Classic Tech Tips Archive

I had a chance today to start the upgrade process for Mandriva 2006 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000). Now, let's see.... a bit of background. Mandriva (Mandrive/Mandrake) has been my favorite distro…

I talked in the last entry about using UltraVNC and UltraVNC Single Click (ultravnc sc) as a means of doing remote desktop support. The idea is that you (the technical support person), setup vncviewe…

A little while back I talked some about TightVNC which for a long time has been my favorite implementation of a remote framebuffer, or remote desktop viewing protocol known as VNC (Virtual Network Co…

Well... the media has taken the drab name of w32sober.X@mm or w32sober.x or w32sober.y, W32/Sober.AD-mm or any of those other drab names that we've been looking at the last week and dubbed the latest…

Sunbeltblog is talking about torrentspy, which has licensed their own version of Rufus, a bittorrent client. All well and good, but... they've decided to bundle WhenU SaveNow *(adware) with THEIR ver…

I did an article a while back on "wolves in sheeps clothing" software that poses as security software but will usually turn around and bite you. Sunbeltblog has a post on another fake security center…

I've not been big into console games. The last computer we had that directly connected to the TV all the time was an old Atari 400. (Which I occassionaly wax nostalgic for...) Anyway, the XBox 360 is…

One of the sub-stories in all the Sony DRM mess of the last month with the XCP copy protection was that it was really an ineffective way of preventing copying of music anyway. In other words, you cou…

So, I submitted the suspicious attachment I received to virustotal (scan@virustotal.com with SCAN in the subject and suspicious file as attachment.) What follows below is the report I received. It lo…

Well, with all the news on the Explorer bug, I started wondering what affect this would have on people browsing sites with adsense. I mean, adsense relies on javascript, so if it's disabled, no adsen…

Ok - not work related, but... I was remembering with one of my brother's a computer game we played maybe 10 years ago that was a strategy game and had a neat play by email feature. The game was turn …

This is one of those stories that you never thought you'd see (especially after the Microsoft-Netscape "wars")... Developers from four of the most prominent web browsers, Internet Explorer, Mozilla/F…

Amazingly I haven't seen any big Sony news today, but there are a couple stories out that are worth noting... First up is freedom-to-tinker with their take on the lawsuits announced yesterday and the…

I noticed that the googleblog had a note today about some improvements to Froogle that have been rolled out. I have noticed recently that some products were "clustered" with price descriptions of (fr…

Ok - there are some new variants on the Sober worm circulating. I received one on an address that's unfiltered (no virus/spam filtering) and must say, I can see people being duped into looking at the…

Among other things... Sans has lowered the infocon to green, NOT that the threat is diminished, but there have been no new developments with regards to the announcement yesterday of a major Internet …

Sunbeltblog has a suggestion (from Ben Edelman) for SONY on how to get the word out to customers that they have the problem laden XCP/ rootkit/ trojan/ drm software that's been burning up tech news..…

Analytics seems to be churning on a bit better, no a bit over a week since it's re-launch. There was a rocky start last week, but it looks like for the 4 sites I'm tracking I have data for 3 up to ye…

Google has become such a dominant company.... it's good to know someone is watching where they might be going tomorrow.... searchenginewatch.com has a list of some recent domain name registrations by…

Madpengiun now has a review up of Mandriva 2006. I'm still hoping soon to have time to sit down and upgrade on at least the laptop. The biggest problem the reviewer had was (slow?) performance under …

The security fix is reporting on the latest lawsuit filed against Sony/BMG for the DRM rootkit known as XCP. "Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers …

"What a tangled web..." there is more today at freedom-to-tinker on the evidence that Sony (and or first4internet), have infringed on copyrighted code in their DRM software XCP which has been at the …

Well.... buckle your seatbelts it's going to be a bumpy start to the week. the securityfix as well as incidents.org are reporting on exploit code that has been released that takes advantage of an unp…

This from incidents.org as well... A user visited a webpage and got redirected to hxxp://iframebiz.biz/dl/adv443.php (tt changed to xx to protect anyone from getting there...) Among other things... t…

The sans institute (incidents.org) is warning of a Mambo exploit making the rounds. Full disclosure and security focus have more details. No word on this point of workarounds... Mambo, of course, is …