Windows Vista

Windows Vista (AKA Longhorn) is the only version of Microsoft Windows I have ever looked forward too. Though I have no intention of being among it’s early adopters for the obvious reason (the usual avalanche of major BUGS) it certainly has an interesting feature set and looks like a major step forward for Microsoft (unlike for example Windows NT to 2K to XP which were, arguably, minor steps forward). WinFS, MSH and the new eye candy are definetely what caught my attention.

Additional Resources:
Hands On with Windows Vista Beta 1
Windows Vista Beta 1 Overview
Wikipedia (very good starting place)
Feedster Search

GDS

Google Desktop Search and the plugins I use:
Archive Files Crawler (Archive files)
MSHelp2 Crawler (MSHelp2 HxS files)
GDS Real Media Indexer by Siva Jawaji (Indexes Real Media (.RM) files)
Larry’s Any Text File Indexer 1.00 by Larry Gadea (Index any file extension specified as plaintext)
Larry’s Help File Indexer 1.00 by Larry Gadea (Indexes CHM/CHW files)
Larry’s OpenOffice and StarOffice Indexer 1.01 (Indexes all OpenOffice.org/StarOffice6+ files)
C/CPP File Crawler (Indexes .CPP,.C, .H AND .HPP files)
IndexSWF (.SWF files indexing)

Troops

Troops is an hilarious Star Wars spoof of Cops.

While being filmed for the hit Imperial TV show TROOPS, Stormtroopers from the infamous Black Sheep Squadron on patrol run into some very familiar characters.

Netscape

I installed Netscape Browser 8.0 and was positively suprised by it. It’s basically Firefox with some additional (mostly useless) features like weather&news. But the real nice feature is being able to switch between the firefox rendering engine and internet explorer’s rendering engine. All the additional features make netscape a bit more complicated to configure. Netscape has become my 2nd browser of choice, after firefox, effectively replacing mozilla. Mainly because I have certain scripts that only run in IE. Try it out if you haven’t. It’s certainly worth it if you have the free time.

Almost Random Noise

Some links I got from people today:
A Gamer’s Manifesto – to which i subscribe almost entirelly (i think low ammo in RE is ok but some things in God of War were a bit too hard).
More stuff making fun of WoW.
Russia’s Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment – How many of us have wished they could beat spammers in the head repeatedly? Guess someone’s wish came true. Either that or it was the mafia.

Tor

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

I’m trying out tor. So far my only problem with it is the relative slowness of the network I’ve experienced (around 5 secs to open a webpage that would otherwise be instantaneous). I tried it with Mozilla and Xchat and it seems to work as advertised. To those that are considering using it I recommend setting it with an alternative client software. For example, I’m a firefox user but while using tor I use Mozilla. I could’ve used firefox with the switchproxy extension but I don’t need privacy for most of what I do on the internet (who cares if I visit slashdot 10 times a day?) and the speed penalty of using tor makes it impratical for common browsing. Since I’m rarelly visiting only one page at the same time (call it multitasking or lack of concentration) – I usually have around ten tabs open – using tor with firefox becomes sort of anoying. I configured mozilla to always use tor and whenever I need privacy browsing the web I use mozilla. Same thing for IRC. mIRC uses normal net, Xchat uses tor.
I’ll try it out further and make a new post sometime later.

Additional Resources:
Launching Attacks via Tor
Tor: The Ying or the Yang?

God of War

Archspace is down so this weekend I played a lot of God of War. This is the first game to live up to it’s hype in quite a while. The game is indeed awsome. An epic struggle of a deeply disturbed man to kill a god, the God of War Ares. Kratos who was once trained by Ares to serve him now endevours to kill his former master. This game feels like Devil May Cry meets Tomb Raider. You kill Ares’ minions (such as Minotaurs, cyclopes, gorgons and other creatures from greek mythology) by the thousands and solve puzzles. All to the sound of an amazing soundtrack in an absolutely impressive, monumental ancient Greece – from Athens to a massive temple strapped to a titan’s back. The game elevates the action-adventure genre to a new level. Considering this game took 3 years to develop, the sequeal will probably be a PS3 game. It’s one good reason to buy a PS3.

Additional Resources:
God of War at Gamespot

Twelve Simple Steps to Protect Your Computer

Abe Usher of Sharp Ideas wrote a basic guide to protecting a PC along the lines of my “How To Keep Your Computer Spyware Free“.
Richard Bejtlich also gave some tips in a recent post. Though “Don’t run Windows” is possibly a bit extreme and unrealistic.

The End of The Full Disclosure Debate

For a very long time now, every few months or so, someone starts another debate about full disclosure. Fortunately, that debate has been rendered academic at best by the refining of binary reverse engineering. I got this link from Thomas Ptacek’s blog a while ago but I only bothered to make this post now.

Additional Resources:
SABRE Security Publications
Comparing Binaries With Graph Isomorphisms
Automated Binary Reverse Engineering (PDF)

Schizos

Great timing: Bombs go off in the UK, it’s all over the news and someone finds this the perfect time to send links to something like this. It’s a distasteful flash animation which claims that somehow it wasn’t flight 77 that crashed into the pentagon on 9/11. With a simple google search I easily found a webpage that debunks those claims. There are probably better ones out there but no reason for me to bother.

Is this the end for Software Patents in Europe?

Relax just sent me this link:
EU Parliament bins software patent bill
I’m extremelly happy about this but I doubt it will be the end of the struggle to keep Europe a sofware patent free zone.

Javascript Troubles

More than 2 weeks ago javascript in IE explorer stopped working in my Windows XP SP2 the only other incovinient apart from having to play Archspace in firefox was the fact that windows search also stopped working. I found both the fix and the cause here:

Fix:
Start->run
regsvr32 urlmon.dll
regsvr32 jscript.dll
regsvr32 wshom.ocx

Cause:
“Problem arose as I tried using Kaspersky Lab virus checker and then had to unistall it, which is when Search stopped working.”