Thoughts From The Fringe Of The Web

The Introduction to Security article that I've been working on for everyones favourite networking site, firewall.cx, has been published.
Go have a look at it here :
An Introduction To Network Security

You can leave your comments here.. using the new comments system, or preferably in the firewall.cx forums, where you'll usually find me skulking.

Many thanks to Chris and Tfs for putting up with my incessantly mailing it to them for proofreading.

You have to have a look at the Acer Ferrari 3000 Notebook. Its a top performance laptop officially licensed from Ferrari. While I'm more of a Porsche person myself, this notebood just looks so sexy.. wait till you check out its specs,
Athlon XP 2500 , 60GB HDD, 512MB DDR SDRAM, DVD writer, ATI Radeon Mobility 9200 powering the 15 inch screen ! Start drooling



Acer Ferrari 3000 Notebook

I've just been testing out Mozilla Firebird after hearing all the wonderful things people say about it. This is the final word -- it really whips IE's ass ! The browser is quick to load, fully customisable and extendable via extensions that can do anything from adding Opera's mouse gestures to having an RSS reader in the sidebar !

The browser supports multiple windows as well as a tabbed interface and has some really neat keyboard shortcuts. The look is very clean and minimalistic (no unnecessary toolbars and buttons) however this does not mean it's dumbed down, its just very good UI design. The whole thing is skinnable as well ! Then you add all the usual jazz like built in google search and nifty full screen modes and you're ready to go !

Rendering wise, this baby is fast! I would say its equivalent in speed to Opera, but it renders pages much better than Opera. The HTML and CSS support are as per international standards (unlike Microsoft which chooses to ignore tags as it pleases). In fact I find this blog looking much more like I intended it to look under Firebird than under IE ! That said, its now my default browser :).

Oh yeah, did I mention it loads really quickly ? Hehe..

I caught this on the security lists. There is a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer that allows an attacker to make any page appear to come from a URL of his choosing. The address bar will display whatever URL he wants, and even if you hover over the link, you won't see the location you're actually being sent to. This has a lot of relevance given how scammers may use it to mislead people into believing they're at e-bay or paypal. The actual exploit involves inserting a null character before the @ sign commonly used to denote a login and password combination when accessing a website or ftp server.

To see a demonstration of the vulnerability, click the link below.

Demonstration of the IE URL spoofing vulnerability

Notice that even when you just hover over the link, it appears to be linked to www.google.com, the only way one might notice this attack is by viewing the source (or happening to notice that you're not making a TCP/IP connection to www.google.com). Both of which are fairly unlikely to happen. As of now there is no word on a patch.. so much for a patchless December from Microsoft !

Well I've also added the nifty little security news, security alerts scrollers courtesy SecurityUnit to the sidebar, as well as virus alerts courtesy VirusPortal. Also don't forget about the new Feeds ! I'm planning to work on them over the next week so that they have proper headlines. However this will have to do for now !

I've also added titles to each blog entry, and a link in the byline so you can link directly to a particular post. Now hows that for a days work eh ?

I've just added RSS newsfeeds of the site, you can access these using the little orange XML icon at the top of the page. Shove this link into your favourite RSS aggregator. I recommend Amphetadesk or FeedReader.

I'm very grateful to Ben from thelocust.org for providing instantRSS for free. Thats how we're giving you the XML feeds. I recommend you visit his website

Go grab that newsfeed !!

I just found a windows port of GkrellM, the incredible little stack of system monitors.

For those who haven't used this beauty before, it is a fully skinnable and customisable stack of monitors which can be extended with lots of plugins.. the plugins do everything from scrolling your choice of news headlines, checking mail, controlling winamp etc etc.

This is a must have !! Go get it
GkrellM Linux/BSD/Solaris/MacOS
GkrellM Windows port

Here are some screenshots of my desktop, click for full size images. GkrellM is the little stack of monitors on the right. As you can see I'm using it to monitor CPU/Disks/Memory, check my mail, control winamp and scroll security headlines and Google news. Oh yeah don't miss Flynn from Doom who shows you how messed your system in true Doom style !!



Yes I know my desktop looks too cool to be Windows XP, but that will be dealt with in another post ;)