Happy New Year to everyone and thanks to all of those who stop by occasionally to read the latest in tech news. In year 2006 I hope to improve the site to help all of us keep the dizzying pace of technology news and growth.
I wish each and every one of you a happy and new prosperous year in all of your endeavors.
WMF 0 Day exploit is getting alot of press today. This exploit does affect a fully patched windows system and simply by viewing a malicious WMF image in Internet Explorer it will install various and significant amount of spyware and nasties on your PC. Websense has put a movie up to show you how it looks when your system gets exploited HERE Please do not go to any of the sites seen in the video unless you really know what it is you are doing and what the outcome could be. Of course if you are willing to spend a few hours of your time rebuilding your windows pc then go for it. From what I have seen thus far this is not a DOS effort as it does not generate network traffic, it seems it is only there to cause the end user pure grief. The orignal exploit site (unionseek.com) is no longer up. But it is being reported the exploit has made it’s way to various sites all over the internet. The sites below especially the F-Secure link will keep us up to date on the advances made on the version currently in the wild.
SANS
Sunbelt Blogs
f-secure
On the quietest news weeks of the year Microsoft and NBC has announced the partnership is over. Steve Blamer has never really like the deal to begin with.
Microsoft has made no secret of its lack of enthusiasm for the cable channel. In 2002, Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive, said publicly that if Microsoft had an opportunity to turn back time, it would never have gone through with the deal for MSNBC. Microsoft agreed to a 99-year partnership, put up a reported $500 million, and then committed to paying NBC about $30 million a year in license fees.
I have always wondered what it was that Micro$oft and Bill Gates thought they were going to get from this deal anyway, seems it turns out not much.
On December 15th I wrote an entry Seagate the King? describing some of the actions Seagate has taken to try and gain market share and reclaim the title. Well if they weren’t king they are surely making advancements on trying to topple the current title holder Western Digital. Seagate has announced it will now get rid of one of its competitors, Maxtor by aquiring it for the sum totaly of 1.9billion dollars.
Lookout Western Digital there is a new heavy weight contender and he is taking on all challengers and knocking them out.
Are you wondering what to get the geek in your family? Well wired news has posted what seems to be hot items for the geek crowd. Upon reading this list was I so suprised to see the gift I have been trying to convince Santa to stick under my tree, the Sony 400disc DVD player. Head on over to Wired News and get that gift the geek in your family would love to have.
And please tell Santa I have been a good boy this year and really do deserve the Sony DVD player.
Really I have been Santa 
MIT Technology Review says the internet is broken. They have written a 3 part series of documents which contain some interesting thoughts Part1 explores security and performance flaws. Part2 explores some of their ideas on how such major problems should be addressed and fixed. Part3 explores some heavy opinions on how to implement a smart internet, but experts like Google’s Vinton Cerf says this could make it slower and more error prone. Can we be headed back to the days of the World Wide Wait when much slower bandwidth speeds were available?
Santa has such a journey ahead of him that he has started to make his rounds early. Unfortunately it is not the Santa all of our children is looking forward to seeing on the 25th of this month. Santa is a new IM worm that is now making his rounds and affecting many computers. The worm, identified as IM.GiftCom.All, was discovered by researchers at IMLogic Inc.’s Threat Center spreading via IM and attempting to trick users into clicking on a malicious URL.
The link lures the target into visiting a harmless Santa Claus Web site, but actually installs a rootkit payload to the victim’s machine, IMLogic said in an advisory.
I got a report from a friend about a mess he was going through with EBAY. He informed me that they say he had purchased an item but he had not. When he logged in with his username and account he noticed that where it listed whom was logged in it reported someone elses username. I did some checking and found that Ebay has released two statements which I have posted below, and complaints are rampant in their forums.
Hi everyone,
We have received a few reports from members who have let us know they are experiencing issues with Sign In. We are investigating this issue, and we appreciate your patience.
Kind Regards,
~Kristal
eBay Customer Support
Good Morning!
Earlier this evening, we received reports from a few members who were experiencing issues with Sign In. Our engineers have rolled back some newly released code that may have been related to this issue. We are continuing to monitor this situation closely, and we appreciate your patience.
Kind Regards,
~Kristal
eBay Customer Support
Seagate was once loosing market share to Western Digital for a long time due to noisy drives and failures. But at a time when drives are getting larger and cheaper by the day they have increased their warranty back to 5 years when everyone else has went the opposite direction some going as low as 1 year. But not only have they increased warranty to show they stand behind their products they have increased density per platter, 25% greater than anyone else. The guys over at techreport has reviewed seagates latest release and based on their specs I am impressed. My next Super Linux machine I plan on building to replace my aging AMD2600 with 1gig of mem running SuSE10 will surely have to be driven by one of these.
–Elijah
If there is one thing everyone knows or have at least heard about it is the internet. But very little know what holds the internet together “DNS”. Without DNS we would be stuck trying to remember all the ipv4 based ip addresses of our favorite websites and within the next few years ipv6 addresses, oh my I shiver from fear just having to think about such a thing. DNS allows all of us to go to our favorites sites by name such as www.digitalrage.org so that you can read about the latest in Information Technology. Having been in this field for over 15 years now I have seen this question asked on BBS’s (remember those flash from the past ?), newsgroups, mailing list, and forums. Often website and dns admins have to change records which might cause problems like reachability due to the fact that just about all clients now cache dns locally so until it ages out you may think that your favorite website or page you are trying to get to is down. Having seen this so many times and being asked this by users of networks I have supported in the past I thought this would be a great first HowTo for my site.
As I stated most DNS clients cache the results of name resolution requests locally. This speeds up name resolution if multiple lookups are done to the same address, such as returning to the same website or when checking email something we all do. If bad a DNS entry is cached it can cause frustration and sometimes stress when this evolves around business related apps. Before being overwhelmed with frustration and stress try flushing the DNS cache from the local pc to get rid of it, or wait up to 24 hours or longer for it to be dropped from the cache automatically.
How to Flush DNS in Microsoft Windows
In Microsoft Windows, you can use the command ipconfig /flushdns to flush the DNS resolver cache.
You can also use the command ipconfig /displaydns to view the DNS resolver cache.
Go to start, run type in cmd or command for older Windows O/S’s like win95.
C:\>ipconfig /flushdns
Windows IP Configuration
Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.
How to Flush DNS in Linux
In Linux, the nscd daemon manages the DNS cache.
To flush the DNS cache, restart the nscd daemon.
To restart the nscd daemon, use the command `/etc/rc.d/init.d/nscd restart`.
In SuSe Linux the rc.d directory is linked to init.d so it will be done the following way
SuSElinux:# /etc/rc.d/nscd restart
Shutting down Name Service Cache Daemon done
Starting Name Service Cache Daemon done
And last but not least Mac OSX. I knew i had to include this O/S or a certain close friend of mine would never let me live it down. Not having had very much experience with this O/S I had to ask a coworker in the graphics department this question
How to Flush DNS in Mac OSX
In Mac OSX, you can use the command lookupd -flushcache to flush the DNS resolver cache.
bash-2.05a$ lookupd -flushcache
And for the Sysadmins we all know that this Book should be on all of your bookshelves.
–Elijah