There’s a bit more detail in this betanews article on the sober worm. They basically say that the next expected “release” is January 8th, that f-secure has cracked the “code” of the worm. You see it appears that the URL’s that new versions of the worm are downloaded from are not hardcoded, but “psuedorandom” and they’ve cracked the algorithm the worm uses.
Category: Computers
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The origins of the internet
The internet was developed essentially with a couple of goals in mind. One of those goals was to have a distributed means of communications that would be resilient to nuclear attack. The idea was this, if we have traffic, (data) that can take one of several paths to a destination, then a fatal attack on one of the communication hubs does NOT have to take down the whole connection. Anyway… there’s an article over at the Register with an interview with one of the individuals that had this groundbreaking idea.
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Two critical fixes from Microsoft on December patch Tuesday
December’s rendition of Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday will feature two critical security fixes. The malicious software removal tool will also be updated…
Additionally, Microsoft will issue two non-security high-priority updates through Windows Update and Software Update Services, and three non-security high-priority updates through Microsoft Update and Windows Server Update Services. It is standard Microsoft procedure to not disclose the nature of the updates beforehand for security reasons.
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Most home pc users lacking on PC security…
Surprise!!… ummm wait, no… This article has come out while I’ve been in the midst of cleaning up a Windows ME pc that has been “0\/\/ned” (owned/controlled…) by someone other than the owner for a bit over 15 months. The system had NO antivirus, no firewall (no antispyware) and used dialup for internet. (That much said, this is probably the most infected dialup system I’ve seen… 30-100 virii, 230+spyware remnants/etc.) Anyway…. the article from cnet news claims that a recent survey found 81% of home pc users lacked either
at least one of three types of critical security–a firewall, updated antivirus software or anti-spyware protection
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Registrars not verifying contact information on domains?
According to a GAO report one of the reasons that phishing and scam websites are because of a lack of enforcement and policing by registrars of accurate contact information. According to their study over 5% of sites had been registered with false data. ~2.5% had been registered with incomplete information. These findings come from a random sample of 300 domain names that they then did lookups on the domains.
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Google indexing weirdness
In looking at my Google Analytics info…. I checked on the Northcarolinagenealogy.net site’s stats and found that it’s really dropped since about Friday or Saturday from decent traffic to next to nothing. (20 visitors a day now.) The first thing I noticed was no google.com referrers…. So, I started looking and sure enough the last Google search visitor arrived Friday. So, I started investigating further site:northcarolinagenealogy.net brought up nothing (as did site:www.northcarolinagenealogy.net).
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Outlook express pet peeve #375
Migrating Outlook Express data from one machine to another. Addresses are easy to export… file export Address Book gives a good option to CSV (comma seperated value) output. Which is a nice common denominator. (WAB/PAB output wouldn’t hurt.) But, File, Export, Messages only let’s you dump your Outlook Express messages into Exchange/Outlook. (!) Now, this is a pet peeve I’ve had for sometime with Outlook Express. There are just too many places to tell people to look for their data.
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Microsoft (MSN) virtual earth becomes Live Local
The Virtual Earth project at MSN will become local.live.com competing with other local search tools from Google and others. There will be some new features. It looks as though one is a 45 degree angle view of most large cities. Directions to a point by just clicking on the map (no address needed). It sounds like there are some interesting features here. Good to see some competition happening in the maps/local search space.