I didn’t really think of this in context, but George Ou points out that Microsoft issued an “out of cycle” patch for their DRM software in response to the FairUse4WM software that stripped DRM protections from Windows Media Files. It took a mere 3 days from being made aware of the issue to releasing a patch. In context, we have seen numerous instances in the last year of “zero-day” vulnerabilities becoming known just after a monthly patch day, and Microsoft waiting until the next patch day to release a fix. So why the different response?
Category: Windows Software
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Windows XP lost administrators password
Some time ago, I’ve talked about chntpasswd as a great utility for when you’re locked out of a Windows 2000 or XP installation because you’ve either forgotten (or weren’t informed) of the valid password to get in. It turns out there is a different approach… well yes, you could format and install from scratch blowing away all data on the drive, OR you could do a second installation in the same partition – that could be messy though and waste space. If you just need a few files off, you could boot up a linux livecd and copy the files to another disc before wiping and rebuilding, but there is yet another possibility….
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Fairuse4wm back on top
In the struggle between fairuse4wm and Microsoft DRM, it appears that fairuse4wm is out on top again. Just to sum up – the last few weeks saw a release of fairuse4wm that stripped DRM from Microsoft DRM protected media files, then MS fixed their DRM to break fairuse4wm and now fairuse4wm has released a NEW version that breaks Microsoft’s fix and strips DRM from Microsoft DRM protected media files…. DRM software arms race, kind of fun to watch.
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CDROM drives with yellow exclamation point in Windows XP
I ran into something I hadn’t yet seen firsthand today. A PC (running Windows XP home) with 2 optical drives (CD-RW and DVD drive). However, neither cd drive showed up in My Computer and both of them had a yellow exclamation point in the device manager listing. Of course, two drives don’t just go bad at the same time, so I wondered if it might be the Secondary IDE connector on the system board or the cable that was causing the trouble. In retrospect, I might could have assumed that they wouldn’t show at all if that were the case, but I checked against a usb connector and good cd drive just to be sure that we could rule out hardware as the problem. So, then it came time to see if the driver was the problem.
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Codeweavers releases beta of Windows compatibility software for Apple Mac OS X
Yesterday codeweavers announced a beta release of their Crossover Office product geared towards Apple Mac OS X users. The software will allow certain windows applications to run on top of Apple’s operating system. They’re of course, seeking feedback and suggestions for what direction to take the project. This is based on the wine project, codeweavers also has Crossover Office for Linux. (The beta release is 6.0, currently the linux version is at 5.0.3)
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Another Internet Explorer Exploit (September 2006)
A new Internet Explorer bug was published on Monday. It’s been given a CVE (2006-4446) and affects IE 6.0 SP1. It’s worth considering alternative browsers. Details from bugtraq indicate that it’s a buffer overflow in the DirectAnimation.PathControl COM Object(daxctle.ocx)… could cause DoS and possibly remote code execution.
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CA etrust antivirus false positive
We’ve got an antivirus false positive to pass along… apparently, a signature update for CA eTrust Antivirus has flagged lsass.exe on Windows 2003 as an undesirable program. There have been updates to address the problem, but if you’re running CA eTrust on Windows 2003 Server you’ve probably already seen the effects. Sans reports some 2003 servers as failing or being unable to reboot.
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Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 approaching
Mozilla is soliciting people to test the candidates for version 1.5.0.7 of both Firefox and Thunderbird, so that sounds as though release is VERY close for that version. It sounds as though there are security issues addressed. (September 7 is the tentative release date… according to this page.)
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IE 7 INCOMPATIBLE with WORDPRESS blogs using the stattraq plugin
I’ve FINALLY tracked down what was causing the issue with displaying my page in Internet Explorer 7 (RC1). It turns out that the stattraq plugin in wordpress (stattraq site) is part of the problem. Now, I don’t understand exactly WHY… because I do have stattraq on each of the sites, but one… onlineradiotv.com carried this error at the bottom of the page (ONLY in IE7 by the way…) “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: () in /var/www/html/radiotv/wp-content/plugins/stattraq.php on line 90”
The other pages just failed to display as though there was a network problem…. until…
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Bizarre Internet Explorer 7 problem – Several of my pages are not displayed AT ALL
I’ve been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as “Internet explorer cannot display the webpage.” The error page goes on to suggest a number of connectivity or availability problems. I even tested side by side with Firefox which WAS able to display the page and Explorer 7 which wasn’t. I thought it might just be a rendering bug of some sort, but today got a chance to try IE7 on Windows XP (RC1). So… the problem is still there, I can find NO other browser exhibiting the same behavior. It affects averyjparker.com, northcarolinagenealogy.net and southcarolinagenealogy.org, but NOT onlineradiotv.com (which all by the way are hosted out of the same VPS – so I know the VPS is up and the database server is just fine….)