Oh happy day, it would appear that a major banner advertising company has been spreading naughty programs via an Internet Explorer exploit, it would appear that they were hacked, along with Comedy Central, and the exploit added to their advertising banners.

Basically if you’ve been using Internet Exploder, sorry, Explorer to view websites under Windows and you are not running Windows XP SP2 then you may well have been infected with either annoying advertising software or with a trojan. Oh, and apparently there is also an exploit circulating for SP2 too now. 🙁

Use Firefox instead – it’s not only more secure, it works better!

You can read the Internet Storm Center’s wrapup report which contains the damning message that:

We have not mentioned the potential damage to Microsoft’s reputation but that also must be taken into consideration when you consider that except for WinXP SP2, the Internet Explorer has no patch for this vulnerability. It will come back again to visit more unprotected sites.

There is an excellent explanation of the attack by LURHQ Managed Security Services.

Netcraft, the website monitoring wizards, are reporting that the US Republican Party has blocked all international access to official sites, I presume because they believe that the rest of the world is irrelevant and doesn’t need to know…

A Groklaw contributor has managed to legally obtain the sealed 1994 settlement between USL (Unix Systems Laboratory) and The Regents of the University of California under the Californian Public Records Law.

It’s a long document, and interesting to note that neither side concedes the others claims, but very interesting in the context that during the case USL conceded that they had distributed the V32 UNIX source files with no copyright notice and the judge pointed out that if he had to rule on it then they were very likely to have lost any copyrights for any material in V32!

Found via Groklaw reporting on a Financial Times story that Micro$oft paid CCIA US$19.75m as part of an anti-trust settlement, and US$9.75m of that ended up in the pocket of their top official and was approved by the CCIA board.

I guess this explains his statement at the time saying “and for important and pragmatic reasons we are choosing to move on with regard to this matter”, I guess almost US$20 million to your organisation counts as a reason to some people. Never mind the principles, smell the money!

This also probably explains Nokia quiting the CCIA in disgust over the settlement. I wonder why Redhat and OSDL are still members ?

If you search Google Scholar for “Vogon” the second link result is Douglas Adams’s Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy which has been cited 107 times.

Beats a lot of science papers.. 🙂

Google seems to have outdone itself, they’re about to launch a new service allowing you to “search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports”.

Basically it’s cool. Very cool.

They not only pull up publications, etc, but also then give you a list of their citations as sub-searches. For instance, if you search for mentions of the book “Nobody Nowhere” by Donna Williams you’ll not only get articles that mention it you’ll also find (for those publications that Google groks the format) a list of articles that have cited it.

Of course, you can also have great fun pulling up searches for friends and places you work, or where you used to work.

You can even find really obscure things, like citations for AberMUD (including one from the Australian Defence Force Academy) or some crusty old physicist.. 🙂