Via Martha Rotter’s blog (Martha is Rob Burke’s replacement in Microsoft Ireland and I bet she hates being introduced that way!), I see that Microsoft Ireland have started a Microsoft Licensing blog.
This is a great idea because licensing Microsoft’s software correctly in any kinds of numbers is unbelievably complex. I often wonder if it is made this way purposefully so that Microsoft can maximise on profit while at the same time Microsoft can say to customers “but if you only took the licensing scheme hidden under all this complexity you could save all this money”! That’s my cynical side coming out again 
Of course, using software licensed under a GPL is far simpler and there are no license fees to worry about!
James Galvin posted a couple of weeks ago about a recently published exploit which made hacking Eircom’s wireless routers trivial.
As Eircom are the largest provider of residential broadband in Ireland, this is potentially a big deal. As Joe Drumgoole commented at the time:
they have inadvertently created Ireland’s largest free WIFI network. Good man Eircom!
However, BT is now facing an even more serious issue on its wireless routers according to an article in the Register today. At least in Eircom’s case, the vulnerability only exposed the WEP key, allowing use of the wifi on the router.
In the case of the BT router, the Reg is reporting that
a remote attacker can quietly gain full administrator control over a device simply by social engineering a user into visiting a website. The exploit makes it possible to steal a user’s WPA key, listen in on VoIP calls, steal VoIP credentials or change DNS settings so users are silently redirected to fraudulent websites
This is a far more serious an issue then the Eircom one and the number of routers this affected is likely to be orders of magnitude greater.
The one saving grace is that the hack hasn’t been published in the wild, as was the case with Eircom. Yet.
Since I updated this blog to WordPress 2.3 and K2 RC2, I have been having reports that the blog crashes Safari (but only Safari 2, not Safari 3).
Today I think I sorted the problem.
I switched the blog from using the native Wordpress’ Widgets to manage the sidebar to using K2’s Sidebar Manager and now the crashing seems to have stopped.
I’m not sure why the WordPress Widgets was causing the blog to crash Safari 2 but if you are having this problem, try switching to using the K2 Sidebar Manager.
It worked for me.
I have had isolated reports that since upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.3 and the theme to K2 RC2, this blog crashes the Safari browser.
I’m running Safari version 3.03 on my Mac and it doesn’t crash but I’m told version 2.04 does crash.
I have tried turning off some of the sidebar widgets but that didn’t fix it (maybe I didn’t turn off the right ones?) and I tried tweaking the theme but to no avail.
If there are any code junkies out there who have any suggestions on why the blog may be suddenly crashing some versions of Safari, I’d love to hear them so I can resolve this.
Thanks.
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