Version 2.0.3 of OpenOffice.org has been released. It includes quite a few bugfixes, including three security related fixes. The security vulnerabilities were apparently found in an internal audit. One of the improvements in 2.0.3 is an integrated update check, to be able to check for available updates directly from within OpenOffice. I think this is an important area to be improved.
Tag: time
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Phishing – so many flaws to exploit so little time
In the last week there was a well documented writeup of a cross site scripting vulnerability which had allowed a phisher to pose as a paypal login with THE LEGIT PAYPAL SSL CERTIFICATE…. Brian Krebs at the Security Fix has some details on some of the new and interesting ways phishers are trying to exploit to seperate us from our personal information.
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VM Player vmx builder
Of course, I’ve spent some time with posts on VMware player (free download to “play” existing vmware images). And more recently on the VMware server which is also a free download but can create images as well. If you’re not in a position to try the VMWare server, you might be interested in this website which walks you through to create the vmx file that defines a virtual machine environment for vmware products. Of course, it doesn’t create the actual disk images for you, but you can use free tools like those supplied with qemu to do that.
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Playing catchup..
Last week our Church held annual Vacation Bible School and I am just now catching up on some of the items I’ve been intending to post over that period, so…. today will likely be a fairly active posting day as I clear out some of these tabs I’ve opened over the last week. In many cases – I’m doing roundups – like the Google stories all in one article. Between the VBS and related preparations/trips to pick up last minute supplies, and the one or two issues that came up needing my firsthand presence…. there was simply no time for posting (unless I wanted to do away with those wasted “sleep” hours.)
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Another wolf among us… and more spyware news
Yes, it’s another wolf in sheeps clothing. This time around Sunbelt is reporting on “Trust cleaner”. Keep your eyes out for this one, among other things it plants an altered version of the Google page complete with links to dating, gambling, ringtones, pharmacy, home loans and spyware removers…….. (the fake site is at mswindowssearch.com – trustcleaner.com trustinbar.com are download sites for the pest….) If you’re in a position to block addresses…. read more for the list….
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VMPlayer on Mandriva 2006 finally…
As you might recall some time back I talked about the release of vmplayer which is a free virtual machine “player” from vmware. Mostly, I wrote about the problems I had running it on my main desktop which was running Mandrake 10.1 at the time. The error was basically a signal 11 in the log file, which MOST everyone says is a hardware problem (or kernel…) Well, I tested the memory, everything seemed fine. Finally, I was having other issues and an itch for an upgrade, so I upgraded to an AMD64 3000 based system with 1GB of memory and did the upgrade to Mandriva 2006 as well (first with the original kernel, now with the updated kernel.) Vmplayer still refused to run.
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Qemu 0.8.1 speed improvement with -kernel-kqemu and kqemu 1.3.0pre7
I mentioned the other day revisiting the qemu site to discover new versions of both qemu and the non-redistributable kernel module kqemu (qemu is now at version 0.8.1 and kqemu is at 1.3.0pre7). There’s also a new startup switch -kernel-kqemu which enables FULL virtualization of both kernel and user code. I could feel a difference in speed, but I wanted to give a test with a stopwatch to see what the numbers were and this is what I found.
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Reinventing the capacitor
These days, big inventions aren’t entirely new creations, but improvements on an old idea. This latest in a string of interesting science/technology breakthrough stories is about just that. Researchers at MIT (how many sentences have I started like that this week?) have developed a new way of constructing a capacitor. One of the limiting factors with HOW much charge a capacitor stores now is the surface area of the “plates” that hold charge. The greater the surface area, the greater the charge. What they’ve done is laced the surface with nano-tubes, greatly increasing the surface area. One writer compared this to a fuzzy bathroom towel soaking up more water than a flat cloth. Probably not a bad analogy. What makes this significant….
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Seller Beware…
This is a cautionary tale about bank fraud for anyone that sells things. (online or otherwise). A man sold a car online, the buyer sent a check for several thousand more than the buying price. He claimed it was to cover extra shipping costs and for the seller to just wire him the excess which turned out to be $5000. He felt a bit suspicious of the check and inquired a couple times if the check was ok, the teller confirmed that the check was fine.
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Microsoft June Patch Cycle heads up
It’s about that time again folks…. Monthly Microsoft patch cycle – June patches will be released on the 13th (next Tuesday) and it looks like a big batch. There should be 12 patches this time and at least one of the Windows updates is Critical and at least one of the Office updates is critical. It’s widely expected that an update will be released for the Word vulnerability that’s been talked about previously here. Also, there will be a change in the ActiveX behavior in Internet Explorer. That change had been scheduled to come out a few months back, but was postponed.