I’ve seen a lot of strange behavior from windows updates, but this apparently wasn’t one. Essentially here is what was going on: the user would try to click on an attachment in Outlook 2003, particularly those that were forwarded emails. Then, nothing happened. No message, no error, nothing. Just doubleclick and that’s it…. right click and open didn’t work either. After a bit of research I found this happening with a few different versions of Outlook.
Tag: google desktop
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Google Wins Bidding War for Dell Desktop Placement
Google has apparently won a pricey bidding war in the race to have their software bundled with new Dell PC’s over the next 3 years. Essentially, I suspect this means, Google Desktop (perhaps Google Pack?) will be preinstalled, as well as browser settings adjusted to make a Google-ified search page the default and probably Google as the default search provider for the browser. They apparently dug in their heels and were determined to win the bidding after seeing the built in search box in IE7 which is in Beta….
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Google Calendar revisited
When Google Calendar first rolled out, I took a look and was not overwhelmed. Now, I’ve had a chance to revisit and see a few improvements. First, one of my initial problems was that I couldn’t get to calendar from gmail. The code has now been added in the upper left corner to navigate between the two (or the google homepage, or their “other services”). This was missing when I first looked. I distinctly remember seeing it in one of the testing screenshots. Even immediately after I had started out with the Calendar, the link was still not there. I’m not sure when, but it’s there now. Good.
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Google press day announcements…
It looks as though Google has made a bit of a splash with four product announcements today. Nothing being EXACTLY as forecast it is a bit interesting…. First there is Google Coop where it looks as though people in specific fields can help suggest, review and refine results (like a directory), then users subscribe to an individual who has labelled sites. This is the area that Google Health falls under and there are a couple areas that are “Under development”. This gives some interesting possibilities for refining searches in certain areas.
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Google Pack
Google has announced Google Pack available for download It sounds as though there’s a nice bundle of Google (and non-google software) included (Google Desktop, Earth, Picasa, Toolbar for IE, Google Pack Screensaver, Acrobat reader, Norton Antivirus 6 month trial, AD-aware SE personal, firefox with google toolbar.) It sounds as though there is an update manager that can keep all the “google pack” components updated and there are rumors of other applications being made available in the not so distant future (OpenOffice for instance.)
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Virtual machine as a safe browsing environment
I mentioned this in my summary yesterday morning as a possible workaround until there are patches for the WMF vulnerability that’s been big news the last week. I notice that incidents.org has mentioned it too as a possibility today. VMware has released VMPLayer as a free way of running premade virtual machines.
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WMF exploit through indexing software
One of the vectors that has been mentioned early on is the infection of a system through the WMF exploit even when the exploited file was downloaded through a dos command shell. At first this seemed absurd, but it appeared that Google Desktop search was indexing files dynamically and once the file was downloaded it indexed the file and triggered the vulnerability. There is word that Microsoft’s indexing service does likewise – although Microsoft has only said that they’re “looking into reports”. Incidents.org is saying that they think this may be the giant white elephant no one is talking about. I certainly would shudder to think if machines on a network are indexing a network share and manage to subvert every machine running an indexing share….
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More on the Windows WMF zero-day exploit
There seems to be quite a bit developing on the Windows Meta File (WMF) zero-day (0-day) exploit which was first reported yesterday. Sans has raised their alert level to yellow in an effort to get attention to this problem. It looks like the original site serving the exploit is down, but now it’s being served MANY places. Here are more details from f-secure…
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Google tightens Google Desktop security to avoid IE bug
Last week there was word of a bug in Internet Explorer that would allow users of Google Desktop to be vulnerable to having the files on their machine viewed from a malicious website. Today, there is news that Google has made changes on thier site that prevent that flaw from being exploited through their software.
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Another IE security flaw this one could lead to data theft
I saw this earlier this afternoon at betanews.com there seems to be a flaw in the way Internet Explorer deals with css that could put your data at risk. According to this article it is a risk combined with Google Desktop. This can be “fixed” by disabling scripting or using Firefox as your primary browser. Currently Microsoft says it is “investigating the problem”…