In all fairness this is a year old news release from US-CERT. Beware of IE, certainly there have been patches for IE since this release (3 this week.) But have all of the issues they raise been dealt with? According to Secunia there are still 20 advisories related to Internet Explorer that are unpatched.
Category: Windows
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Anti-phishing tool
I had run across a link that netcraft was trying to combat phishing schemes and I didn’t have time for a detailed look at the time. I’ve since revisited and found their Netcraft toolbar. I’m impressed, it installs in either Internet Explorer (under Windows), or Mozilla Firefox (all platforms.)
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Summary of the windows patches
Over at the Sans Institute (incidents.org), they have a round up of yesterdays windows updates a summary of their severity and some details about some of the problems (one had an invalid signature and had to be re-posted.)
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Free Ext2 Ext3 driver for Windows
Barrapunto.com is reporting on a Noticias.com article (on another story by… sorry… got carried away.) Their reporting on a freely available Ext2 Ext3 driver for Windows. It should allow full read/write access (although I would quail at allowing Windows to write to ext2 or 3…. just me though.)
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Lawsuit to block the release of Windows Vista?
Betanews.com is reporting on a move by a public interest lawyer (who is running as a Republican for the Governors Office of Illinois) who is attempting to block the distribution of Windows Vista. He intends to ask Microsoft for an unconditional warranty that the operating system is free from major bugs that could lead to security vulnerabilities. (Good luck with that one…)
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Raft of Microsoft updates out – time to get updating
The promised batch of windows updates for today are now out and it turns out there were 3 critical updates out of the 6 released. It looks as though the biggy is an RPC problem with the plug and play system (Plug and play needing a remote procedure call?) This is one that could likely be quickly exloited. There is a workaround on this of having port 139 and 445 firewalled (many places do that by default now, last I checked my ISP does.) Don’t take that as a tool for complacence though. Patch it anyway!
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Interesting NASA open source software
I was just browsing Sourceforge.net and looking at the most downloaded software and something from NASA caught my eye. It’s called World Wind. The link is to their home page (not the project page.) It’s Windows only, but looks very nicely done from what I can see.
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Linux using wine passes Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage test
This will likely not last long, but according to this post at bit-tech.net, the author went to windows update to try to download directx on his linux machine just to see if it would work. (I assume he was using Internet Explorer running on wine.)
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Microsofts Linux Lab manager answers questions on slashdot
A few days back I mentioned that slashdot was posing questions to Bill Hilf, the manager of Microsoft’s Linux lab. Today his responses are being posted.
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OpenGL asking for help as Vista appears poised to make it useless
It looks as though Windows Vista has been designed to essentially neutralized the usability of OpenGL, one of two competing 3d acceleration apis. Directx *(by Microsoft) is the other competing API and from what I read, the current structure makes OpenGL applications run through Directx cutting performance by 50%, preventing upgrades of the API and it would appear essentially killing off their graphics API competition.
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