Computer Tips -Tech Info

I’ll go ahead and warn you this is a very non-technical oriented post – just some musings about science fiction – life, health and a few other things including this site and my computer work. The Doctor Who series is premiering the finale of The End of Time tonight and I’m greatly anticipating that although […]

First, I guess I should give a primer, what’s an RBL? RBL stands for Realtime Black List (or Realtime Block List depending on who you talk to.) The idea is there are machines that either 1) have no business DIRECTLY trying to deliver a mail message to a legitimate mail server or 2) are known […]

Sorry, I’ll have to wrap up for the evening. I got to the end of the internet.    Send article as PDF   

This time around, the zero day is related to Internet Explorer and activex… (directanimation specifically). Incidents has a good update on the issue. This is a second exploit, there was another at the end of August, MS has an advisory on the issue. I think a safe bet would be alternative browsers until this is […]

Today is the first chance I”ve had to try out my new usb/ ide adapter “in the field”. I have previously used external ide enclosures for either laptop (2.5″) or desktop (3.5″) drives as well as larger (5.5″ cdrom’s) But, it was a bit of a nuisance to have to remove the drive that I […]

July 11th will mark the end of Microsoft’s support for Windows 98 and ME. Which means that there will be no further security updates for those systems after that date. In SOME ways, those systems may find comfort in the security through obscurity approach as much malware MAY not run on those systems, but that’s […]

So, I had the script all ready, I’ve got my x11vnc custom compiled to be as widely compatible as possible, I’ve tested thoroughly on the internal network. The next step was to test my x11vnc “one cut and paste” script over the internet. So, I visited my parents pc which dual-boots Windows XP and Mandrake […]

VuNet has an article today on the coming of Vista and the imminent doom of the smaller security companies. The hardest hit will be anti-spyware and personal firewall vendors they say. It may well be true, it does sound like a different approach to user permissions (limited priviliges by default?) IE7 running in a sandbox, […]

When a machine has been arp spoofed, ALL network traffic from it is likely passing through a “hostile” machine. So, NO, https and ssh traffic is not immune, it is travelling through a hostile machine. However, it should be encrypted. There are a few exceptions though. SSH version 1 is a broken encryption scheme and […]

I really ought to find a way to alias “rm -f *” to “rm -i” IF the time is between 1 AM and 7 AM…. Last night I was working late (2:30AM or so when this happened). I had just made a few “refinements” to some of my audio streaming scripts (kept in a “Foreign […]