I talked in the last entry about using UltraVNC and UltraVNC Single Click (ultravnc sc) as a means of doing remote desktop support. The idea is that you (the technical support person), setup vncviewer to listen for connections, then the end user with pc problems can download your customized ultravnc server that will connect to your viewer through firewalls/etc. This has a lot of things going for it. 1) ease of use by the end user 2) only one network to make firewall configuration changes on, 3) small quick download. The biggest downside I see is that the ultravnc viewer doesn’t run on linux.
Category: Software
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Old Play by mail (email) games…
Ok – not work related, but… I was remembering with one of my brother’s a computer game we played maybe 10 years ago that was a strategy game and had a neat play by email feature. The game was turn based, we’d make a move and it had a handy link to email the game info to each other and I think we went back and forth with it for several weeks. It was really quite an entertaining way to deal with the game. Now, today, with realtime strategy games, online multiplayer communities, etc. play by email seems a bit dated, but for many turn based games this would be one feature I’d LOVE to see more of.
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Leading browser coders get together on internet security
This is one of those stories that you never thought you’d see (especially after the Microsoft-Netscape “wars”)… Developers from four of the most prominent web browsers, Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and Konqueror (much of the foundations for Safari are in the Konqueror codebase)… have got together and talked about different approaches and ideas on improving security while web-browsing…
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More on Explorer vulnerability
Among other things… Sans has lowered the infocon to green, NOT that the threat is diminished, but there have been no new developments with regards to the announcement yesterday of a major Internet Explorer security vulnerability. Sans recommends browsing the web with firefox (with the noscript extension, so you can enable/disable javascript where you wish). There has not yet been evidence of an active attempt at exploiting the vulnerability, but the proof of concept code could be relatively easily changed.
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Cleaning up after the Sony Rootkit
Sunbeltblog has a suggestion (from Ben Edelman) for SONY on how to get the word out to customers that they have the problem laden XCP/ rootkit/ trojan/ drm software that’s been burning up tech news… Distribute an ad through their own rootkit. It does, after all, “phone home” from time to time and…. it looks like a banner can be displayed. Details on Ben Edelman’s site.
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Mandriva 2006 review
Madpengiun now has a review up of Mandriva 2006. I’m still hoping soon to have time to sit down and upgrade on at least the laptop. The biggest problem the reviewer had was (slow?) performance under KDE which he suspected could be hardware specific. Overall it sounds like things are VERY well done, it looks like a nice interactive firewall, a la zonealarm is in there which the reviewer was pleased with.
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More on Sony’s copyright infringement with their DRM Rootkit
“What a tangled web…” there is more today at freedom-to-tinker on the evidence that Sony (and or first4internet), have infringed on copyrighted code in their DRM software XCP which has been at the middle of quite a bit of controversy the last few weeks. Most of the coverage has been on some of the cloaking capabilities, the security vulnerabilities and the uninstaller vulnerabilities… but it looks fairly obvious that at least some GPL or LGPL code has been used without abiding by the terms of the GPL/LGPL
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Exploit for Unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability
Well…. buckle your seatbelts it’s going to be a bumpy start to the week.
the securityfix as well as incidents.org are reporting on exploit code that has been released that takes advantage of an unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability. According to the Sans institute diary entry… they have tested the exploit code and it remotely launched the calculator application, so this is a remote code execution vulnerability and can have SERIOUS consequences.
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Some links to purchase linux boxed set installs
OK, truth be told linux is usually thought of as a download for free and install operating system and there are LOT’s of ways to do that. But it is also available for purchase at various places, from the different distributions web sites.
Also, these are links to the product pages at Amazon. They have a new link style that I was curious to test out and see what it looked like.
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Apache2 ( apache webserver ) not restarting
This is an error I’ve run into a few times. It’s rare enough that the second time I saw it, I had a vague memory that it had happened before. The third time though (was within the last week) I remembered and even remembered where the file was located to solve it. Here’s the problem….
As far as I know this is an apache2 problem, not prior.
Apache is not running. You try to start apache and receive the message…Cannot allocate shared memory: (17)File exists apache