September 2005

First Symbian Trojan Targeted at the PC

A report from F-Secure details the first known attempt of a virus threat on the PC coming from a mobile phones memory card. While it seems unlikely to cause damage (read why here: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/#00000659) this is still something to take note of for the future. Remember: Security is an ongoing process - you must be aware at all times of the potential for mischief in seemingly unrelated items. Because, cough, Better Safe Than Sorry, cough.

Opera Now Free

Those sneaky Norwegians have been doing well enough that the only thing left to do with the excellent Opera browser was to gve it away! I suggest you download it from <http://www.opera.com/download/> and compare it to the latest relases of Firefox and Internet Explorer. I suspect more than a few of you will appreciate its features while loving its security.

Firefox 1.0.7 Released

It's new. It's improved. You should download it from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/.

Website Problem Cured With Greasemonkey

A very interesting follow-up post today on Boing-Boing shows the power of the Firefox Greasemonkey extension. Yesterday the comment was bemoaning the ugly look and crappy interface at a US Library of Congress site. In the space of 24 hours a chap threw together a Greasemonkey script that fixed the problems.

Bell & Rogers = Inukshuk

In a bid to stifle any competition where WiFi is concerned, Bell and Rogers have formed a new entity, Inukshuk, to spread a $200,000,000.00 wireless network across Canada. Each partner will be allowed to use 50% of the others network but such items as billing and tech support will remain distinct. How soon until each will overload the others network and blame the problem on their partner has yet to be seen. How soon until tech support and billing issues (neither of which is a strong suit for these companies) are simply blamed on each other is unknown at this time. How long before extra charges, inept installation and all network issues being blamed on each carrier remains to be seen. Watching the canabilization of each companies customer base OR the amazement of the public when the rates for this access are announced should prove highly amusing.

Reminderfox

Very nice, simple reminder/calendar extension for those who need small and useful NOT large and pointless.

Firefox Patched !

Several minutes after the security hole was discovered a few workarounds were finished - Go here: https://addons.mozilla.org/messages/307259.html. The easiest method is to install the extension.

Firefox Vulnerability Reported

Firefox appears to have a problem handling URLs that contain a certain character in the domain name. This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow. This results in a possible compromised system. The only solution thus far is to "avoid untrustworthy sites". Uh-huh. You may want to switch to your install of Opera until the patch is released. What, you don't use Opera? You've never even tried it? Oh, c'mon, what are ya new? Get it at http://www.opera.com.