Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Microsoft issues patch for Zero-Day VML exploit on Day Eight Slashdot is noting that Microsoft Patches VML Vulnerability. "Microsoft has quietly released an official patch for the zero-day VML vulnerability. The patch was publicly available yesterday, But Microsoft has just added it to the Security Bulletin Index." Eight days from time of first report to patch is pretty fast for Microsoft, and is almost two weeks ahead of their normal patch schedule. This security flaw was being aggressively exploited out in the wild." For Microsoft to break their usual once-a-month patch cycle is pretty unusual, so I'd consider this patch sooner rather than later. Get patching! 2:48:05 PM    comment []

InfoWorld's Off the Record column continues to supply great tales of the software world's mis-steps, like this one: "Ten years ago, I was the IT manager at a successful software company whose main product was aimed at large insurance companies. It was a DOS app that read records from large data files, did a little processing, and passed the results to other apps downstream. It wasn't particularly pretty, but it was accurate -- and it was fast! It worked in batch mode, processing thousands of records per minute, which was a critical feature, considering how many records our clients needed to manage each day." "We were doing well with this app, which was pretty much the industry leader. So in a classic it-ain't-broke-so-let's-fix-it-anyway move, some of our managers and salespeople began complaining that it wasn't written for Windows." Betcha can't guess what comes next. Read the whole story here. 11:09:32 AM    comment []

Comcast inadvertantly blocks Google Google sites unavailable in some parts of the U.S.. (InfoWorld) - "Google Inc. users in the U.S. lost access to Google Web sites on Tuesday in a connectivity issue that lit up the blogosphere but whose causes remain unclear... An undetermined number of Google users that connect to the Internet via a specific service provider "experienced problems accessing Google and other services for a short period of time" on Tuesday, a Google spokesman said via e-mail." Thats would be COMCAST. We lost connectivity with Google yesterday here in New Hampshire. It felt like half the internet was unavailable. Google ads on pages would grind page loads to a halt. Google Mail lost meant I missed some of my mailing list reading. And I hadn't appreciated how dependent I had gotten on typing whatever I needed into the little box in the upper right of FoxFire: JavaScript syntax questions, contact information. Why bookmark? There's Google. Sure, there were other search engines to switch to, and our business has a business DSL line with another vendor, but it was remarkable how much Google was missed. I attempted to figure out if we had DNS problems in-house but couldn't find any symptoms, other than lack of Google. Traceroutes and pings and digs seemed to yield correct information. I even tried to contact Comcast to see if they had a page with "known outages" but never located it. Worse, I tried a "Chat with Comcast" session that turned out to be a bot with a single-digit IQ that only knew the answers to 10 questions, none of which were "Why are you blocking Google?" Quite annoying. Glad to see order has been returned to the universe. 9:52:09 AM    comment []

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