Classic Tech Tips Archive

This is one worth checking out anybody using vnc for remote administration. It looks as though intelliadmin has come across a vulnerability in Real VNC 4 (the slashdot post I saw suggested "any machi…

Fines and prison time are among the penalties envisioned under a proposed house bill. The requirement would be that businesses with database holding information on more than 10,000 people (or federal…

Incidents.org has another interesting post about a spyware site. One of the handlers ran across it while doing a search for an educational institution. (They've used a wildcard in the dns record so t…

Apple has released Quicktime v. 7.1 for both Windows and OS X to address about 12 vulnerabilities. It looks as though all of the vulnerabilities were related to either a specially crafted images or m…

For a long time, the only way to play around with Google advertising possibilities was to join Adwords and then you could choose different keywords, see search volume information, estimate the ad pos…

There is no doubt that spyware is a problem, but when a vendor of anti-spyware software claims 87% of pcs have on average 34 pieces of spyware per machine installed...... you do have to wonder. And w…

Last month, April, the Microsoft patch cycle had one problem patch that broke certain explorer extensions (most notable some HP software...) This time around it looks like the Flash patch that they d…

It looks as though Google has made a bit of a splash with four product announcements today. Nothing being EXACTLY as forecast it is a bit interesting.... First there is Google Coop where it looks as …

First let me tell you I have not seen first hand Microsoft's Vista UAP (User Account Protection) I cannot then claim firsthand experience with it, the following is and will be based on what I have re…

It seems that today is Google Press day and speculation is rampant as to what will be unvelied. Google Health/ Google Purchases are among the leading speculations. In fact, Google Health has been a s…

Rootkits are a piece (or pieces) of software that someone can be used once a system is compromised to a) regain access to a system and b) remove traces of a compromise and c) many times hide itself. …

Not too long ago I had an article about an ISP/telecom executive that floated the idea of charging some BIG web sites to make sure they had a fast connection/delivery to the ISP's customers. In effec…

I ran across ubuntucenter today, which aims to be a web based control panel for any ubuntu based machine, providing file access, etc. Here's their summary... Ubuntu Center is a web based interface fo…

While I was reading about browser sandboxing coming up in Vista and musing about how easy or difficult it would be to sandbox OTHER 3rd party applications, I found a comment on a ZDNet post that I th…

Sans has the story on a security vulnerability involving specifically crafted .cab files affecting a WIDE range of SOPHOS antivirus products (from desktop to server.) The main result of the vulnerabi…

Oracle released 36 patches in mid-April as part of their quarterly patch cycle.... unfortunately, not all of the patches were released. Apparently they hadn't finished testing and users were advised …

VuNet has an article today on the coming of Vista and the imminent doom of the smaller security companies. The hardest hit will be anti-spyware and personal firewall vendors they say. It may well be …

There have been several articles in the last few days breathlessly heralding the news The linux kernel is too buggy... Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer has said in the last week that the 2.6 kernel…

Microsoft hasn't got a lot of positive free publicity about Vista that I've seen. I read about a Gartner Group suggesting that it wouldn't be available until 2nd quarter 2007. (Which was shortly afte…

It looks as though there are two critical updates to be had today, one moderate/low (depending on the OS version.) The critical updates are one biggy for Exchange server which is reported to break so…

"We tried scanning and all that happened was the lamp moved back and forth.... Nothing else happened." That was the description I had and the request to see why the scanner was broken. It hadn't been…

This is going to sound familiar to those that have been here before, but I've just had a once over of a batch of machines that are going to get thrown away tomorrow and felt compelled to make a list …

Sometime during the winter, I recall President Bush visited the NSA headquarters if I'm not mistaken and there was some press footage of him shaking hands in a very important looking techy monitoring…

This isn't exactly "high tech".... but earbuds are one of the ways we "interface" with high tech devices... A couple weeks ago I had the annoyance of my long time pair of earbuds failing to work. At …

I was just skimming a couple articles after noticing two sites that I had reported to google as having WRONG cache information had disappeared. It looks as though there is a certain amount of flux go…