Ok, one of the first things that I got annoyed with in the new Mandriva 2006 install on the laptop was the event triggered sounds. Popup notification window one sound, error message – glass breaking, etc. etc…. So, I started trying to remember where to cut all that stuff off. It took a bit of digging to find it, because it’s not in the KDE control panel under “sound” where it might be found in a Windows setup…
Tag: Windows
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Ooops… hard drive maker ships trojan on storage media
Oooops… According to the Sunbelt blog a Japanese storage maker (I-O Data Device) has offered to exchange drives that were discovered to have been shipped out with the Tompai-A, a worm which would give a cracker backdoor access to a machine. It affects portable hard drive’s in the companies HDP-U series.
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Apple iTunes vulnerability on Windows
eEye has discovered a remotely expoitable security vulnerability in Apple’s iTunes software. It affects iTunes 6 and prior and the current security updates (released yesterday) do not address the issue. News.com has coverage as well. Earlier they reported that it affected “all operating systems”, however now they are saying that it’s only been found on Windows systems using iTunes.
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Keyloggers a growing problem
It’s interesting some years ago when viruses on Windows machines were SOOOO plentiful it seemed like that’s all I spent my time cleaning up, I thought… “you know, most viruses are prankster-ish programs. They rearrange icons, maybe cause Windows to crash, or send random files out to others, but they could be MUCH worse.” Since then, we’ve seen viruses used as delivery tools for mail relays (so that spammers can have more “safe havens”, we’ve seen viruses bring in spyware, both of the last two for “fun and profit”. I don’t know that we’ve really seen the WORST that a virus could be designed to do. However, I’m afraid we’re getting there.
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Microsoft working to ensure Windows Validation works with Firefox
I’ve got to say, I’m impressed that this is happening. From the IEblog…
The core of my team’s job is to make IE7 and Windows Vista so compelling so that people choose our products. The people who work on Windows want you to have a good experience, whether you use IE or not – for example, Windows Media Player has a Firefox plugin. I also recently got a chance to play with a new Firefox plugin that simplifies and improves the Windows validation process on that browser – since, as I said to Scoble a long time ago, it would be arrogant for the people working on a product not to use other products in that category.
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Windows Denial of Service via RPC vulnerability
The Sans Institute is reporting on a vulnerability in Windows 2000 and XP SP1 (sp2 and 2003 not affected), that “could allow an attacker to levy a denial of service attack of limited duration”. It appears that valid login credentials are necessary for this. There is no patch yet, the best solution at this point is to firewall off services that are not necessary.
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VNC or Tightvnc for remote pc access
I was surprised to do a search and find that I haven’t mentioned tightvnc before (or even merely VNC as a useful tool.) Ok – here’s the scenario, you need a way to get remote pc access, or remotely view a desktop, maybe it’s a Windows machine and you’re using a Mac? Or Maybe it’s a Mac and you have a linux desktop? Or a Linux server from a Windows machine? Most of the time in the Windows to Windows remote control area the choice becomes either Remote Desktop, or PCAnywhere. There are other options though. One that I’m particularly found of is TightVNC, which is an implementation of the VNC protocol (VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing).
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Netscape 7.1 download file could not be saved
I’ve run across this a couple of times and to save me a few more Google searches….
Under Netscape 7.1, trying to download a file, there is a long message (with a temporary file address), and the following…
(long path to file like c:\windows\temp\….. ) could not be saved because the source file could not be found. Try again later or contact the server administrator.
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MS05-053 Microsoft Windows Image Viewing Vulnerability
Two notes on the Windows vulnerability patched day before yesterday. There is a trojan in the wild exploiting it and Symantec’s AV definition to detect such an exploit is a bit too paranoid and flags lot’s of emf files as having an exploit for the same. The workaround is to disable emf files from virus scans.
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New List of Open Source software for Windows
In an effort to educate more people on the value of open source software, there is the Looplist. The Looplist was highlighted in desktoplinux.com today. It’s essentially a user-collaborated WIKI listing Open Source applications which run on Windows based systems.