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The fact that you write for a big site doesn’t make you an expert
The corollary of the above being: don’t rephrase what the expert said if you don’t understand it. Real life example from an eweek article: The Redmond, Wash. software giant has convinced major U.S. computer makers—including Dell, Gateway and Hewlett-Packard—to make default changes at the BIOS level to allow a new Vista security feature called ASLR…
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Offline updating of Windows
When re-installing Windows, you should always do so without any network physical connection (meaning unplugged network cables) or you risk infecting yourself via various exploits (for example there is at least one virus which scans the LAN for PCs to infect). Now heise security has put together a tool to download the security updates on…
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Undisclosed Microsoft bug
Over at the eEye research site you can read a worrying and little confusing advisory (how can something be a local privilege escalation and a remote code execution attack at the same time?). I’m eagerly awaiting more details about this. In the mean time, don’t forget to subscribe to their Zero-Day tracker. Update: I don’t…
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What virtualization can and cannot do in an anti-malware context
Over at the anti-virus rant blog (which is a nice blog because it includes the word rant in the title :)) Kurt Wismer states that virtualization is overhyped as a security technology. While I agree, I want to point out that following some simple rules, it can be a very powerful security which can easily…
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Random stuff
For fun: The Opinionated Beer page: if operating systems were beers. An interesting idea: a search engine with an unusual way to present the results. While the interface is appealing, on the long run it seems an overkill. Also the fact that the first results are advertisements with only very subtle indication of this fact…
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“not a valid win32 application”
An interesting difference between the loader of Win9x and WinNT line (tested with Win98 and Win2K SP4): if SizeOfImage is bigger than the sum of the header sizes and section sizes, Win98 will happily load it, while Win2K will complain that it’s not a valid Win32 application. The tricky part about this is that you…
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On Delphi
Being a long time Delphi programmer, I really enjoyed this blog posting about learning Delphi. My favorite quote: The Delphi compiler itself is lightning fast. Sometimes I compile twice because I’m not sure I actually hit the compile key. It is so true. The first thing I do when I install Delphi is to check…