Classic Tech Tips Archive

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 …

I've been out of town for several days (about 4) and came back to a dying hard drive and a two day project, so.... I've not been able to get any updates here for a bit. So, hopefully I can start play…

I noticed this evening that I wasn't getting the usual thumbnails of jpg images in Konqueror (KDE's file browser.) On investigation, there were error messages like this.... konqueror: WARNING: Pixmap…

We're planning a quick trip out of town and I'm using the lowly free version of Google Earth that doesn't integrate with a GPS device. So, I had got a series of places tagged in "My Places" and had s…

Here's the link to Microsoft's advisory. The main workaround seems to be.... Don't open or save powerpoint attachments that you receive from untrusted sources, OR that you receive unexpectedly from t…

The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. …

Sysinternals.com is a GREAT source of free Windows utilities (rootkit detector, process list, list of files being used by a process, etc....) Today the news started to spread that they've been acquir…

Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables. For starters, I've tested this on a test system that started out with NO iptables rules, and then moved on to an IPCop install (the vmware download…

SANS has a story on another local kernel vulnerability for linux. I've got to say that I typically haven't looked as much at "local" vulnerabilities on this site as I have talked about remote vulnera…

Linux has full support for so many file systems. Fat32, which is the filesystem of the Win98 and ME systems has had full read-write support as long as I can remember, but NTFS has not. In fact, NTFS …

Yesterday I had a bit of a realization. I had just been looking at a wireless router/firewall setup and was thinking about the firewalling rules (which seemed to be geared at the WIRELESS lan... i.e.…

This has been a rough quarter for Office vulnerabilities... there seems to be a pattern, Microsoft patch day, then.... zero-day exploit within a week for an Office component. First Word, then Excel a…

I mentioned some time ago a frustrating issue with the hardware on my desktop that I had finally solved. I got the new system Which was a 64-bit AMD Athlon on an Asus k8N4-E board and a pci-express n…

I've detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for Wordpress can be found in the following posts (reverse ch…

Sans also brings this story about the Debian development server being compromised. Investigation is ongoing. The machine was gluck.debian.org and hosted CVS among other things (ddtp, lintian, people,…

Sans has a story on botnet traffic spotted coming from the TOR network. Now, I had to refresh my memory on what TOR is, but it's an anonymizing network, essentially a computer running TOR, would coll…

I've been keeping an install of Vmware virtual Server through their beta and Release Candidate phase and have seen several places that they've released the 1.0 version today. This release is free (as…

On the heels of yesterdays massive update day from Microsoft, Adobe has released an update for the free Adobe Reader. The Adobe reader is one of those ALMOST essential applications that MOST everyone…

I've seen a couple places referring to some improvements in the way google maps handles zooming and so I decided to take a look in Firefox. The zoom handling of Google maps is the one thing that I've…

I don't know much about the dv format, except that it is a standard format that many camcorders use. For this reason, many video editors (such as kino for linux) prefer to see files coming in dv form…

Well, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405 that I ordered from Amazon has arrived today (ordered the 5th of July, arrived the 11th with the "slow boat" free shipping option.) I've had it long enough to charg…

and they affect no fewer than 18 issues in Office and Windows. 13 issues are tagged as critical, others as important. They are all bundled into 7 update downloads. 8 vulnerabilities within Excel have…

From time to time I've done product reviews on this site and I'm getting ready to do a first impression review on something else. I'd like to take a step back though and give you my thoughts on produ…

The SecurityFix reports on this clever two-factor authentication phishing attempt. They were looking for Citibank Business customers and in addition to username password information they were looking…

There are articles out about the demise of official Windows 98 and ME support would be a boost to linux uptake. Realistically, I suppose it may, but I personally am not holding my breath. Here's why.…