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SecureIE from Winferno Software can supposedly help lock down IE and help keep you from the nasties out there.

Lesse … I found this link from this article on RootSecure.net which is actually a link to this PC World article.

Found this in kbAlertz: MSKB article 825750 tells you how to disable DCOM. Why would you want to do that? It obviates the recently identified and hyped and over-hyped problem where a bad guy can take over your machine (discussed in MS03-026 and supposedly addressed in MSKB 823980).

And, of course, it happened at the worst time and I didn’t take the time to record the error information. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll happen again. In the 30 days or so that I ran Tiny I never had a problem like that. Hmm … just another data point.

My 30-day eval period for Tiny Personal Firewall V5.0 beta has expired. Now, who ever heard of a company applying the 30 days to a beta? — you’d think they’d want people to continue to test. Anyway, I’m now running a 30-day eval of ZoneAlarm Pro V4.0.123.012. I don’t care much for the UI but I never have — too flashy for me. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. Right now, Tiny is my fave, even with the bugs/problems. Note that I haven’t had any functional problems, just issues with the UI … I can deal with that.

Got this from the Windows XP mailing list maintained by Sunbelt Software (great mailing list, BTW — there are lots more here). If you’ve got a port that’s open or being listened to on your system, chances are you can find it at one of these sites.

http://andrew.triumf.ca/cgi-bin/port
http://www.neohapsis.com/neolabs/neo-ports/
http://lists.gpick.com/portlist/lookup.asp
http://www.snort.org/ports.html

Shure In-Ear Earphones reviewed here.

Seen those things stuck in performers ears at concerts? Those are “monitoring devices” that, apparently, block out a lot of sound except what’s coming through the earphone (they claim 10-20dB attenuation). ExtremeTech explains about ’em and reviews 2 of Shure’s. Go to Shure and look for E1C and the E2C.

Woody Leonhard does it again. In this issue of Woody’s Windows Watch, he discusses the truth behind the story circulating last week about cracking Windows passwords in less than 15 seconds. Well worth reading!

He also discusses Windows Product Activation — seems that someone has gone through every byte sent to Microsoft during the activation process and has been able to account for all but a couple of bytes.

This is all over the ASP.NET weblogs. MSDN has put up this page that lists some VB weblogs. Here’s Duncan Mackenzie’s post about it … he’s apparently the author/owner and maintainer of the page.

Read about it in this particular ASP.NET weblog. Bruce Eckel’s “Thinking in C++” is available as a download or you can buy it from Amazon.com. The author of the weblog entry swears by the book. I’ll have to download it and give it a look-see. I’m an old C programmer and was just getting in to C++ when I went over to the dark side (read: joined management). Fortunately, the “good” side kept drawing me back and I ended up trying to help both sides understand each other … but that’s another story.

Slashdot has a pointer to this article on O’ReillyNet by Dru Nelson who talks about Trustic — a service by Mark Fletcher, creator of Bloglines.com. The deal is, Trustic creates blacklists based on feedback from its registered members.

Anyway, this mention is part of a larger discussion about “Defending Your Site Against SPAM” — Part 1 and Part 2. Part 2 discusses implementing protection with qmail and how to incorporate Trustic into your configuration. Very interesting stuff!