Hey look, spy photos.... you are dumb.
Don't open attachments. Don't open attachments... I can say it over and over again. It just makes you look more stupid. There is another email worm going around promising spy photos of iraq. Use common sense, if there were photos of this, why are they emailing them for free. It's stupid. The email says it's supposed to show screensavers of U.S. spy satellite pictures of Iraq or animations that are either patriotic or that mock President Bush, a computer security company warned Thursday. It is called Ganda-A, spreads by sending itself to e-mail addresses on an infected machine and tries to disable anti-virus and other security software and infect certain files on the hard disk. Subject lines include: "Spy pics," "GO USA!!!!," "G.W Bush animation," and others like "Catlover," and "Disgusting propaganda." Don't open it. Read more here.

So I don't think I need to tell you about the war so...
I was looking at a friends' site and I noticed I didn't have real player and I didn't want RealOne. Real Networks is always changing their site and hiding the link. Well I though I would just post the link for the older players and linux players here. Enjoy. Go to http://forms.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html

Lindows still trying to win the race.
A story on VNUNET.com is stating about Lindows.com CEO making deals with white box PC retail outlets for post-sales incentive. Lindows is stating that it's RevShare program allows small and medium-sized computer system dealers to increase profit margins by sharing in after-market revenue, even after shipping their systems. For example, customer buys services or premium upgrades from Lindows, the system builder which sold the computer system will receive a margin of up to 20 per cent of the transaction's profits. But I still wonder if Mom will use Linux. You can read more about it here.

US ARMY Server Attacked
A computer intruder armed with a secret, particularly effective attack tool recently took control of an Army Web server, says MSNBC. Both Microsoft and the CERT Coordination Center released hastily-prepared warnings about the vulnerability that led to the attack on Monday. But it was a disturbingly successful attack, experts say, because the intruder found and exploited a flaw that took security researchers completely by surprise.

In the computer security world, such secret vulnerabilities are called zero-day exploits. It's at least a year since a significant zero-day exploit was revealed, said Chris Rouland, director of Internet Security Systems-Force research team. Because hackers have the upper hand in this vulnerability, his has a very high degree of urgency, Rouland said. More found here

Apparently there is a hole in Samba...
A hole, in a Windows Based file sharing protocol? You have to be kidding. Well the bugtraq has been banging out emails. I know Redhat sent out the fix although it's probably temporary. News.com states "Several Linux editions--including Debian, Gentoo, and SuSE--released patches for the problem. Apple Computer noted in an advisory that Samba is not enabled by default with Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, but the company plans to issue a patch for version 10.2.4. Red Hat hasn't yet released a patch but will do so soon, the company said in a statement... While the problem was spotted by a security team at German Linux software company SuSE last week, the problem apparently was leaked by someone who had access to the Samba source code. Still, Roman Drahtmueller, head of security for SuSE, stressed that finding the problem during a code review gave companies time to respond." Full story is here.

CNET top story: Windows has a huge hole in it. (duh)
Microsoft warned customers on Monday that a security hole in Windows 2000 and the company's Web server software is allowing online attackers to take control of corporate servers. Because the vulnerability is being actively exploited by Internet vandals, Microsoft advised customers to apply a patch or use a workaround to defend against the attack as soon as possible. The flaw, known as a buffer overflow, is in a component of the software that handles the World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol in Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). A specially formatted Web request to the WebDAV component can overflow the memory allocated to such requests and cause another, malicious program to be run instead. The technique can be used to take control of the server. The flaw affects only IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 servers. IIS 4.0 on Windows NT and IIS 5.1 on Windows XP are not affected. Full story here.

I love my Pocket PC but I could do without this
Sprint has confirmed plans to carry Pocket PC Phone Edition PDAs. They are the Samsung i700 and the Hitachi G1000 models. Now it is said to be fueling Sprints push for their Vision Network, wireless CDMA G3 wanna-be, but I hate the Sprint Vision network. I have had nothing but timeouts and crappy content on my $300 phone. I wouldn't count on a pocket pc phone being the solution. A PDA is a PDA. A Phone is a Phone. Don't try to combine it, look at the TREO, it's outdated already. More here.