Month: February 2010
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Privacy and freedom: World Gone Mad Part 2
The US Copyright Lobby has indicated that using FOSS equates to the undermining of intellectual property rights. Yes you read that correctly. They want the US Trade Representative to place countries like Brazil, India, and Indonesia on the Special 301 list, which is a list of countries that do not, according to mostly the Pharmaceutical…
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Privacy and freedom: World Gone Mad Part 1
Last week, a story broke in the US concerning invasion of privacy and has become a huge talking point globally. The Lower Merion School District provided Apple Mac laptops to students ( no private machines were allowed ) and installed remote control software on these, allowing the school to remotely activate web-cams in an apparent…
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2009 most hacked app – Acrobat Reader
Malicious Acrobat Reader documents made up almost 80% of all exploits for 2009 according to security research company ScanSafe. Vulnerabilities have doubled year on year in Adobe’s PDF reader and they seem to be having a problem in keeping things under any sort of control. To keep yourself safe ( well sort of ) disable…
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New Windows 7 update phones home
Apologies for the late notice on this but I only just learned of it myself: Microsoft will be releasing “Update for Microsoft Windows (KB971033)” today. This however is not an ordinary update. This one will change the current activation and anti-piracy behaviour of Windows 7 by phoning home every 90 days ( for now ).…
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New research paints grim picture for AntiVirus software
While I’ve never assumed AV software will protect you from all ills on the Internet, new research from SurfRight shows just how bad things are. A sample of just under 110k users ( a very good sample I think ) shows that 32% ( yes 1/3rd ) of all machines running AV software were infected…
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XStore Services downtime
XStore services will be down this evening at 6pm for scheduled maintenance for about 15 minutes. Services affected include: hosted Nagios monitoring hosted email/web
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Patch Tuesday
This coming Tuesday, Microsoft is releasing a slew of patch fixes, 5 of which are rated critical, 7 important and 1 moderate. All of the critical flaws result in remote code execution and 10 of these patches require a system restart. The list of operating systems affected includes everything from Win2k through to Win2k8 R2.…
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Virtualisation part 3: VMware backup scenarios
Backups in a virtualisation environment take on a whole new meaning, typically complex ( as opposed to the simple outlook that the vm vendors would like to portray ) because now you are dealing with shared SAN storage, vm images instead of files, very specific requirements around backup hardware and setup, 3rd party backup agents…
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New Microsoft IE flaw
Microsoft has issued a new security advisory ( 980099 ) to address a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer that may allow information disclosure for Windows XP users or for users who have disabled Internet Explorer Protected Mode. The advisory explains that content can be forced to render incorrectly from local files in such a…
