Gbuy, Gcheckout, Google Payments etc…. the news has been circulating for months – Google will compete with Paypal. Well, Google Checkout has finally launched and is being covered by most every outlet covering online news (including several of Google’s blogs are talking about this latest product launch from google. It seems to be US only at this point and there are a couple of interesting twists.
Category: Computers
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FreeDos suspended development – nevermind
The Freedos has suspended development. It’s been a 12 year project and really, Freedos has become THE free DOS implementation around. It’s been shipped with “blank” pc’s, integrated into several other projects that use a dos’ish boot environment and the 1.0 release has not officially come. (I think the most recent is a Beta9 Service Release 2…) The site has been moved to freedos.sourceforge.net although, freedos.org will redirect to this eventually (DNS settling right now.) On many sites I’ve seen it reported as “freedos is dead”… and the comments are post-mortem style – however this is open source…. –UPDATE– OSNEWS had the original story and it seems like it was a joke of sorts as the dns had been moved to point to the new VHOST at sourceforge. In other words – no one was meant to see the Freedos is dead message at freedos.org… But still the following thoughts on the “death” of an open source project in general still apply….
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All old scams are new again….
Last week I got a notice of this warning…. it seems that scammers are sending out emails claiming to be from the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) and the email claims that the government will no longer insure your bank deposits unless you validate certain information…
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Phishing – so many flaws to exploit so little time
In the last week there was a well documented writeup of a cross site scripting vulnerability which had allowed a phisher to pose as a paypal login with THE LEGIT PAYPAL SSL CERTIFICATE…. Brian Krebs at the Security Fix has some details on some of the new and interesting ways phishers are trying to exploit to seperate us from our personal information.
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NTFS cloning
Sometimes drives just go bad. Surprise. One recent fresh install of Windows XP had started having real stability problems. On running a chkdsk and looking at the event viewer, it was fairly clear that 16KB of bad sectors and the disk problems had likely been the problem (lots of disk and atapi errors in the system log. Mostly disk error during paging operation (swap filing)) So…. I looked at cloning the drive using dd_rescue. All went well and the new system booted up on the new identically sized drive. In fact EVERYTHING was fine except chkdsk still reported 16KB of bat sectors….
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Microsoft security roundup
OK – there have been a number of Excel problems floating around in the last week – week and a half. Securiteam blog has a FAQ on the Excel 0-day vulnerabilities with Excel and Excel Viewer Incidents.org kindly gives us a scoresheet documenting the three different vulnerabilities that have been recently exploited. I have not thoroughly read details, but suspect that avoiding opening unexpected xls attachments would likely be a GOOD preventative measure. If you take the attitude… “oh junk mail…. ooo attachment – wonder whats in there – let’s see…” then you’re likely already stuck by a few viruses.
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VM Player vmx builder
Of course, I’ve spent some time with posts on VMware player (free download to “play” existing vmware images). And more recently on the VMware server which is also a free download but can create images as well. If you’re not in a position to try the VMWare server, you might be interested in this website which walks you through to create the vmx file that defines a virtual machine environment for vmware products. Of course, it doesn’t create the actual disk images for you, but you can use free tools like those supplied with qemu to do that.
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French competitor to Google Maps
Sometime last week, the news story of a French competitor to Google Maps called Geoportail.fr caught my attention and I took a look at the page. It caught my eye because the initial article boasted 20 inch resolution in some areas (???) But, as of today, all I’ve been able to get is an error message along the lines that there is too much traffic and that I should try again later. It’s in French – it’s been a while…. anyway, I’m not the only one that’s noticed – The Register has noted the painful launch as well. Really, it should be interesting when it’s up.