Microsoft has rolled out Windows 2003 SP1.
One of its main new features (apart from bug fixes) is the Security Configuration Wizard, which helps reduce the “attack surface” by collecting data about specific server roles and then automatically blocking all services and ports that are not needed to carry out those roles.
The update also contains Microsoft’s Windows Firewall, permitting network-wide control though Group Policy. The firewall, which was also released with Windows XP Service Pack 2, serves as a host firewall around each client and server on the network.
With the inclusion of firewalling technology and the Security Configuration Wizard, rolling out this upgrade will require significant planning on any network to minimise potential client downtime.
Still, on the upside, it looks like Microsoft are getting serious (finally) about security!
According to an article in Businessworld, Toshiba have invented a Lithium-ion rechargeable battery that can be charged to 80% of it capacity in just one minute.
The battery uses nano technology apparently - nano-particles to prevent organic liquid electrolytes from reducing during battery recharging, according to Toshiba.
The battery’s lifetime performance is also improved, with just one per cent loss of total capacity after 1,000 recharge/discharge cycles, and the battery can operate at a lower temperatures; at -40 degrees it is capable of discharging up to 80 per cent of its capacity.
The current prototype is just 3.8×62x35mm and has a capacity of 600mAh and commercial production will begin in 2006.
Bernie emailed me this morning to invite me to join Irishblogs - a new group set up on Yahoo! Groups.
The group description
People from Ireland or in Ireland who have blogs, cross-links, and threads worth sharing.
sounded reasonably interesting so I thought I’d wander on by and check it out.
However, when I went to the site, the page came up blank!
I checked it in Safari and it worked fine, so it only appeared to be a Firefox issue - strange! I went back to Firefox, disabled all the extensions and re-started it - no good. I deleted the cache - no good. I deleted cookies - no good, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get in.
It was only when TwentyMajor advised me to:
check there are no proxy settings in Firefox.
that I got anywhere. I have a proxy manually set in Firefox. This is because there are certain sites I can only view when I have the Proxy turned on (i.e. Googlerankings).
Now, it seems, there are certain sites I can only view with the proxy settings turned off - this is going to be fun!
Today is my son’s birthday - happy birthday Tomás!
Isn’t he beautiful?
Matt has posted a piece on his site noting that Red Hat’s blogs are run out of Movable Type - a closed source blog software application!
This is made all the more ironic when you read on Red Hat’s Open Source Now site that Red Hat is
a challenger of monopolies, defender of public domain, and steward of open source.
I left a comment on the Red Hat People blog asking about this contradiction - it will be interesting to see if 1) they publish the comment and 2) they choose to answer.
It appears that Red Hat see themselves simply as signposts - they are merely pointing the way, they are not going there themselves!
A spam comment makes it through my comment spam defences
Well, it had to happen - a comment spam made it through my defences and onto the site this morning. Having said that, I never thought the site would be spam-free for four whole weeks when I turned off my comment spam plugins.
The spam, which was on the site this morning, looked innocuous enough. The text of the comment was
The comment was from someone calling themselves elephant with the email address norman@chick.com. The domain being pointed to by the comment was 11say.com and the comment was left with a User Agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1).
Something about the comment didn’t seem right so I did a bit of digging. I checked out the site and at a first cursory glance, it appears to be a legitimate site but looking a little more closely, you will notice the text is nonsense and below the copyright notice there are a load of links.
So I did a bit more research on the comment (address lookup, whois info, traceroute, etc.) and forwarded my findings to SpamHuntress. She subsequently wrote a comprehensive post on it.
Searches on Google and MSN Search for the term “I came to your site accidentially,” (including the inverted commas and note the misspelling of accidentally) show that those responsible for this spam have been busy and are also using a variety of aliases and many other domains all pointing to the same spam site.
They are also using the comment text
and
so if you see any of these comments on your site, delete them.