Well, let’s start with the extensions first. Like ANY software, you should be cautious installing something from an untrusted source. If you think an extension looks neat and cool – look for reviews and third party information before installing it. That much said…. never install an extension that comes attached as an unexpected email…. Apparently, just that has been happening a password stealing trojan has been showing up as an email attachment that appears to be a firefox extension. OK – quick review – what’s the weakest link in computer security (grab mirror and look….) Now… Mozilla has also released some security updates for Firefox….
Tag: NO
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Open Source NTFS driver for linux with Read and Write support
Linux has full support for so many file systems. Fat32, which is the filesystem of the Win98 and ME systems has had full read-write support as long as I can remember, but NTFS has not. In fact, NTFS has had read-only support in the main open source driver, but NO write support. (Or at least VERY limited and risky write support.) There was the captive ntfs project which used Windows own NTFS driver, but…. it looks like we’re getting very close to a true open source, read write NTFS driver for linux (and really, for any other OS that wants to implement it.)
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UPS Worldship changing report printer
I really couldn’t find a quick answer to this on this in a quick search. Maybe it’s just me. But, one of the computers that I support has UPS Worldship installed on it. (Version 8.0.16 I think.) They had a printer problem and switched printers. Of course, Windows handled the printer just fine. Worldship printed out labels (this all happened before I got there, but Worldship gives you an opportunity to change the label printer.) Unfortunately reports wouldn’t print. When looking through the setup and attempting to test it simply gave a message that the printer couldn’t be found (the printer could not be found) and nowhere was an option to CHANGE the report printer. In retrospect, I wonder if I should have looked in the “Change label printer” choice, but at the time I didn’t want to run the risk of tinkering with THAT working part. So… here’s what I did.
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Trackback and Comment Spam storms update
Well it looks as though the storms of Trackback and Comment spam that I mentioned last week have just about tailed off now. About 6200-6300 posts were reported as junk by akismet and the “other” spam killing plugin probably got another couple hundred, so it’s been pretty deep. Anyway, the first few days, I was seeing spikes of about 200 or so junk comments/trackbacks happen for about an hour every 2-3 hours and today there’s just been a “spike” of a bit under 100 for an hour once in the day. I think there may have been one yesterday. Just not much to “write home about”.
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Sandbox your browser on a linux system
While I was reading about browser sandboxing coming up in Vista and musing about how easy or difficult it would be to sandbox OTHER 3rd party applications, I found a comment on a ZDNet post that I think I’ll just copy directly (of course, giving credit to the poster…) Of course, with the user seperation under linux, individual users have NO access to other users folders by default. ONLY the administrator can access individual user folders. So, you obviously don’t want to run a web browser as the administrator (root), but you could setup another user account to run your web browser under if you’re particularly concerned about isolating it from NOT just the system files, but YOUR files as well.
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Clamav and Firefox updates
In the last couple days there have been new security releases of both clamantivirus (0.88.2 is now the current) and Mozilla-Firefox (1.0.3 is the current release over there). If you use either of these programs you should be looking to update. I’ve been busy looking at getting src.rpm’s recompiled here for various Mandr-ake/iva’s and if time allows I’ll even upload the latest. It sure feels like firefox has been getting rebuilt about every week or two lately though.
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Bellsouth mail.lig.bellsouth.net server phasing out?
I haven’t had much time to look into this, but one of the mailservers I administer is typically configured to relay through mail.lig.bellsouth.net, with mail.averyjparker.com as a fallback. Sometime overnight, mail.averyjparker.com started getting heavy use and on checking this morning was getting all of the outbound traffic. So, I did a bit of investigation mail.lig.bellsouth.net is no longer found and I’ve switched the configuration to mail.bellsouth.net and all is churning along well.
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Version 2 of the WMF exploit vs Windows 98 SE
Ok, I wasn’t quite satisfied with the results of the tests against the first version of the WMF (Windows Metafile) zero day exploit that’s now up to 4 or 5 days or so… Windows 98 is listed as being vulnerable, but there are no patches or workarounds currently available for Windows 98 users. I was mostly curious to see if current exploits could wreck a Windows 98 system. The answer at this point is not that I can see.
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Network Security guide for the home or small business network – Part 9 – Know your network
Once more into the breech… Ok you’ve taken account of the software and services on your pc. The next thing we need to talk about is knowing your network. Do you have any wireless access points? Not sure? Print servers? How many pcs? Are any of them portables? Public access? Are all of them secured?
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Linux/Unix Bash scripted weblog
Oh my some people have time on their hands. I just found Linux, Unix, /etc/: Unix Weblog Hacks where the writer says they wanted to do a weblog, but didn’t want to go with a big blog hosting service, or have to deal with a hard to install blogging script. So their solution was to write their own weblog tool in the bash scripting language.
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