Posts by Vigilante

Nexenta trashes Win8 Storage Spaces

Competing vendor...

... labels competing product as crap.

Well colour me shocked - a company that chooses to claim its competitors have crap products and theirs aren't. I would have expected nothing less.

However, instead of taking the time to extol the virtues of their own products, they choose instead to dismiss Storage Spaces as nothing more than a frivolity - when Microsoft have not stated that it is even going to be released as an enterprise feature, and hence not even a truly competing product.

The issue i see here is that Nexenta is threatened by this - and probably for good reason, Microsoft has made an immense amount of money catering to the 95% of consumers, businesses and enterprises that their software works for - I can easily see an upscale version of Storage Spaces becoming commonplace in a few years in business environments that don't need the resilience of a full scale ZFS setup, but want something more manageable than a boatload of separate drives.

He's probably using Chrome

Chrome allows you to resize editboxes on any website, but the downside to this is that sometimes the end of the lines in the resized editbox are sent in forms as line breaks.

That's more likely, I've seen it happen a few times, so I try to only use it occasionally and on sites which strip them out.

Worm spreads via RDP

Wrong...

Remote Desktop is NEVER enabled by default, and never has been.

On client versions of windows you have to go to system properties > remote > enable remote access (and then it forces you to make sure your password is secure, meeting the server 2008 password guidelines).

On server versions, it must be enabled via server manager. Note that some automated server 2008 R2 installs are configured to have it enabled by default, but this requires whoever runs the install to roll their own system image - by no means "standard".

One thing this article fails to mention is whether this is actually a bug/vulnerability in RDP (which I seriously doubt) or whether it is a case of one machine getting exploited (by having weak passwords) and then that machine exploiting others by bruteforcing RDP. Both cases are able to be easily mitigated by having secure passwords, throttling - or better yet, change the RDP port.

Microsoft kills Windows Vista SP1 support

That would happen normally

Due to XPs prevalence in the workplace, and Vistas not particularly successful launch, Microsoft was forced to support XP for a lot longer than they wanted.

Businesses demanded that XP be supported until well into the life cycle of the OS past Vista, for those companies that had to maintain XP-era systems that couldn't handle Vista. Microsoft obliged.

As such, we have the current state of affairs. Vista SP2 will be supported until April 10th 2012 for Ultimate and Home Basic. Home Premium, Business and Enterprise will be in extended support at that time (like xp now) until April 11 2017.

Google questions tests that praise IE's bad website blocker

Old version of chrome or typical flamebait "convenient ignorance"?

If you are using chrome on any version of windows from 2000 onwards, this does not happen. The saved passwords and form data are unavailable under any account with a different SID, which is highly unlikely to occur between two completely separate systems (as would be in the example you just provided).

History can be transferred, along with bookmarks and such, but this is standard for almost all modern browsers.

Microsoft secretly yanks TechNet product keys

Sucks.

I am certainly going to be contacting them regarding it, I just resubscribed and this was NOT part of the agreement. I'll be cancelling my subscripton (which I've held for 4 years) if there is no reticence in this matter.

I would not have minded half as much had I been informed in advance (which would have been before I resubscribed), but I'm wondering now if it was an intentional omission. I even upgraded to Professional with media from my previous standard account at the same time... Stung twice as it were.

Mozilla eases fears over phishy URL alert

Old link

The link Sood referred to is for a vulnerability that was fixed before chrome reached version 1 (it's specifically referring to version 0.2.149.xx, some of the earlier beta builds). It's now at version 6 in the dev branch, and should be released as version 6 within the next few weeks.

The fact that Google felt this was worthwhile to patch nearly two years ago should tell them something. At the very least they should have checked to see if that flaw still existed before making themselves look silly in an attempt to downplay the fact that their browser was found to be vulnerable to it.

UK bans Nintendo DS homebrew code installer

Expected... but still disappointing.

This was to be expected eventually - however, I'm wondering whether this affects all of these similar devices - such as the Acekard. They all do effectively the same thing, but the ruling apparently just applies to he R4.

This is a shame too, if Nintendo and Sony and all the others would simply enable users to easily create and share their own code, not only would they make their platforms far more appealing to the modders and homebrewers (more sales), but they might manage to land themselves some future developers (See: Garrys mod) - and at the same time, making these devices less of a "grey area" and giving the pirates nothing to hide behind for their use.

It's still a shame that the people out there who actually want to get involved in creating stuff for their favourite platforms, get shunned by the device manufacturers and branded as pirates when they find ways of doing it.

IE and Safari lets attackers steal user names and addresses

Exactly.

You have emphasised my point exactly. Chrome and Firefox would only be able to leak a password if you visited the ACTUAL page where those passwords were supposed to be used - allowing a single password to be leaked ONLY if the site had been compromised in advance. Considering that "important" passwords are often for extremely high profile sites - Google services, banks and building societies, Social networking sites etc, the scope of the vulnerability is much reduced (these companies have the most to lose through a security breach, so it is logical to think that they put more emphasis on building secure websites that would not vulnerable to this type of attack).

For IE and Safari, all you have to do is visit ANY page under the control of a malicious organisation. For Chrome and Firefox, one has to visit the correct page the passwords/data would be used on, but the page would have had to have been previously compromised to enable it to leak information. A significant difference in difficulty between the two.

Kinda misleading first paragraph...

Safari and Internet explorer seem to be vulnerable to these attacks (getting user data from any site the user visits), but Firefox and Chrome are only susceptible to an attack like this if the (official, correct) site is compromised with a XSS vulnerability, which limits the scope greatly, and places more of the burden on the websites not being vulnerable to this kind of exploit in the first place, than on the browser a visitor is using.

The other browsers (IE and Safari) leak this information to any site built to take advantage of this hole, meaning it's a far greater concern than the one affecting Firefox and Chrome.

IBM sends sodden supercomputer to Zurich uni

Interesting...

Doesn't a radeon 5870 calculate at up to 2.72 teraflops? Seems like they would save a lot more trees buying 4 of those and calculating stuff on them instead, at a faster rate. Assuming their work can be ported to GPGPU, of course.

MSI tells 97,000 customers to 'Read The F***ing Manual'

Some people knew/assumed

that this was an April Fools joke. However, posting such on the forums got their post deleted and/or their account banned. I'm not certain what this means, but why would they go to the length of banning people permanently for making a claim that it was an April fools' joke... when it was?

ICANN delays decision on pornography domain

The point is..

Having the .xxx domain as well as the current ones, and NOT forcing porn site administrators to use it, simply means that there will be twice as many, or more, of the sites currently out there.

This proposal would only be worthwhile considering if there was also a rule forcing porn domains onto .xx INSTEAD of .com .biz .whatever domains, as then there would simply be " a place" for them, rather than "another place" for them.

HP bids to boost sales with 0% financing (again)

How does HP even make any money?

I used to work for a subsidiary of the telecoms company Vodafone, and any employee was able to get a 30% no-questions-asked discount on any HP appliance, laptop, desktop, or even things like print cartridges. That was on top of any other offers they had, and as far as I am aware, that deal is still ongoing - I worked there for about two years, and stopped working there in November, so that's a pretty substantial potential for loss, and the entire reason that was available is because the company itself used HP for its own computers.

I mean, surely there must be SOME profit in a deal like that, but someone has to ask just how much profit these companies are making from their hardware if there's still profit in it after possibly as much as a 50% price cut.

I know that on the other hand, any sale means moving stock, which would only depreciate if not sold - but the hardware that the company bought just 18 months ago is still very modern, and in all will have not depreciated by nearly as much in value as it was actually undercut by in the first place.

It just seems to make no sense to me.

Microsoft ends Windows and Office 2007 rental restrictions

Except... You said it yourself.

"Section 3a....You may allow other users to access the software to provide you with support services"

If some gran is in a cafe sending an email to her grandkids, friends etc, she's hardly giving you or your organisation "support services".

Who wants T-Mobile UK?

Er, yeah.

I agree with Gideon, I work for Vodafone UK and this article made me chuckle. There's a reason that the smaller networks were forced to use 1800mhz band, and it;s not because it's better. It travels less distance, requiring far more cell sites and therefore, larger costs to maintain the entire network.

I expect it'll end up with Vodafone and O2 competing on the larger share of the bandwidth - if Vodafone were to buy say, 45mhz of that spectrum, they would still be within the 130mhz range and telefonica/O2 would be in quite a bad posistion, network-wise, even after getting the remaining bandwidth.

I guess we'll see how this pans out.

Microsoft bribes Oz to ditch Firefox

Not just Firefox

I visited the site in Chrome and got this message instead:

"But you'll never find it using tarnished Chrome,

(So get rid of it, or get lost)."

Looks like microsoft just doesn't like anyone who doesn't use IE8.