Classic Tech Tips Archive

After perusing the Sans.org handlers diary, there are a few things brewing that should be known. Exploits are in the wild for some of the vulnerabilities addressed by this weeks Microsoft patchfest. …

In the spirit of a fair look at Mozilla Firefox (after doing a bit of a roasting of IE's security), I've taken a look at Secunia's analysis of Firefox. Currently there are 3 unpatched vulnerabilities…

In all fairness this is a year old news release from US-CERT. Beware of IE, certainly there have been patches for IE since this release (3 this week.) But have all of the issues they raise been dealt…

The Register is reporting that a new phishing email is taking a different twist. Instead of directing you to a website, they instruct you to fax your information to a number in the email. (I wonder i…

Over at Desktop Linux there's an opinion piece that's really a rallying cry for the linux desktop. He looks at what is promised in Vista and tries to discern what will really be different than we cur…

Osdir.com is at it again with the screenshots...., this time there's a lizard on the desktop. Yes, screenshots from openSuSe 10 beta 1. Just several days ago Novell announced that they were "opening"…

I've just seen a slideshow at osdir of screenshots of the Klax KDE 3.5 Alpha livecd. It looks like a pretty good tour, nice screenshots (and the images should be a quicker download than the cd.) It l…

So, you don't click on "phishy" links, keep your pc free from spyware, only bank at secure websites, do all the good things a cautious computer user is supposed to do to keep from having your identit…

Recently I've consolidated a few domain names that I've acquired to direct to this site, and a few others to direct to another site that I maintain. One of the things that I wondered about after I se…

According to Mandrivaclub, the second beta in the Release cycle for Mandrive (formerly Mandrake) linux 2006 has been released. Release notes on this beta are available here. Information on the releas…

I was disappointed to see that Newsforge has a story by Joe Barr regarding a request for comments at the U.S. Copyright Office. It seems that they are asking if it would be inconvenient for Copyright…

There another two fascinating posts in the saga of the massive identity theft that was reported in the Sunbelt blog. For starters they detail the beast here. It sounds truly devious, MAY still be rel…

I had run across a link that netcraft was trying to combat phishing schemes and I didn't have time for a detailed look at the time. I've since revisited and found their Netcraft toolbar. I'm impresse…

Just found this interesting post at the Security Fix. It seems Brian has had a chance to ask a question of the FBI director Robert Mueller and to speak with the assistant director in the Cyber Divisi…

Over at the Sans Institute (incidents.org), they have a round up of yesterdays windows updates a summary of their severity and some details about some of the problems (one had an invalid signature an…

According to Barrapunto and Linux Juegos (Spanish for Linux Games), the release of "X.org 7.0 RC0" (RC zero?).... will provide more 3d graphics drivers. "Outstandingly improved support for 3d acceler…

I've not run across this resource before, but it looks to have been around for a while. When I have people ask how I'm able to search and find what I'm looking for online, I may suggest this to them …

In the past few days I've been working on an automated backup system for both my site databases and a few others. I thought I'd take a bit to go through what I've done. It's really simple, but I susp…

Barrapunto.com is reporting on a Noticias.com article (on another story by... sorry... got carried away.) Their reporting on a freely available Ext2 Ext3 driver for Windows. It should allow full read…

Ironic that I find this news first at barrapunto.com, but it turns out the words Phishing and Podcasting have officially entered the Oxford English dictionary. Wiki has made it as well, as have Beatb…

Newsforge has a review up on The Book of Postfix. They recommend it for anyone administering Postfix as work or hobby. It doesn't delve into contrasting with other MTA's, but walks you through instal…

Betanews.com is reporting on a move by a public interest lawyer (who is running as a Republican for the Governors Office of Illinois) who is attempting to block the distribution of Windows Vista. He …

The Register is reporting on the iPod linux project and a developer "Kyle" there that has made Doom run on the platform. It gets a painful 3-4 frames per second. One of the next goals is to scale the…

The promised batch of windows updates for today are now out and it turns out there were 3 critical updates out of the 6 released. It looks as though the biggy is an RPC problem with the plug and play…

I just read a blog entry at zdnet. The writer, John Carroll, essentially asserts that the free market has chosen that monopoly in the case of the web browser IS what's best for it. There are a few th…