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Free AV from Microsoft
It seems like Microsoft is dropping their OneCare product line and repackaging it as “Morro”, a free consumer AV product. I read the news on Graham Cluley’s blog. What does this mean? This will of course eat from the pie of other vendors offering free products (AVG, Avira and Avast!). It will also get more…
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Opinions about whitelisting
I was reading the piece entitled White Listing – The End of Antivirus??? by the “Director of Technical Education”. Now it would be fairly easy to do ad-hominem attack against him, I will stick to the technical details of the post: First, it gives the argument that one of the approaches whitelisting companies use is…
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Firefox 2 end-of-life
Via Slashdot came the news that version 1.8 of the Gecko engine used to render HTML in Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2, etc. was being end of lifed. Now I have still a few computers which I’m responsible for that have FF2 on them, just because that’s what the users were accustomed to. So I searched…
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Ethical hacker challenge solution
Given that the deadline passed, I’ll publish my solution to the Scooby Doo Ethical hacker challenge. In related news (via SANS): the November challenge from packetlife. The deadline is the 20th of November, so hurry up. Can you figure out who killed Dr. Wilson, and why? I would say it was Dr. Miller. In the…
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Dynamic or static typing?
Working is Java (Eclipse more precisely), I came to value very much the features which it offers related to exploring / manipulating the source code. I’m talking about things like “take me to definition”, “show me where it is used”, refactoring features, etc. This made me thinking: isn’t really the difference between static and dynamic…
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Vendor included backdoors
An other reason to make sure that you use your available software to the maximum extent before going out and deciding to remediate your software problem with more software 🙂 Vendor included backdoor can appear for multiple reasons, but there are two big categories: “Easter-egg” like feature (some programmer decided to put in a piece…
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Calculating the intersection of two Java sets
This is my simple stupid Java tip for the day: to nondestructively calculate the intersection of two Set’s (ie, retain both object), do the following: Set intersection = new HashSet(s1); intersection.retainAll(s2); Taken from Java Tutorials. Lessons learned: before implementing code which even vaguely seems that it should already exists, check with your favorite search engine.…
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Daily funny
Via Mechanix: the difference between JPEG and PNG illustrated. A similar topic would be: don’t use the same image for the thumbnail and the big image! Just because you said width=”320px”, it will still needs to download the whole image!
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Note to self
A Dell Optiplex (755 if I recall correctly) is refusing to start from time to time. Unplugging it and replugging it after ~10 seconds helps, but I would like to get to the bottom of the problem. I made sure that all the extension cards and memory modules are properly seated. Now it actually gave…
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Fiddling with the comment system
My friend Dan D. mentioned that the new inline commenting system wasn’t playing nice with NoScript. After a little looking into it I found that indeed, Blogger is using JS to render the form (why?). To reduce the pain a little I’ve added a link to the old method of leaving comments which should appear…