ICMPECHO » microsoft

All your ‘PageUp’ and ‘PageDown’ are belong to Microsoft!

Daniel Nyström — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:14:50 +0000

Hahaha Most comical/tragical news in a while:

Microsoft has been granted a patent on ‘Page Up’ and ‘Page Down’ keystrokes.

The software giant applied for the patent in 2005, and was granted it on August 19, 2008. US patent number 7,415,666 describes “a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed”.

More comments on this here and here…

Cisco aquires “Exchange-killer” PostPath

Daniel Nyström — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:24:12 +0000

Photo: LarimdaME on Flickr.

From Richi Jennings (via Security Bloggers Network):

“Suddenly, things are getting interesting again in the Exchange-alternatives market.

The quintessential growth-by-acquisition specialist, Cisco (CSCO), has just announced that it’s acquiring PostPath.
[...]
Of all the other Exchange alternatives, PostPath has the most interesting architecture. And I say that as one who has years emotionally invested in the HP OpenMail technology

All the others rely on additional software on the desktop. In the case of OpenMail/SamsungContact/Scalix/Domino/etc., a MAPI service provider “plugin”. Or, like Bynari/OpenXchange/etc., a separate app that synchronized an IMAP store with an Outlook.PST (personal store file).”

Time for a switch?

Semi-good news

Daniel Nyström — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:26:12 +0000

Microsoft has let the expiration date on Windows XP slip a little further, but unfortunately only for OEM’s on cheap/weak computers.

More at The Register.

My feeling is that Microsoft is slipping in a lot of areas right now and alternatives are being examined where there is possibility to do so.

Vista is/was probably a big mistake, and key features are being turned off in a lot of larger environments for the sake of compatibility with older applications.

The problems companies are facing with this operating system is not very far from what they would be facing if switching to an open source solution as many components need to be rewritten in whole.

The world is changing and there are alternatives to resource-hogging and expensive software. You wanna stay in the game? Then get with it.

I do not use this phrase very often,

Daniel Nyström — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:53:03 +0000

but “L O L” at Microsofts latest security debacle

I think their own advisory from 1999 (!!!) explains the issue pretty well:

The IE 5 Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) feature enables web clients to automatically detect proxy settings without user intervention. The algorithm used by WPAD prepends the hostname “wpad” to the fully-qualified domain name and progressively removes subdomains until it either finds a WPAD server answering the domain name or reaches the third-level domain. For instance, web clients in the domain a.b.microsoft.com would query wpad.a.b.microsoft, wpad.b.microsoft.com, then wpad.microsoft.com. A vulnerability arises because in international usage, the third-level domain may not be trusted. A malicious user could set up a WPAD server and serve proxy configuration commands of his or her choice.

Well,

too bad they only protected their customers from this if their domains ended in .com, and that this issue has persisted through eight more years of code (how much new code did they say there were in Vista?). This little function seems to have remained unchanged for almost a decade anyhow…

Now let’s hope that Microsoft are faster than the bad guys… And in the meantime:

If you have a webfilter, block all adresses containing “wpad.” in them.
On most Windows operating systems, stopping the service “WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service” would also do it, but some people have been having problems with this.

In other words, keep an eye on your network the next couple of weeks until MS produces a patch.

Cheers and browse safe!