According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC in it’s December meeting will be looking at the possibility of requiring the winner of the upcoming spectrum auction to use a portion of it’s spectrum to provide free internet access. They would require filtering although the idea is that adults could get unfiltered access with verification. Large wireless networks (as you can imagine) are against the idea, but I wonder if it REALLY is the threat to them that they think.
Tag: public
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Spam storm
Wow… just took a glance at the error_logs and saw numerous errors from Trackbacks and started browsing to find that the last few days we’ve been weathering a spam storm. Thanks to akismet and another tool I’ve only had maybe 2 comments stuck in moderation that were spammy, but several thousand have made it to akismet (and if I recall my OTHER filter catches 90% of the spammy stuff before akismet sees it…) So, I hope someones having fun…. realistically they seem to be coming from a variety of machines, likely a botnet. I saw one machine belonged to a netblock owned by the state of Ohio for public schools. There was another residential broadband in Texas… etc. etc. etc. So, surprise, there are still botnets in the wild and being used for spam.
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Public Record Search Engine
I ran across a good public record search engine (pretrieve.com) a few weeks back. They’ve done a good job of integrating many searches/databases into one interface.
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Is bestbuy really the bestbuy?
There’s an interesting writeup about bestbuy that essentially says they have 2 web sites, one is the public facing website, the other is an internal web site. No big surprise there I suppose, internet/intranet… the catch is
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Internet Explorer 7 final release – AND first vulnerability…
Looks as though IE 7 release is imminent and will be in automatic updates on November 1st. Here’s one persons take on the user interface “improvements”. Now, there are many improvements in core functionality, but I’m annoyed by the user interface changes. I have spent quite a while with people getting use to the way the interface for windows programs have been for the last 10 years, now I feel like many of them will take another 5-8 years to get used to a NEW way to expect programs to be laid out….
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Microsoft October 2006 patch Tuesday
The first thing I should mention is that this months update from Microsoft is the last for XP SP1 users should plan a migration path to SP2 to keep getting updates to XP. Multiple vulnerabilities this month have been patched in Office There are 4 advisories, but a total of 15 issues covered by those four. Powerpoint, Excel, Word and Office/Publisher there are a variety of exploits, some public (like the powerpoint) others that were privately reported. Also, Incidents.org gives a nice summary of the advisories and the severity of each (urgency of updating.) The setslice vulnerability is patched in this batch by the way.
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Watch what things you store in public places…. part 342
Not too long ago there was an article about how people reveal too much about their lives in Google (or other web) calendars AND MAKE PUBLIC…. well I think this takes it a step further. Gmail let’s you access your mail through an RSS feed…. well there are online services that let you subscribe/watch feeds and apparently the feeds are put in the public access folder…. (oooops.) Be careful what you make public….
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Another Debian server security breach
According to this story, there has been another compromise of a debian project server. (Is this the third in the last year?)… the Alioth webserver was offline most of the 5th of September…
It was simply stopped because we discovered that some script kiddies were running an IRC proxy. After thorough investigation, we discovered that they exploited a pmwiki security hole[1] to deface some web pages, to install some malicious php pages which in turn were used to setup the IRC proxy.
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Real time Global strategy game using Google Maps?
Some time back, there was a Risk clone using Google maps which was interesting, but taken offline due to a legal letter. Well, I have had a long interest in strategy games…. (Risk/Axis&Allies and variants as well as the civilization/freeciv variety and Age of Empires/etc….) Anyway… saw this last week… Online strategy game using Google Maps. Upon visiting, I found out the site has moved under heavy load to a new location…. Here’s the new site gmworldwar.com. I don’t know, I’m not terribly eager to strategize world war right now – it seems a bit too much like reality seem to be shaping up for right now… Anyway – it’s called Endgame and uses Google Maps as the back end. It’s currently limited to beta testers due to high demand so, the general public will have to wait.
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Other MS patch news as well as a Yahoo vulnerability?
Or lack of currently available patch as the case may be. From the previous link it appears that there was at least one previously announced vulnerability that was not addressed in the recent patch day from Microsoft. From MS…
“this is a DoS only issue that was not addressed in MS06-040, but will be addressed in a bulletin.”
Not timeline yet on when… There are also public exploits out for (possibly related to MS06-046) which is related to the MS Help system.