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Look out for bootable media!

By on November 3, 2005 in Microsoft, Security

Last night, I booted my Windows XP notebook after it spent the day traveling in its padded bag – never touched, dropped, struck by lightening, etc. I had left a CD in the tray and it may have tried to boot from that — oops. Removing the disk and rebooting resulted in “NTFS.SYS is missing or corrupted.” Since the machine didn’t come with a rescue CD, I used Knoppix to boot the machine to examine the partition. Looking through the partition, the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers directory is empty. That’s pretty unlikely a failure on Windows part – WinXP usually keeps several of these files open, and “Windows File Protection” prevents their deletion. Ran fine until I shut it down yesterday morning. Running S.M.A.R.T. utilities shows no errors on the drive. Running SpinRite right now to confirm there’s not a drive problem, then I’ll be restoring from a Ghost backup.

Reminder: don’t leave your computer configured to boot from devices you don’t want to boot from! UPDATE: Scanned the disk on a trustworthy computer with an up-to-date NAV, and it indicates no malware. Curiouser and curioser…

Microsoft: It’s Alive!!!!

By on November 2, 2005 in Microsoft

It seems Microsoft was a day late with their Halloween horror story called Microsoft Live! and Microsoft Office Live! Whether these are truly “a Microsoft bet” (boy, is that line getting tired) or just a tired rebranding of next-gen Hotmail, MSN and bCentral services to respond to all the good press Google, Yahoo! and other rich AJAX apps are getting remains to be seen.

Dave Winer attended and called it “the worst demo ever.” Mini-Microsoft links to dozens of links. Mary Jo Foley has thorough coverage. Dan Farber questions what’s live – that it’s on the web? Niall Kennedy has some intriguing photographs.

Maybe Microsoft Live 3.0 will be better…

Sony Music CDs install rootkit?

By on November 1, 2005 in Security

Yet another reason to avoid Digital Restriction Management: SysInternals is reporting that certain Sony music CDs install rootkits and that removing the rootkit disables the ability to play music CDs on your (Windows) computer.

These feeble restrictions surely won’t deter any serious piracy of the music, but only infringe on the abilities of consumers to rip their favorite music to their own music players.

Thanks to Ed Leafe of the ProFox mailing list for the pointer.

Apple issues Halloween Security Update: OS X 10.4.3

By on November 1, 2005 in Apple Macintosh OS X

The SANS Internet Storm Center notes that Apple has issued their monthly security update, a whopping 97 megabytes that, according the the Apple site, includes:

– AFP, SMB/CIFS, NFS and FTP network and file services
– AirPort and Bluetooth wireless access
– Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, and RAW camera support
– disc recording when creating and burning media
– .Mac sync services
– Spotlight indexing and searching
– Dashboard widgets: Dictionary, Flight Tracker, Stickies, and Unit Converter
– Address Book, AppleScript, Automator, Dictionary, Font Book, iCal, iSync, Mail, and Safari applications
– Disk Utility, Keychain Access, Migration Assistant, and Software Update
– compatibility with third party applications and devices
– previous standalone security updates

Get patching!

PySIG last Thursday: Jython

By on October 29, 2005 in OpenSource, Python, Technology

The Python Special Interest Group (http://www.pysig.org), a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (http://www.gnhlug.org) had it’s monthly meeting last Thursday at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, NH.

Kent Johnson put on a very good presentation and demonstration of Jython, complete with working demos, sample code and handouts. Everyone from novice to journeyman practitioner walked away with a better appreciation of what Jython is (simplifying, a Python interpreter/runtime written in Java) and what it isn’t, when to use it (working in a Java environment or wanting to use Java-based library functions). Great job, Kent! I’ve posted some notes from the meeting as well as Kent’s notes to the PySIG wiki at http://www.pysig.org/pywiki/PyNotes20051027.

Nearly a dozen people attended at the Amoskeag Business Incubator (thanks to them for the free space and projector), including new attendees brought in by Bill Sconce’s recent appearance at the ACM/IEEE seminar series and from my posts to the SwaNH lists. See, PR works!

The Way of The Yum

By on October 28, 2005 in Home Page

Bill McGonigle, over at Resigned to the Bittersweet Truth, blogs, “Automatic updates are the only rational approach for most businesses in today’s world of 24/7 Internet connectivity, malware and 0-day vulnerabilities…” read the entire post here.

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