.com…)
I’ve detailed previously one dilemma that I had with regard to my own cable connection which made me question how one could SAFELY host a wireless access point (in the clear) for guest web browsing, without allowing a wireless user to port scan the outside world/aggressively spread viruses/etc. Traditional firewall setups are typically oriented towards protecting the internal network. This post is an attempt to give an explanation of how to implement the idea put forth in this post.
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Linux Local kernel vulnerability
SANS has a story on another local kernel vulnerability for linux. I’ve got to say that I typically haven’t looked as much at “local” vulnerabilities on this site as I have talked about remote vulnerabilities. Usually local vulnerabilities are flaws that allow a user that’s already logged into a system to escalate their user rights to control the system. So, IF you allow logins for various users, you definitely need to pay attention to local vulnerabilities.
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Open Source NTFS driver for linux with Read and Write support
Linux has full support for so many file systems. Fat32, which is the filesystem of the Win98 and ME systems has had full read-write support as long as I can remember, but NTFS has not. In fact, NTFS has had read-only support in the main open source driver, but NO write support. (Or at least VERY limited and risky write support.) There was the captive ntfs project which used Windows own NTFS driver, but…. it looks like we’re getting very close to a true open source, read write NTFS driver for linux (and really, for any other OS that wants to implement it.)
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Firewall musings…
Yesterday I had a bit of a realization. I had just been looking at a wireless router/firewall setup and was thinking about the firewalling rules (which seemed to be geared at the WIRELESS lan… i.e. blocking that activity on the Wireless segment.) You know, traditionally firewalls have had the attitude of defending the internal network from the outside. Of course, these days firewalls sometimes protect the internal network from a WLAN (Wireless segment as well.) But, I put a few events together and started looking for a new feature in a firewall.