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I usually carry my laptop to work and manage to do most of my work on that. But I still have a desktop machine which stores a lot of the data as well the two other work email addresses I have to manage (in addition to my own.)

Having to move my laptop out of the way and work on the desktop every now and then was getting to be a bit of a pain, so the first thing I did was install TightVNC on the desktop so that I can remotely access it from my laptop.

Once I did that, I realised that the LCD screen that came with my desktop would then be redundant. And then the light dawned. I could hook it up to my laptop as a secondary screen and extend my desktop onto it! Woo hoo!

Fifteen minutes later and a lot of digging around under the desk for cables and such, I now have a very nice dual screen and dual computer set up.

This is possibly just one of many ways you can get access to a computer running Vista. The crazy thing about this exploit is that all you require is a Live Linux CD that allows you to copy/rename files on an NTFS partition. There’s no dearth of those, the one used in the video is called Back Track

The steps are very, very simple; even your grandma could do it! All she’d have to do is watch this video and follow the same steps.

Scary? You bet!

Update: There’s quite a lot of discussion on Slashdot about this including people pointing out that a variant of this hack was available on Windows XP and 2000 too. But the more important point made was that if you have physical access to a computer and that computer’s hard disk is unencrypted (both of which are prerequisites for this hack) then you pretty much own the computer anyway. I guess the utility of this hack is for SysAdmins so that if they ever find themselves with a Vista box without a password, this is a useful way to get in.

Sung to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” this hilarious video by The Richter Scales is a neat caricature of “Bubble 2.0.”

Although browser preferences have been changing over the last couple of years Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still the one of the most popular browser in use. Does IE deserve this prestigious position in today’s world of heightened Internet dependence?

Internet Explorer achieved its popularity, not based on its quality, but due to Microsoft’s marketing strategies. Although I am no one to pass moral judgements, and I do admit Microsoft’s marketing strategy itself was ingenious, I refuse to use substandard software.

Why is IE substandard? To start with, anyone who ever developed structured web pages using css ( or similar methods ) will know that IE was initially developed and since has been maintained with little regard for Guidelines. What this means is that those who want to follow guidelines can not do so for fear of having their pages disfigured by this sad excuse for a browser. I do understand that from a users point of view, this is not convincing. Unfortunately the incompetence does not end there. Internet Explorer has, for years, shipped with many known security vulnerabilities ( find them here here and here ). One would imagine that things would be better in the latest release ( IE7 ) but it turns out that it was not to be. IE7 too has its share of security vulnerabilities. What really shocked me was Microsoft’s response:

Hi, this is Christopher Budd.

We’ve gotten some questions here today about public reports claiming there’s a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7. This is an issue that we have under investigation and so we have some technical information we can share about the issue.

These reports are technically inaccurate: the issue concerned in these reports is not in Internet Explorer 7 (or any other version) at all. Rather, it is in a different Windows component, specifically a component in Outlook Express. While these reports use Internet Explorer as a vector the vulnerability itself is in Outlook Express.

While we are aware that the issue has been publicly disclosed, we’re not aware of it being used in any attacks against customers.

We do have this under investigation and are monitoring the situation closely and we’ll take appropriate action to protect our customers once we’ve completed the investigation.

I hope that helps to clarify.

Christopher

Original Source

Thanks Budd, I am real happy that its not IE but Outlook. Whats more, you are going to wait till you complete your “investigation” to take “appropriate action”? Oh ya, its good to know that you have no clue as to whether or not its been used in any attacks so far. [Just as an aside, it turns out that the "public" was wrong in this one instance but right with regard to many other]

And here is an slightly exaggerated version of what might happen if you continue to use this “browser”:

So what does one do in the unlikely event of wanting to surf the Internet without losing one’s computer? One alternative of course can be found at http://ie7.com/:

Firefox

The true power of Firefox is derived from the fact that the browser is lightweight and allows for increased functionality by use of plugins. This article has an interesting analysis, and this has a case study.

Firefox also has better security – Why is this not a surprise? Well Firefox is an Open Source project and so hundreds of people look through the code that actually runs Firefox and make sure that bugs are kept to a minimum. There is no single testing team in the world that can beat this extensive scrutiny at the hands of the Open Source community, which consists of some of the best programmers around.

Whats more, shifting to Firefox is as easy as

1. Download Firefox
2. Install it [more help]
3. Personalize it (optional)
4. and enjoy a better and more secure Web Experience.

There are enough and more articles talking about why one should use Open Source software. However it is impossible to start talking about any Open Source product before getting this out of the way, so here we go.

The other day, one of my friends came up to me and said: “Why are you so pro Open Source, I don’t see how supporting Open Source is any different from supporting Microsoft”. At first I thought he was making a philosophical statement – but later I realized that he was not. He actually thought that “Open Source”, like Microsoft was a company. Its not.

So what then is Open Source? Wikipedia ( a free-content, collaborative encyclopedia ) defines it to be:

Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration.

Open Source comes with both philosophical and practical advantages. We will leave the philosophical advantages to another post and instead focus on the practical ones here. The primary advantages are:

1. Less dependence on vendors [Example one, two and three]
2. Lower costs
3. Ease of customization [ Example one, two and three]
4. Increased security

So now that we have established that Open Source is in fact an alternative worth exploring, lets move onto the what these alternatives are for individual applications. I intend to do this in a series of posts:

1. Browsers – The Open Source Alternative
2. Email Clients – The Open Source Alternative
3. Office Automation – The Open Source Alternative
4. Operating Systems – The Open Source Alternative
5. Music and other media – The Open Source Alternative
6. Image editing – The Open Source Alternative

What better way to start a tech blog than to talk about the software that runs it! I’m using Wordpress on this site. More specifically, a version of Wordpress called Wordpress MU (for multi-user) which allows me to run multiple blogs with multiple users each and all using a single database with a single users table. Wordpress MU is what powers Wordpress.com and as of this writing they have 1,207,365 users! Yep 1.2 million users!

Anyway, Wordpress which started out as a fork of the b2\cafelog blogging software has grown into a de facto standard for blogging software.

Of course, the web being what it is, there are a ton of options out there. Some notables include the venerable Textpattern and Mephisto – a new, interesting software written in Ruby.

What I love about Wordpress though is the sheer extensibility of it. There are a zillion plugins available and about as many themes available. It barely took me a day to look at a template file and figure out how to mess with it to display as I liked. And that’s because the template tags that Wordpress uses (actually PHP functions) are very readable. For e.g.

the_title ()
the_author ()
the_post ()


Well enough for now, there probably will be more posts on Wordpress out here soon!

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