If you haven’t been living under a rock the past week you have surely heard of the Chinese hacking of Google and several other firms via a browser hole in Internet Explorer.
The bug reported in MS Security Advisory 979352 will be patched tomorrow in a rare out-of-band patch that does not follow Microsoft’s standard patch Tuesday schedule of once a month. The flaw supposedly only affects ie 6 on up, however IE 6 is the only browser that has a known exploit. More information is available in the advisory. There also will be a webanar tomorrow where Microsoft will announce further information. If you run Windows be sure to run windows update tomorrow and apply this critical patch and upgrade to the newest version of Internet Explorer
It also may be a wise idea to follow the advice of Germany, andFrance and leave IE entirely. I recommend looking into one of several alternatives including:
I know that this is a bit late, but it is that time of year again… Time to wish everyone a “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!” This year was the year that I almost didn’t make it to my Grandparents house due to the weather (as it was Jess and I braved the freezing rain, a low tire, and etc…). Unfortunately Dad got stranded in Algona and was unable to make it, but we did have Tena’s new husband and Jess so that helped a little bit
Here is a picture of everyone, for more photos of Christmas see my Flickr page. The highlight of the night was the Candle light service (yes they had it even though the children’s program was canceled) where Grandma’s new knees allowed her to play her bells and tear around the whole church.
This is also the time of year for Christmas cards, I am still finishing up mine but have mailed most of them. This year Jess and I did a joint mailing with each other’s letters on one piece of paper. We also saved on postage by including our “Save the Date” cards for our wedding. Below is our Christmas letter:
Quite a while back, I wrote about free anti virus options. Well since then there has been a major entry into the market by the folks responsible for all the security holes in the first place, Microsoft. With a security suite named “Microsoft Security Essentials” they provide free anti virus and malware protection for windows xp and higher. I have used it on several machines and it preforms as advertised, however I still wonder if Microsoft is trustworthy enough not to screw up anti virus as much as they have screwed up their OS. If you want to give it a try it is available at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/default.aspx
After making several reinstalls on various laptops for work all needing SP3 installed I remembered the /nobackup flag for starting the install. so in in the command line you drag and drop the sp3 installer and then type /passive /nobackup /forcerestart and then walk away for a bit (but less time then if you had to backup the data) Yes it may be more risky, but since it is a clean install why bother with worrying about that!
/quiet Quiet mode (no user interaction or display)
/passive Unattended mode (progress bar only)
RESTART OPTIONS
/norestart Do not restart when installation is complete
/forcerestart Restart after installation
/warnrestart[:] Warn and restart automatically if required (default timeout 30 seconds)
/promptrestart Prompt if restart is required
SPECIAL OPTIONS
/overwriteoem Overwrite OEM files without prompting
/nobackup Do not backup files needed for uninstall
/forceappsclose Force other programs to close when the computer shuts down
/integrate: Integrate this software update into
/d: Back up files into
/log: Create log file at
What happens when you let a music geek loose with an autotuner and too much time on his hands? A great tribute to the late Carl Sagan, of course!
This is not the first tribute piece that John Boswell has made, his other work includes a tribute to Billy Mays. For more of his great work see Melody Sheep on youtube.
I know that everywhere is pushing the whole Michal Jackson’s dead thing but I saw this great post on facebook and just had to link to it…
Michael Jackson vs Super Mario Bros. Levels…
What ever you thought of the guy while he was alive, you have to admit this was a funny video!
If you are running a windows computer today with out antivirus, you are running with a set of scissors. Yes, I know that with a little bit of care you can keep yourself from being infected. For example using webmail with antivirus (i.e. gmail) and not downloading stray programs off of bit-torrent (especially the “hacked” versions of stuff).
However, accidents do happen. Are you sure that that flash drive that your friend just handed you is clean? Are you sure that that site you are visiting just didn’t get hacked and have a browser hack that will get you?
The best answer is to use great alternative software out there like Linux (my favorite is Ubuntu), however for those who refuse of can’t run linux (there are still some programs out there that are irreplaceable and wine just won’t do everything). It is only responsible to have some protection. This does not mean that you have to go out and spend $100 on the latest copy of Norton however, there are plenty of free solutions (some as in speech and others just as in beer only) out there. They work just as well or even better then the pay software.
The first and my personal favorite is AVG. It just plain works and gets the job done. Next is Avast I have also installed it on some computers that I have repaired for friends. Finally in the “free” corner (free as in speach and beer) is Clamwin. It is NOT a on access scanner so it does not provide the same level of protection as the other options, however for a slower computer nightly scans can at least keep your computer cleaner.
At work the other day, one of my coworkers pointed out a new os that had just came down the pipeline, Nexenta. It is a Open Solaris system with an Ubuntu user land.
What does this mean? Basically you get the best of both worlds, ZFS and Solaris Zones (basically a kick ass version of bsd jails) and all the great user programs that come with Ubuntu. So in other words it is unix with the GNU tools on top.
I tried to install it on a junker computer from the Iowa State University Surplus Sale, however, it apparently requires over 256 mb of ram so it failed on the install. I guess I will just have to use a virtual machine to play with it… but this just means that I wont be able to put it into production, oh well!
