News.Com: Web site virus attack blunted.
“The attack, which had turned some Web sites into points of digital
infection was nipped in the bud on Friday, when Internet engineers
managed to shut down a Russian server that had been the source of
malicious code for the attack.” Link via Tomalak’s Realm
Archive | Home Page
Articles to appear on the home page (nearly all)
Surfing the web or providing web pages with Microsoft products? Stop.
InfoWorld: Top News reports: “Web attack aims to steal surfers’ financial details.
A new Internet attack discovered late Thursday was designed by an
infamous group of Russian virus writers to steal credit card and other
financial information from Web surfers and send it to Web sites where
it can be retrieved by hackers, security experts warned Friday.” The
key paragraphs:
“Security experts
have said that the attack only affects users of certain versions of
Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser…
Additionally, Cluley said that it appears that the threat only affects
Web servers running Microsoft IIS 5 (Internet Information
Services) Web Server software and not Microsoft IIS 6, which comes with
Windows 2003 Server.”
have said that the attack only affects users of certain versions of
Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser…
Additionally, Cluley said that it appears that the threat only affects
Web servers running Microsoft IIS 5 (Internet Information
Services) Web Server software and not Microsoft IIS 6, which comes with
Windows 2003 Server.”
Make sure you’ve patched IIS with the
Sasser patches. Raise the shields high on IE, or better yet, get a
secure browser. According the article, some *major* sites have been
hacked, so watch those credit card bills!
Update: According to this article on Netcraft, the trojan can be installed silently on fully-patched versions of Internet Explorer. Until the extent of the exploit is known, you may want to hold off surfing with IE.
Um, yeah…
I want my share of the credit, too. I said this, um, last year, after the year of the LAN fizzled. Or was it the year of IM?
Zawodny: “RSS looks like one of the better bets this year.” [Scripting News]
Be Afraid…
Microsoft patents a method to transmit data and power over the human body.
Today Microsoft was granted patent 6,754,472 for “Method and apparatus
for transmitting power and data using the human body.” [Ars Technica]
Tim O’Reilly: Open Source Paradigm Shift
Open Source Paradigm Shift.
“This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus’
annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have
delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations
ranging from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User’s
Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red
Hat’s internal “all-hands” meeting, and BEA’s eWorld conference. I
finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open
source,”Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software,” edited by J.
Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published
by MIT Press in 2005.” [Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Network]
Interesting reading.
How much would you pay for a favorable opinion?
From Dan Gillmor’s eJournal: Opinion Laundering Thrives.
- Tim Lambert: When Think Tanks Attack. Why
are all these think tanks so down on Open Source? Well, the Small
Business Survival Committee is concerned that using open source will
expose small business to the risk of lawsuits. Citizens Against
Government Waste is concerned that the Government might waste money on
Open Source. Defenders of Property Rights is concerned that Open Source
might be a threat to intellectual property rights. However, I was able
to detect a common theme to all their criticism. They all seem to be
funded by Microsoft.
“This piece isn’t absolute proof, but it’s another layer of circumstantial evidence that Microsoft is continuing its campaign of what I’ve called “opinion laundering” to make a case against LInux and other free software. (See previous looks at this subject here, here and here, for example.) Microsoft is hardly alone in this activity, of course. Lambert’s article looks into the tobacco archives and shows how major think tanks were paid by tobacco companies and took positions congruent with the tobacco interests’ own views. The bigger problem is that we often don’t know who is funding which think tank, and many won’t tell us. Even the ones that do say they’re getting some money from companies like Microsoft won’t say how much. If the “contribution” is .001 percent of annual funding, that’s trivial. If it’s 50 percent, that’s not trivial. But we are never told this relevant information. None of this is illegal, but it’s definitely sleazy. We need laws, not that this Congress or administration will every touch the topic, to force think tanks to reveal the sources and amounts of their funding in amounts over, say, $500. That would let individuals continue to contribute in privacy, but would shine a needed light on the opinion laundering that is now so prevalent. In the meantime, when a think tank takes any position on just about anything, your first instinct should be to ask, “Did someone pay for that opinion?” — Dan Gillmor
Some people accuse me of being an “Open Source zealot” (thanks, btw), but at least my opinion is not for sale to the highest bidder.
GNU Bash reference
MacOSXHints points out a really useful reference for Mac OS X, Linux or Windows CygWin users, for that matter – the GNU Bash Reference.
Written by the authors of the shell, this book covers the concept of
the shell, its commands and variables in 180 pages. The book can be
purchased for $29.95 or downloaded in PDF from their website for free.
Off to Waltham!
Off to Waltham this evening for the meeting of the Boston Area FoxPro User Group. Dmitry
Litvak will show how he accesses Visual FoxPro using ASP.NET.
Directions to the meeting – open to the public – and enrolment
information for our low-traffic announcement email list is also
available at the website.
Just 20 steps to Linux mastery!
OSNews features an opinion piece on “Opinion: How to Master GNU/Linux in 20 steps” – no great secrets here, but some good, common sense advice.
The Answers Really Are Out There…
Andrew MacNeill – AKSEL Solutions responded to my query about Office having a 3% upgrade rate: “Only 3% of Office Users Using Office 2003?. Ted
wanted to know where Jeff Riefman got his facts from on his complaints
about Office, etc. Here’s the quote right from Ballmer’s mouth, in
response to a question about long vs. small steps (back on April 7,
2004).
“No.
2, it is not like Office releases, in any sense, have slowed down. We
did Office 2000; we did Office 2003; we are working away on the next
release. Most of our customers do not use Office 2003 yet. It has been
in the market, what, four or five months–something like that–and
maybe 1, 2, 3 percent of the installed base use Office 2003 so far. I
think we have got plenty of headroom before we need another product to
bring huge benefit to a lot of people. “
2, it is not like Office releases, in any sense, have slowed down. We
did Office 2000; we did Office 2003; we are working away on the next
release. Most of our customers do not use Office 2003 yet. It has been
in the market, what, four or five months–something like that–and
maybe 1, 2, 3 percent of the installed base use Office 2003 so far. I
think we have got plenty of headroom before we need another product to
bring huge benefit to a lot of people. “
Read the entire article: here. By the way, Jeff’s original comments were in the Seattle Weekly“
Thanks, Andrew!