It seems the WMF patch that was recently released for Windows 2000 and XP (and 2003) has been ported to Microsoft Windows Vista Beta…. This makes it the first security patch for Vista. eweek has an article on the issue. So, if you’re beta testing Vista, get it updated ASAP. Hopefully though, if you’re beta-testing it’s not a production machine and no great loss if you get infested with beaucoup spyware….
Category: Tech Support
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Direct links to international broadcasters audio streams
I’ve posted several things over at the onlineradiotv.com site. For starters I’ve got links to a few international (shortwave) broadcasters live audio streams and where available their “latest” english news update (and in some cases spanish and other languages.) I’ve also started posting some bash scripts there that can directly start mplayer streaming a feed.
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Another Win98 patch for WMF vulnerability
There’s another patch for those Win98 users that are nervous about the WMF vulnerability that was announced at the tail end of the year. This site has made the patched version of gdi32.dll available to any and all. Their patch is open source. They basically say “it works for them…” no warranties. Steve Gibson has also said that he’ll be writing a Win9x patch.
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Windows Wireless vulnerability
Brian Krebs has a post today on a Windows wireless networking “feature” which can be somewhat of a security risk. You see, it seems that With wireless networking enabled, Windows remembers the last wireless SSID that you connected to, so let’s say you were at a public Wireless access point called “Bob’s hotel” and you carry your laptop somewhere else. When the machine boots up, Windows tries to find “Bob’s hotel”, but of course, it’s not available at this other location, so… it assigns a 169.254.x.x ip address and broadcasts looking for “Bob’s hotel” the most recent wireless lan.
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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 for Mandriva 2006
Mandriva 2006 released without Mozilla Firefox 1.5, it came with 1.0.6 (which included security fixes and other patches from 1.0.7)…. anyway, source rpm’s for Firefox 1.5 became available in cooker, so I’ve built rpm’s for Mandriva 2006 for easy management on my systems. I’ll post links here as they may be of use to others as well. …. These are provided as is, with no warranty express or implied, etc. etc. etc. The src.rpm is straight from cooker, so, if you like, you could build it yourself….
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Mondorescue manually restoring from an afio.bz2 file
For several years now, I’ve used Mondorescue as a backup solution for those customers with a Linux server. It makes for a nice, easily scriptable backup that can go ahead and burn to disc, *(or tape or another pc….) My preferred way of doing this has been a full mondorescue backup to dvd (usually one or two discs) and a couple “incremental” backups each week. The client site handles swapping the discs as needed *(I’ve got reminder emails scripted) and they rotate through two sets of discs. Since mostly, these backups are kept onsite, once a month I burn a copy to move offsite.
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Clamav 0.88 for Mandrake 10.0
I’ve got a couple of older Mandrake 10.0 servers that I’m still maintaining. They’re systems that it hasn’t been practical (yet) to do an upgrade to a more recent release of the base operating system. Two of those are currenlty using Clamantivirus for their mailscanning. So, with the recent security vulnerability an update was needed. I basically took the clamav 0.88 source rpm from cooker and rebuilt on a 10.0 system. For convenience I’m posting ALL of these for download. So…. I’ll post the original src rpm from Mandriva cooker. (Which you could make use of to rebuild for another release of Mandrake.) And also the resulting built rpm’s….
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Microsoft Support extensions for XP
Good news for Windows XP users (especially XP Home). Microsoft has extended the support period for XP Home and Pro. Originally, security patch related support was expected to end December 31st of this year. According to the article for XP Home…
So for the consumer versions of Windows XP, mainstream support was going to end on December 31, 2006 and there was no guarantee of any security hot-fixes beyond that time. Microsoft has now extended the mainstream support deadline for the consumer versions to an undefined date that is two years after the release of the follow-on operating system.
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Microsoft’s speed to get security patches out
Brian Krebs at the Security Fix has done an interesting study related to how long it takes Microsoft to release a security fix for a problem, starting from the time they are notified of the security vulnerability. For the most part, 134.5 days has been the window between notification and vulnerability patching for the last 2 years from Microsoft. (That is for vulnerabilities that were submitted to Microsoft through the normal process…)
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Codeweavers fixes WMF vulnerability in Crossover Office
There has been a bugfix release to Crossover Office, released by Codeweavers. Crossover Office is an offshoot of the Wine project, which is a windows compatibility suite for Linux, to allow Windows applications to run under modern Linux operating systems. It was found recently that wine suffered from the WMF vulnerability just the same as Windows. The new release is 5.0.1, notes on what has changed can be found here.