Month: April 2003

ethereal
lprng
tcpdump
zlib
mysql

Of These Zlib is the one to watch: the last zlib bug was really nasty and it’s really easy to forget how easy it is for a would be attacker to pass data to zlib: http, email, images. the list is long

riseup.net are reporting more anti-capitalist mayhem planned for this bank holiday weekend. This year the proceedings have unsurprisingly taken an anti-war slant.

The web site has posted the registered addresses in London for many of the major Defence companies operating in Europe.Think about taking some electronic precautions this weekend or have some extra monitoring in place: Worms and Viruses are often timed around organised chaos events.At least check for virus updates more regularly and for unusual gateway activity.

Some anarchy related sites have recently gone offline, so perhaps agency moves are afoot.

So far (oddly), riseup.net is still online. Checkout if you might be affected: riseup.net.

Lots of changes here at the TurboTas site. Firstly the SSL site now works properly and has a proper Certificate and Chain. This should minimize security warnings.In fact, the non-SSL site is deprecated to further improve security.

MAES is now deprecated, see the original link for details of getting the new access. Otto, it’s replacement supports only download (No streaming), but the database is faster and the front end is much slicker. This change has been carried out as MAES no longer meets my own needs.

HTML cleanups carried out, modules tidied up a bit and spurious old content removed.

Let me know what you think of the changes or if you need access to the authenticated area’s.

The preliminary reccomendations following the loss of the shuttle Columbia have been published at the official accident investigation site (see links). Tragically, it seems that complacency may be creeping back in at NASA: one possible cause, falling foam, has affected many previous flights.There are two basic changes recommended by the CAIB, namely that Shuttle Imaging on Orbit be a standard feature (bearing in mind that the US government have this ability, and that it’s rarely used). This facility is intended to be able to assess the condition of the orbiter after ascent.

Secondly that the examination of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC) components be made a comprehensive one to include all possible forms of non-destructive testing. This is in response to the most likely reason for the loss of the orbiter: that of failure of a structural RCC component in the leading edge of the left wing.

There is as yet no final verdict on the root cause of the RCC component failure: Much speculation exists with present favorite being either pre-existing damage not spotted by inspection or a strike from other material (foam from the tank for example).

The leading edge components are extremely complex and have many layers and treatments. If the thermal protection the RCC parts provide is breached, even in a small way, a super heated air stream can enter the wing and burn the structural aluminium components.

Microsoft has had to come clean and admit that the registration problem is actually an error in code intended to prevent registration.

This is the interesting bit: Office 2000 has code to prevent registration after April 15 2003. This is to ‘help’ you decide to upgrade/buy the next version.

The chukle here is that this code is bust and the registration box won’t go away, eventually culminating in ‘reduced functionality’. I can’t wait..
source: The Register

The site logout function, which was lost after a recent section spring-clean has been found!

It was located from the inside of the settee with two toffees, 5 centimes and two remote controls.

It’s now back in it’s rightful place at the right of the main screen.

AOL has begun a $10M lawsuit against a dozen individuals and companies.

This could be an interesting development. General estimates suggest that AOL accounts could be responsible for as much as 20% of the Western worlds spam problem.

In this case, AOL says that these lawsuits address 8 million complaints about an estimated 1 billion pieces of spam.

No joke!
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Scientists in the six cooperating countries, UK, USA, China, Japan, France and Germany, announced today that the mapping of the 3 billion base pair Human Genome is now essentially complete.

This marks the polishing of the data first published in rough form in 2001 (And carried on the Turbotas site in the Gutenberg archives).2003 is a fitting year to mark the completion of the human genome mapping which was begun in 1990.

It was 50 years ago that the DNS double helix was originally announced.

It was Saturday Februray 28th when Francis Crick and James Watson announced there discovery in the inauspicious surroundings of a public house in Cambridge.

Two new advisories on NetBSD: Kerberos and Sendmail.
Why didn’t these get updated with other public warnings a week ago? Good question

Perhaps this will means new general Sendmail and Kerberos warnings tomorrow.