Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Lots of interesing/disturbing things today:
First up, a new Trojan that attacks via Windows Metafiles. Nasty stuff. Read the CERT advisory. There are several things you can do, such as unregister the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, and not make that program the default for WMF files. Right now I've set WMF files to open in Notepad. Not elegant, but better than nothing. Using Mozilla Firefox seems to offer some protection as well, but don't be lulled into a false sense of security.
Think that if you don't run Windows you're safe? Think again. Whatever OS or software you use, it pays to practice safe computing. Keep patched, okay?
And speaking of security exploits, I've pulled the calendar on this page out of the iframe. Clicking to another month will bring the calendar up in a page by itself. I was also having some trouble with links in the iframe, so this is probably the best solution all around. I'd like to bring back the menu at the bottom, but I've been having trouble with the code. When our hosting service upgrades to .Net 2.0, I should have a more elegant solution to some of the little things that bother me about the way this journal works. I'm a little frustrated that they haven't upgraded already, but it seems they've been busy working on a new anti-spam measure, which they put in place last night. And sure enough, the amount of incoming spam has decreased drastically.
On the topic of spam, if you read the blog comments you'll notice that URLs are not hotlinked. This is to help discourage comment spam. If you want to hotlink your URL, go ahead and put the HTML code in the field.
More later, but for now I need to start in on my year-end books. Joy.
Tags: Technology, Blogging