Category: Technology

So your running Windows XP Pro, you’ve downloaded service pack two and turned on the built in firewall. You’re setup for automatic updates and you install them automatically to make sure you’re up to date. Feeling pretty safe right about now aren’t you? Well guess what if you have remote desktop turned on your wide open for an attack! There is a vulnerabilty in this configuration as reported by ZDNet UK. The vulnerabilty would allow a remote user to crash your system. As of yet there is no patch available to fix this. My recomendation if the system is addressable via the Net is to turn of Remote Desktop if you have it enabled until Microsoft closes this door.

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** UPDATE! This vulnerability is more widespread! It effects all flavors of XP including Media Center, as well as Windows 2003 servers.

Windows XP Pro 64bit is definitely not ready for primetime. First off you’re not going to see much of an improvement unless you’re running a 64bit application. Right now there really isn’t much out there that take advantage of the benefits of 64bit. However you will be getting yourself into a world of hurt if you have a lot of accessories attached to your system, guaranteed! I found this out the hard way, helping a friend build his dream computer. He went for the best of everything, dual core Athlon 64bit 4200+ processor, 1 gigabyte of Corsair XPERT memory, Dual Nvidia 7800GTX graphics board in a SLI configuration. With this type of hardware you would think why not run Windows XP Pro 64bit to get everything you can out of the system. There is one resounding answer why not to, there is no driver support what so ever. Unless it is built into Microsoft’s build, you might as well just hang it up. He has the following peripherals attached to his system: HP Scanner, DYMO label printer, several HP printers he prints to on different floors and across a WAN, most important Alcohol 120% to keep images of all his game discs. We found that the scanner and label printer had no drivers. Alcohol 120% will not run under 64bit because it creates a virtual drive and needs a driver to create it. We made a phone call to Dymo to get a status on driver development and were basically told “We are not in the process of designing any drivers for 64bit Windows”. Umm, hello, can we have a reality check here. It seems the industry is in one of those which came first the chicken or the egg scenarios again. Developers do not want to take the time to develop drivers until they see OS adoption. Then you have the end users that will not adopt without drivers. Get your act together folks and just design and make drivers available for the products we shelled out our good hard earned dollars for. It’s not like we are talking about Mom and Pop companies, were talking huge corporations like HP that don’t even have any driver support for most of their products under 64bit Windows. My suggestion for now is just avoid Windows XP Pro 64bit like the plague unless you have not peripherals attached to your box. Do your homework first on all devices and software you will run under 64bit Windows or you will wind up throwing your system out the window in frustration.

There have been rumors of this coming down the pipe for the last three years or so. Last time the rumor came around it concerned Apple using AMD processors. This time the rumors were Apple going to Intel for processors instead of the PowerPC processors. Well this time the rumors were true and Steve Jobs let the cat out of the bag while also demonstrating OS X running on a PC and has been doing so in their development department for several years already. What does this mean for the future, only time will tell? One thing I would like to see is Apple licensing its OS to OEMs, so I could run a triple boot WinXP, Linux, OS X box. Now that would be sweet!!!

Here are some links on the announcement as well as keynote highlights:

http://news.com.com/Apple+throws+the+switch%2C+aligns+with+Intel/2100-7341_3-5733756.html?tag=nl http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050606-4974.html http://www.macrumorslive.com/web/

Last night I met a bunch of the guys that I hung out with in college (New York Institute of Technology). I first caught up with them at Scruffy Duffys on 8th Avenue between 46th & 47th. We spent some time there and watched some of the Yankees game. The unique thing that the bar does is if either of the Matsuis hit a home run they buy the entire bar a drink on the house. When Matsui first stepped up to bat, he nailed it but it fell short at the warning track. One big ‘Damn’ rang out at the bar. We had a lot of fun there and had some of the best Buffalo wings I have ever had. The party then moved a little further up 8th avenue to Social a very nice bar with three floors and a great bartender on the 2nd floor named Kim. No sooner did we get there sit down have a couple of drinks still watching the Yankees get their butts kicked, Matsui steps up to the plate and nails a home run. I think we could hear the packed bar at Scruffys yelling a block away. We spent a couple of hours there before I took off to catch the 2nd to last train to White Plains. You really never want to take the last train on the Harlem line out of Grand Central because it has the nickname of ‘The Vomit Commit’ for a reason on weekends.

IFILM will curate and deliver popular content and celebrated Viral Videos to MSN consumers.

REDMOND, Wash., and LOS ANGELES, April 7, 2005 MSN® Video, a premier provider of streaming video content online, and IFILM, a leading video entertainment destination on the Web, are joining forces to deliver IFILM content to MSN Video’s free streaming entertainment channel at http://video.msn.com. With the added IFILM programming, MSN consumers will now have access to the some of the most celebrated, irreverent and timely filmed content on the Web.

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ISS has reported a large vulnerability in a component that is used in most of Symantec products. Symantec has acknowledged this and is fixing these problems through its LiveUpdates of its products. Symantec has buried it’s acknowledgement of the problem. If you want to read it and see if your product is affected, here is Symantec’s announcement.

Well it seems a hacker group has taken it upon themselves to take down phpBB.com. phpBB is a popular open source forum software. Not to long ago there was a worm going around targeting this popular software using Google to find vulnerable systems. The worm utilized a flaw in PHP to gain access to systems and deface them. In this case it was a flaw in awstats that was used to deface the site. phpBB has taken the forums down and replaced it with a splash screen explaining what had transpired. It seems as if they could be down for almost a week since they are having the actual server shipped from their data farm to their location for further investigation as to the extend of the compromise.

Looks like Google might get dethroned soon. Microsoft has just released it’s new Search engine and has added some pretty unique features to it tool set. Microsoft has added the ability for you to do search based on your location using the “Near me” option. When this option is used it does a reverse IP lookup to estimate location. It can also give answers to simple questions such as “How many carbs in a potato?” or “Who shot JFK”. The new search engine hooks into Microsoft’s extensive information contained in its Encarta product. Head on over to search.msn.com and give it a try.

What is it with big companies trying to squash bloggers lately? First it was Apple going after a 19 year old blogger concerning a scoop on Apple’s new iPod shuffle and mini Mac before they announced at Mac World. Now it seems Microsoft wants to get some bad PR by going after a couple of sites blogging about the future of their mobile technologies. It is a shame that since these bloggers are not large publications, companies like Apple and Microsoft can have their way with them. Since most of them couldn’t afford to protect themselves in court against them they usually back down due to threats from these companies. The fact is that these companies are not under any NDAs (Non Disclosure Agreements) so why go after them. Go after the people who leaked the information rather than these individuals only reporting on the information that has been given them. If the people reporting the information were CNN or the New York Times, would the companies even attempt to sue them let alone strong arm them? If you ant to read some more info on these instances follow the links below.

Microsoft Boggers Recieve Legal Threats Think Secret Gets Legal Defense