In case you were going to let other folks find out if the last week’s batch of Microsoft patches were naughty or nice, it’s time to patch. The SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center Daily Handler’s Diary notes that the HTML Help exploit described in MS05-026 is out in the wild and coming in as spam to an unsuspecting mailbox near you.
Archive | June, 2005
MS Office XML Formats Not OK with GNU
Scripting News links to eWeek: MS Office XML Formats Not OK with GNU.
Fedora Core 4 released on Monday
OSNews says Meet Fedora Core 4. “The latest issue of Red Hat Magazine includes an interesting overview of the new Fedora Core 4 among other things, released earlier this week.”
I can’t believe I missed the announcement. Must have had a case of the Mondays. Hop over to the Fedora site and join the BitTorrent – share the bandwidth and speed everyone’s download. DVD and CD isos of source and binary are available for i386, x64 and PPC.
WebObjects Now Free With Tiger
WebObjects Now Free With Tiger. Reverberant writes “Macworld reports that has Apple released WebObjects as a free application. From $50,000 to free, the software used to build the iTunes Music Store and Dell’s original online store is now available for free to Tiger users via Xcode 2.1.” From the article: ” The software has historical importance to Apple-watchers: it was originally released in March 1996 – but not by Apple. In fact, WebObjects was developed by NeXT Computer and became Apple’s software only when that company acquired Steve Jobs’ second computer company later that year. While not software on the tip of every Mac users tongue, WebObjects sits behind several significant implementations – the most famous current example being Apple’s iTunes Music Store.” [Slashdot]
Microsoft Patches for June – something for everyone!
InfoWorld: Application development reports Microsoft patches critical bugs in IE, Windows. “Microsoft released 10 security patches, including three deemed “critical,” for bugs in a variety of the company’s products. Released Tuesday as part of the company’s monthly updates, the critical patches repair flaws in Windows and Internet Explorer that could allow attackers to take complete control of a computer, Microsoft said.”
Affected software includes Internet Explorer (an integral part of the OS which can’t be removed or disabled, according to Microsoft), HTML Help (see IE), Microsoft’s sharing protocol called SMB, Exchange 5.5, Outlook Express, ISA Server and more. Three “Critical” flaws allow a remote user to assume complete control of your machine. Affected versions of Windows include Windows 98, 98 SE, Millenium Edition (“ME”), Windows 2000 SP 3 and SP4, Windows XP SP1 and SP2, Windows XP 64-Bit Edition SP1 and Version 2003, and Windows Server 2003 original, SP1, Itanium original and SP1 and x64 Edition. (Microsoft no longer supports nor offers updates for Win95 nor NT editions, but you can presume these are likely affected, too.)
Windows Security Bulletins MS05-025 through MS05-034 are described on the TechNet web site. It is the 25th week of the year.
Happy Flag Day!
Happy Flag Day!
And never the twain shall meet?
In Jon Udell’s Strategic Developer column:
“We’ve learned this before and will again when the next wave of business process modelers arrives: Visual programming tools don’t turn civilians into programmers. Nor is that an appropriate goal.”
TLAI, a good QOTD
TLAI. “Think logically, act incrementally.” Paul McNett’s Weblog
Alex Feldstein and David Stevenson blog VFP Advisor DevCon 2005
Alex Feldstein blogs Visual FoxPro Devcon: Keynote.
“VFP Devcon’s Keynote in Las Vegas was well attended. Present from Microsoft were Y. Alan Griver, Ken Levy, Randy Brown, John Koziol and Richard Stanton.” Read lots more on his blog.
For the stereoscopic view, David Stevenson heard the same keynote, a few seats away. In David Stevenson’s Talking Fox, he blogs:
DEVCON keynote shows early Sedna ideas. “At the opening keynote session at the Visual FoxPro DevCon in Las Vegas Sunday night, Ken Levy and Randy Brown of the Microsoft Visual FoxPro team showed several early prototypes of features that might be included in the Sedna release in 2007. Ken emphasized throughout the session much of the same information that has been posted publicly so far, including the fact that Sedna will be focused on making Visual FoxPro 9.0 work better with the Longhorn operating system, .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and other upcoming technologies.”
FireFox: inch by inch…
InfoWorld: Top News notes that Firefox keeps chipping away at IE’s share.
The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox managed to slightly increase its usage share in the Web browser market in May, as it continues to compete against the market’s Goliath: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).
Firefox’s market share reached 8 percent in May, up from 7.38 percent in April, while IE’s slice of the pie shrunk a bit to 87.23 percent, down 0.77 percent, according to a statement released Wednesday by NetApplications.com, an Aliso Viejo, California, maker of applications for monitoring and measuring Web site usage.
Although IE’s share is colossal, Firefox is consistently increasing its share by between 0.5 percent and 1 percent from month to month.