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Ezine Manager gives you the tools you need to publish and distribute your own ezine … for FREE if your distributing less than 1,000 copies. Their list of clients is pretty darn impressive, too, if you like Dr. Phil, Dun and Bradstreet and the Red Cross.

Another newsletter I subscribe to is Scot’s Newsletter. It’s usually pretty long but every so often there’s a real gem in it. The June 17, 2003 issue has a link to one of Scot’s Forums that discusses XP services. The forum postings have some good links to sites that explain what service does what, which services you can shutdown and so on. Here’s a link to the forum:
http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=4&t=1271&s=.

Since parting company with TechTV, Chris has stepped up promotion promotion of his properties — GnomeTomes, GnomeDex, and his new GnomeForums to name a few — and it gets a little tiresome. Still, a guy’s gotta make a living so I’ll cut him a little slack. Anyway, his Lockergnome Windows Daily still comes up with some useful tidbits. The 6/16/2003 issue tells about Drivers Collection — a site that lets you search for drivers by vendor or product category.

It was available to read but I couldn’t update anything. It was pretty frustrating cause I had, oh, I dunno, 5 or 6 entries to make. I’ll get ’em posted here shortly.

Another security advisory from Secunia, this time about BlackICE. You can see the advisory at http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9058/. In short, I guess BlackICE is supposed to protect the PC against Cross Site Scripting attacks (the thing that’s been in a lot of the newer advisories of late). It apparently doesn’t check for some small subset of HTTP requests. Their solution isn’t too helpful … it basically comes down to “be careful out there.”

I picked up a prime grade Chateaubriand from PW Markets yesterday and we grilled it last night. Man, what a steak! It was one of the best meals I can remember having. Went over and picked up another one this afternoon, too.

I dunno, this is listed by Secunia as “moderately critical” but I think the probability of it happening is pretty low if you’re careful about what sites you visit as it first requires the site operator to take you to an error page first and then you must click on a link provided by the malicious site operator.

Secunia has what they call a fix but I consider it a workaround and it requires you to edit the registry. The Secunia advisory is at http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9056/ and gives you a link to the original security notice by GreyMagic which contains a much better explanation than what I gave. Make up your own mind.

Looks like this is based on the same kind of flaw reported above. Here’s the Secunia advisory: http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9055. Check out the GreyMagic site for the original report.

Looks like a few of you decided to pick up the SMC wireless router from CompUSA. Glad I could help and I hope it works out.

And, no, I don’t get a commission from CompUSA 🙂

Story’s at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1126751,00.asp. Here’s the deal: they say a compromised system listens for packets of size 55,808. Supposedly there’s another system (systems?) out there that are sending TCP SYN packets to random IP addresses at a speed that will allow them to hit 90% of the Internet’s addresses in 24 hours (!! — that’s gotta be FAST! — there’re a LOT of addresses out there). They don’t know what the compromised systems will do or what kind of information they’ll leak so they can’t say what’s up with this new trojan/virus. You gotta admit, though, this is a weird one!

Read the article. Decide for yourself.