Its the time of the month where Microsoft will release various patches for their products. 13th February, just a day before Valentines Day. Wishes all the System Admins out there all the best and hopefully you won’t sacrifice your date on Valentines Day to get the patches done.
Security Updates
- Five Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. Some of these updates will require a restart.
- Two Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Office. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. These updates may require a restart.
- One Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Visual Studio. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Important. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scan Tool. These updates will require a restart.
- One Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Important. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. These updates may require a restart.
- One Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Step-by-Step Interactive Training. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Important. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scan Tool. These updates may require a restart.
- One Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Data Access Components. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Critical. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scan Tool. These updates may require a restart.
- One Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft Antigen, Microsoft Windows Defender, Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical. These products provide built-in mechanisms for automatic detection and deployment of updates. Some of these updates may require a restart.
Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool
- Microsoft will release an updated version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool on Windows Update, Microsoft Update, Windows Server Update Services and the Download Center.
Note that this tool will NOT be distributed using Software Update Services (SUS).
Non-security High Priority updates on MU, WU, WSUS and SUS
- Microsoft will release two NON-SECURITY High-Priority Updates for Windows on Windows Update (WU) and Software Update Services (SUS).
- Microsoft will release eight NON-SECURITY High-Priority Updates on Microsoft Update (MU) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).
Somehow it just amazed me on how Apple is able to distort the fact that PC can do multimedia stuff too. Especially when coming to gaming. Especially when those MacOS fanboys who insisted that Windows (or PC) is a inferior product and MacOS can do everything that Windows (or PC) can do. But when I ask them whay are they using a PC (or Windows), they told me, PC (or Windows) can play the games they wanted, Mac can’t. So much for “MacOS can do everything that Windows (or PC) can do.
Anyway, here’s some entertaiment for you.
Remember those time when searching for “miserable failure” on google leads you to the biography of George Bush, the President of the United States of America? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm
Google had finally changed their search algorithm and now you no longer see such interesting pranks again =(
An IDS report that was published recently suggests that the first generation of Hybrid-HDD might not perform as expected by many.
Both technologies aimed to improve the load time of windows as well as applications. The technologies also aims to improve power consumptions especially for mobile devices.
The technological difficulty of improving the performance of traditional HDD might proved to be more difficult than it seems. According to the report, “neither the H-HDD nor embedded NAND technology convincingly realizes the potential of NAND caching”.
Hybrid HDD and embedded NAND are some of the key hardware that supports caching solutions such as ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive.
Atheros issued a statement today reporting that “all of the 3,000 technical comments to the 802.11n draft 1.0 have now been resolved” and that there was “unanimous approval” for the creation of a draft 1.10.
from http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29823/97/
A-Data, at CES 2007 annouce their Solid State Drives (SSD), rivaling Samsung and Sandisks’ 32GB SSD with one that is four times larger at 128GB. The 128GB SSD comes in a 2.5″ form factor, suitable for notebooks.
Solid State Drives are harddisk drives (HDD) built using flash memory, and has a much faster seek time compared to the conventional HDD. Due to the lack of moving parts, SSD produces much lesser heat and more importantly, consumes less power, promising to extend battery life by a few minutes.
The SSD is a promising notebook HDD replacements, but not until it gets affordable for the consumers.
isohunt.com, one of the largest bittorent search engine, sued by the MPAA over distribution of copyright contents recently, had their website brought down by the ISP on the 16th of January 2007.
WIBU-Systems USA, Inc. will give $40,000 to the first person who can hack into and remove their anti-piracy software from a protected application. Techies will have six weeks to try, starting Jan. 31. Registration for the challenge kicks off at MacWorld Expo next week in San Francisco.
from http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196800978
- The new theme is too bulky, inconsistent on different platforms, and inferior to the highly refined and very user friendly theme of 1.5 (this is despite late efforts by Mozilla to spruce up the icon set and improve consistency)
- Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem. The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released byGoogle, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risk
- The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features
- There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions of Firefox. While this can, to some degree, be expected, the loss of this huge user contributed extension base is a non-trivial problem with Firefox 2.0, and could be a deal breaker for some people all by itself
- The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox
- There are reported problems with the CSS engine in Firefox 2.0, affecting various websites, and making certain features unavailable to surfers. Notable among these is a continued problem with certain aspects of Yahoo! mail
- Reports indicate that episodes of random freezing during use are worse with the 2.0 version, though a cause has not yet been isolated
- RSS feed handling has taken a step backwards, and is inferior to that of IE7.
- Numerous users have reported that the History bar is buggy, and that in some instances - for unknown reasons - will not display recent items when the history menu is opened as a side panel
- SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0. This defect has been known since June 2006 but no patch has yet been made available. The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus (and I have witnessed the crash personally). If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?
from http://goldcoaster.wordpress.com/2006/10/30/ten-reasons-not-to-use-firefox-20/
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