There was a time when people looked to shape images for political benefit. (I mean political in most ALL senses of the word whether it’s domestic or international or issue oriented politics etc.) By this I mean, “Framing the picture” the right way, in front of a banner, cropping tight on a speaker so you don’t see wacky signs and the best “message” can be put forward. It can mean having a “photo op” in front of an impressive symbol or it can simply be the way an image of a landscape is framed that can tell an amazing story. Yes, I know this still goes on, but I have to wonder if the “organic” ways of “controlling the message” conveyed by a picture have become a thing of the past. This weekend, late Saturday night to be exact, I saw the beginnings of a blog-storm over a Reuters photograph of the aftermath of some of the activity in Lebanon.
Tag: time
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Workfriendly links?
I saw this by way of SunbeltBLog yesterday…. workfriendly.net…. you basically enter a web address and choose which “microsoft office theme” you want to use and the page is presented as if it was just a text document (backgrounds/images seem to be stripped) in Word. (Complete with toolbars…) Links still work. Some people have a lot of time on their hands….
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Windows update advance notice for August 2006
August’s advance bulletin of Microsoft updates is already up. Tuesday of course is the monthly Microsoft patch day. It appears as though there will be 12 updates this time around. As usual, it could be that individual updates fix multiple problems. 10 updates will affect Windows at least 1 critical, will require a restart. 2 updates will affect Office, at least 1 critical, MAY require a restart. Also the malicious software removal tool will see an update.
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Phantastic site for Phishing research….
By way of Sunbelt blog… The Phishtank at Internet Defence has a realtime archive of phishing emails as well as real time information on the status of their host sites. On their phishing site monitor it says…
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Wireless Driver Vulnerabilities
There are a couple notes to pass along with regards to some pretty serious vulnerabilities in various wireless network adapter drivers. First, Sans has information on some Intel Centrino updates that resolve some vulnerabilities that would affect the Windows Centrino driver and the ProSet management software. F-secure chimes in on this noting that the download is a whopping 129MB.
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Time for Apple Mac OS X updates again
From the look of it Apple has released a bunch of updates for OS X. A number of security issues are detailed. As always, SANS has some good details and links to more info on each of the ~13 issues. Many of them are legacy bugs if you will from older *nix-based systems. This is as good a time as any for the now familiar lesson – NO operating system is invulnerable, you must keep any software install updated with current security patches.
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Security Tip a day for August
SANS has an answer to last months browser vulnerability a day blog… for August they’ll present a security tip a day. So, if you haven’t visited the handlers diary, this may be a good time to “tune in”. The first one has to do with strong passwords (I think they decided they may as well get that out of the way up front….)
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Fun way to mess with wireless freeloaders….
Some people spend a lot of time finding ways to block the freeloaders from their wireless internet. Others find fun ways to mess with them…. They start off by settup up dhcpd.conf to carve out two subnets a “good” one with known mac addresses and an untrusted…. then the fun begins with some proxy side image manipulation. Either upside down images, blurry images, etc. I wonder why you don’t just take it a step further…. block images entirely and replace with a jpg of your choice. IF you have a very BUSY accesspoint with freeloaders – maybe you could even sell an ad…. or do a captive portal for the untrusted crowd that redirects through a page that says…. “Uploading personal data…. Please wait…. Credit Card info transfered…. browsing history transfered….. email history transfered…. My Documents in progress…” Of course, it would be actually doing this…
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Fun with Voice Recognition
Lately, I’ve tried to make use of my phone’s voice command system for calls. I’ve had a couple long drives and used a headset and tried to do something that works better without the headset…. “Name Dial”…. “please say the number” (sigh…) “1234567” “did you say 3225467?” “NO” “did you say 3225468?” “NO!” 5 miles later….. for the 5th time…. “Name dial”…. “please say the name” (finally…) It reminded me quite well of using what was a demonstration program from Microsoft that would type as you dictate. Ah, fabulous, science fiction meets reality. I tested and, it was, PAINFUL to use. “Now is the time…. no delete word no…. don’t type that.. no you stupid. NO stop. delete… not oh….” Well, it’s reassuring to see that Microsoft has problems with using Voice Dictation too. The video is hosted at Google videos and is a “demonstration” of voice recognition technology.
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Internet Explorer 7 as High Priority update and the ability to prevent it’s auto-download
The news has come that Internet Explorer 7 will come out as a high priority security update when it’s released later this year. This should mean good things for the folks that are still using IE6 as it will bring quite a few security enhancements. (On a side note, my test of Vista with IE7 failed to display averyjparker.com … other sites hosted on the same server worked, but I got a page not found for that domain. More testing there to come.) Microsoft has noted that not everyone will want all their pcs to automatically update to IE7 and so… They’ll issue a tool to block that update if one chooses.