Classic Tech Tips Archive

According to ibnlive.com started today (June 1st) Microsoft will be utilizing their Genuine Advantage check through the Automatic Update feature. Up until now, you have only been prompted for the Gen…

Probably the biggest news so far today, at least in linux circles is the official release of the Dapper Drake.... Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) (and kubuntu and edubuntu all...). I've been play…

One of the things I've really admired about the Ubuntu project is that they will MAIL you REAL cds of their product for free. That can give a much more professional look for redistribution than a han…

Well it looks as though the storms of Trackback and Comment spam that I mentioned last week have just about tailed off now. About 6200-6300 posts were reported as junk by akismet and the "other" spam…

After I did my "Kiosk" upgrade to KDE 3.5.2 I was really interested to see if Konqueror would finally work with Google Maps, of course, the problem isn't with Konqueror it's with the browser detectio…

Some time back I had seen a quick reference to Mandriva Kiosk as some new Mandriva version of the "Click and Run" repository of Linspire. I finally got a chance to give it a try with the upgrade of K…

This is bad - whose defending the defender? eEye security has a bulletin announced that regards a remotely exploitable vulnerability in Symantec Antivirus 10.x and Symantec Client Security 3.x They s…

Google has apparently won a pricey bidding war in the race to have their software bundled with new Dell PC's over the next 3 years. Essentially, I suspect this means, Google Desktop (perhaps Google P…

I think at one point I've said that once taxes are put in place they tend NEVER to go away. Well, I must admit I'm wrong. 108 years ago in an effort to help finance the Spanish American War, long dis…

One of the big stories out today... Google has released an "early beta" version of Picasa for linux. I first saw the news from the ZDNet Googling Google blog. There are deb, rpm and bin downloads ava…

This has been a slow posting week. Much slower than I had hoped across all the sites. The main reason is a stomach bug of sorts (flu?) Anyway, I managed to get a little work done yesterday and felt c…

The Mozilla Firefox 1.0.x series will no longer be supported with security updates. IF you use Firefox as your web browser, make sure you're using the current version in the 1.5 series (currently 1.5…

This is interesting.... there's been a lot of frustration among some (myself included) with the current state of Googles site indexing. For a good while I've been able to consistently find ANY post o…

A few days ago - while musing about the botnet take-down of Blue Security - I said something along the lines of "Make sure your pc’s are clean from “bugs” and help your friends do likewise. Spr…

There was some news on this last night at Incidents.org, today F-secure has some details as well on the trojan that's dropped in this circulating, exploit. It seems as though the initial attack was v…

As I've already commented today.... there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I've now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on…

Microsoft has started releasing details of the hardware requirements for the upcoming release of Vista. It appears there are two categories of requirements. One is a bare minimum for vista, the other…

I remember the first Windows XP vulnerability was a Upnp vulnerability. I have made one of my first visits on any new XP system a visit to grc.com to disable it on an XP workstation. But, it's the gr…

As reported over the last several days, there is a critical problem with RealVNC 4.1.1, there is NOW an exploit in the wild for RealVNC 4.1.1, that SANS is looking for more information on. There are …

All of the the swarms of trackback spam seemed to last an hour give or take a few minutes, so it does look kind of like "rent-a-bot" activity, lots of different IP addresses, trackback spam sites see…

I seem to be getting the second flood of trackback spam attempts on the day. LOT's of ip addresses, from all corners of the globe - most seem to be casino-related trackback spam. I guess botnets are …

To show you where the threat with bot networks is going there's a story today on Nugache (Symantec summary) which is a bot that takes advantage of a number of clever tricks to avoid having the whole …

There's quite a bit more discussion on a DOS bug in Firefox 1.5.0.3, the link goes to a site where they've confirmed the issue and there is a link there to a POC, so be cautious. It turns out that us…

But perhaps you are not as powerful as the emporer has foreseen.... I just skimmed the stats and saw an abornmal spike in traffic over the last hour, so being curious.... I checked the server logs an…

There is a company (well, unfortunately, WAS a company) called Blue Security. They had an innovative approach to stopping spam. A small download essentially sent opt-out return emails that were junk …