The long awaited patch for ie is now available that will break the standard http://user:pass@domain functionality but will prevent a lot of the phishing attacks that have gone on. To check whether you are still vulnerable or not, visit my initial page on the phishing problem. This update is actually one of three vulnerabilities that has been patched in the cumaltive update.
There are more details in the February 2004 security bulletin
Month: February 2004
Got Angela’s atom feed into the latest version of feed on feed. Now I no longer have to rely on a third party (voidstar) to provide the feed.
T-mobile sent me a letter with the latest bill saying that they were going to charge £1 a month for itemised billing which had previously been free. The bottom of the letter mentioned that this “represents an increase in our charges above the retail price index figures”. What they don’t tell you is that this means you can quite legitimately (although not hassle free) cancel your agreement with them under their own terms and conditions. I’ve tried ringing customer services up who insist they’d charge me up until september and suprise suprise there is no manager available to speak to. They did say they’d ring back before 10pm tonight though but I’m not holding my breath. An interesting forum discussion has evolved at Money SavingExpert on this problem.
I like this Remote assistance in XP. I was able to connect to the parents-in-law PC on Sunday and troubleshoot an anti-virus update problem they had. The performance was stunning and it was as if they were connected on my lan. I don’t know what sort of speed cable is in the states but its certainly faster than UK asdl connections. A 3mb patch from symantec came down extremely quickly. I had to use the same software to troubleshoot a colleagues pc at work this morning. Didn’t work quite as well, the performance was slower and for some reason I couldn’t take control of the mouse and keyboard which it said I had control over, but the screen refresh was good enough for me to talk the end user through the troubleshooting process whilst I watched the output. The end user was happy when they got the problem solved and saved me a 3 hour journey up the motorway to their house.
Microsoft have brought out a new toolbar that looks very much like Google’s. The beta MSN toolbar includes the popup blocker and links to MSN sites such as hotmail. I’ve downloaded to try out and use as a popup blocker for those rare occasions that I need to use ie
kbAlertz are now producing RSS feeds for new knowledge base articles which is an excellent idea and something MS should really have done themselves. This is the second bit of interesting news I’ve had from kbAlertz with the first being the breaking news about MS’s approach to the Internet Explorer spoofing problem.
Update Well it would be good if the pages that they linked to didn’t come back with a 404 🙁
Update2 The first feed I looked at was the security feed and this had no articles, hence no data, hence a 404 – an oversight perhaps? I’ve sent an email to their support address to let them know about the problem.
Update3 Looks like they wont get the email as they are using Declude junkmail filtering. It detected that our isp’s mailserver is not in our domains mx records (which it wouldn’t be) and also their own mx server is not in mx records either – its therefore (i presume) junked the mail. Sounds like someone needs to properly configure their anti-spam protection.
Outlook Shutdown Addin from daveswebsite.com may be useful for getting rid of outlook as it often stays around. Personally though I’d try and work out why it stays in memory.
Went to see Delirious last night at Liverpool Cathedral. Apparently they are the first rock band to play (well actually the second since Superhero were their opening act) there since 1962. It was a bit of a weird concert as the whole thing was rather narrow but very deep. It was packed with about 3500 people and I couldn’t be bothered to stand in the crush with a jumper AND a coat so I stood at the back, leant on the barrier and enjoyed the show from a distance. It was an ok concert, probably one of the best of theirs that I’ve been to, but I don’t think I’ll bother going to a delirious gig again as I didn’t enjoy it that much. However everyone else who went did so it must have been me. Had a good laugh bluejacking the mobile phones on the way out though – there were loads of people with bluetooth switched on in their mobiles 🙂