From the monthly archives:
Sometimes it can be hard to pick a secure password. Dictionary words, and pet names usually come to mind, but are not secure. A good password will have numbers, letters, and special characters. Windows XP has a hidden feature that will generate a password, and set it at the same time. Get to a command […]
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Sometimes when I have a kiosk, or demo machine I want the windows session to be generic as possible. This includes the name that is sprawled across the top of the start menu. Especially when I am making a video of a demo I don’t want my name all over it. Unfortunately Microsoft did not […]
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Another zero day flaw for word has been found in the wild. Microsoft has reported that they have seen it exploited in a very limited and targeted basis. It is a different flaw than the one reported last week that affects almost every version of Word. Microsoft has stated that in their initial investigation they […]
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Adobe announced today the release of Acrobat Reader 8. The release comes in at a whopping 27 MB. One of the most annoying ‘features’ of the previous versions is the broken automatic update. It usually pops up at the worst time…and many times locks up the application. Better yet, it can be so confusing that […]
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Dell announced a new line of their Poweredge servers, the Power Smart models 1950, and 2950 that are supposed to be 25% more power efficient than their standard counterparts. This follows their launch of the Optiplex power saving desktop computers back in September. The servers will only take up 40 watts of power compared to […]
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Right after the zero day exploit for Word was announced. We have this from eEye Digital security: The Windows Media Player library WMVCORE.DLL contains a potentially exploitable heap buffer overflow in its handling of “REF HREF” URLs within ASX files. If the URL contains an unrecognized protocol (only “file”, “ftp”, “http”, “https”, “mms”, “mmst”, “mmsu”, […]
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Blue screens, lockups, or simply rebooting. XP has done all of these for me… and probably you too. Whenever a friend brings me a machine that is giving them trouble I start by pulling out all programs that run at startup. Then I scan it with the latest anti-virus software and clean spyware off the […]
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The search bar in IE 7 can be convenient. You can customize it to use any search engine you want. Even your own home brew search engine if you want. It can get really annoying if you already have search software installed from Google, or Yahoo. Who wants two search bars when you only need […]
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Microsoft warned today that an unpatched vulnerability in Office could be used by attackers to gain control of a Windows machine. The affected software includes Word 2000, 2002, and 2003 (Including the Word Viewers), also included in this vulnerability is Microsoft Works 2004, 2005, and 2006. Surprisingly the vulnerability also includes the Mac version of […]
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Sometimes when I am locking down a kiosk machine I need to disable access to any windows Hotkey. This keeps savvy users from getting around by primitive lockdown procedures. A Hotkey is any keyboard shortcut that uses the Windows key. For example you can lock your workstation by pressing Windows Key + L. To disable […]
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