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Apple has recently polished up it’s Safari for Windows browser codebase into some less reminiscent of an alpha-hackfest (much like it was when i tried their original release on a clean vista machine some months back) and have now slipped it in below the radar on many people’s machines as an automatic download/update on iTunes & Quicktime.

However the disclaimer and EULA you have to sign up for is a beaut…

Now click accept on that in good faith…:0)

Sigh…here’s the reason I hate flash ! Got into a huge scrap at work with a colleague arguing our customer-facing offering needed to be Web2.0 and RIA and that flash was the way to go as AJAX wasn’t ubiquitous yet etc etc and I politely pointed out that I personally, on all the browsers I use at home, block flash content.

And here’s why and here’s the original PoC code. Nice bundled-up, serialised SOAP call over an embedded flash object using an XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) vulnerability and UPnP (Universal Plug n Play – it makes those tricky little apps like MSN Messenger and Skype slip through your hardware and software firewalls like a hot knife through butter).

So the ongoing rule is learn to use your hardware properly and configure ONLY those ports on your firewalls that you really, really, really, REALLY need open and go home this evening and make sure UPnP is disabled on your router.

You have been warned…again !

If this isn’t the final nail in the coffin of this abortive attempt to see off the Leopard advance I’ve no idea what is…

Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh as it’s been snappily entitled has now been released to a slightly wider audience that those bleary-eyed nerdlings initially supplied with the hyoooge service pack earlier last year.

I’ve got a Vista Home basic on my second laptop at home, it’s fine but I’ve yet to get used to the wholesale changes they’ve made to where everything now resides (maybe if I made the switch and just got on with it !) but this ma-hoo-sive SP is just beyond a joke. There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that they rushed this codebase to RC1 last year to avoid a publicity meltdown as this scale of a Service pack is just taking the piss !

It ain’t going to be on my primary machine for quite some to come I can tell you…in fact I’m seriously, seriously considering this as my next machine.

I’m turning to the dark side…no doubt.

This just in….Vista dialog causes widespread cerebral meltdown

Go figure :0)

Just been sent in a phishing attempt, quite nicely done. Well crafted and linked back to the actual lloyds bank site

Main aim is to get you to punch in your user name and password and memorable answers which it then submits to a couple of email accounts. THESE EMAIL ACCOUNTS

mailto:lom.data@web2mail.com
mailto:lom.data@gmail.com

Please feel free to add these to the most useless and inappropriate mailing lists or offers sites you can think of. Ideally include them in any honeypot scripts you may have running on your site.

I thank you.

I’ll bet very few of you out there will have heard of ‘enum’ other than in coding terms as in ‘enumerating’ over a collection or array. Well I’m stating for the record now, in a very few short years it’ll be the glue that binds you to your ‘Uniform Resource Identifier’ or URI.

At the moment we all probably have a phone number, some of us will have a mobile and a very few of us might have a VoIP address for internet-routed calls to your VoIP (typically Skype but other services are available) phone. The real problem is that there’s almost no way of making this information follow you around unless with every email signature or business card you have great big list of contact details !

Enter ‘ENUM’ (Depending where you look – Electronic NUmber Mapping System aka TElephone NUmber Mapping) . This works on almost the same principle as DNS does for web address on the internet.

The end result is that by entering a ‘NAPTR’ record into the DNS entries on your domain when someone calls on your main phone number, if it finds you unavailable it can do a lookup for your next preferred means of communications which might be your mobile, then that’s not available it follow you down to your VoIP number and finally if this still can’t get to you it’ll drop you an email with the voicemail of the call as an attachment…all transparently and without you having to look up/remember a series of numbers.

This is the future..and I like it !

Brief morning browse of my faves from my hotel room in London brought me to elReg and this little beauty.

“With a total of 72 processors, 48 GB memory, and 3 PCIexpress ports, the Catapult draws less than 200 watts of power and fits in standard PC chassis.”

Blinkin’ flip ! All this for $15k and an opteron core in there for your desktop OS of choice for cluster control and workload management. Bugger me I though the nVidia graphics card processing clusters were good but this takes their pants down and gives them a good skelp on the bum to boot !

Much of my day-to-day involves putting together solutions that do a bit of data extraction, transformation and loading somewhere else (That’s the ETL bit). So that’s the transactional bit, at then end of the production line, once we’ve speont all this time, money and effort loading and validating this info you then need to quantify and carry out analysis on the metrics derived from this data…this is the OLAP.

With the imminent release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 comes MDX or Multi Dimensional eXpressions. This article on ElReg does a better job of explaining than I ever would but I’m actually quite keen to get a better understanding of the ‘closing the loop’ power of the expressions language as increasingly our systems become ‘touchless’ and business processes need to be able to be run with minimal/zero intervention this sort of business intelligence becomes invaluable.

This post from well known and respected UK ISP Zen has to set alarm bells ringing ! Hot on the heels of the news that the UK’s BT Home Hub is borked comes the news that the chipset used globally by a third of all ADSL router integrators ’causes intermittancy’

Yikes…this could run and run !
As I suspected the comments that have arisen after this info appeared on the net point to confusion, misunderstanding and and an utter lack of faith in the BB market in the UK.