Author: Dr. Bill

A friend of mine says IE is the “safest browser on the Internet”… yeah, right! No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it is still a pig! Move to Chrome, or Firefox. Just sayin’!

IE flaw allows attackers, advertisers to track cursor movement

“A software engineer from online analytics company Spider.io is claiming that a security flaw in Internet Explorer 6-10 could allow attackers or advertisers to track user’s mouse movements, potentially compromising data entered via virtual keyboards.

Nick Johnson, who previously worked for Google before joining Spider.io, posted details of the flaw on the Bugtraq mailing list this morning.

‘Internet Explorer’s event model populates the global Event object with some attributes relating to mouse events, even in situations where it should not. Combined with the ability to trigger events manually using the fireEvent() method, this allows JavaScript in any web page (or in any iframe within any web page) to poll for the position of the mouse cursor anywhere on the screen and at any time — even when the tab containing the page is not active, or when the Internet Explorer window is unfocused or minimized.’

Knowing the position of the cursor has significant ramifications for authentication systems that use a virtual keyboard as a means to circumvent keyloggers. Virtual keyboards that randomize key placement would likely be unaffected.

Johnson also believes that it would be relatively trivial for an attacker to use the flaw on high-traffic and generally trusted sites by purchasing advertising space on popular sites.

“Through today’s ad exchanges, any site from YouTube to the New York Times is a possible attack vector. Indeed, the vulnerability is already being exploited by at least two display ad analytics companies across billions of web page impressions each month.”

The nature of the flaw means that the tracking of cursor movements is not simply restricted to Internet Explorer either. According to Johnson, so long as the page remains open, even if it has been placed in a background tab or the entire Internet Explorer application is minimized, it will continue to log movements.”

Check it out! It is available for Linux and Windows!

Ekiga 4.0 offers a fresh, Open Source Skype alternative

“Longtime users of Ubuntu Linux may already be familiar with open source Ekiga, which used to be the default Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) client in that popular Linux distribution, but late last month the telephony software got a major update.

Arriving some three years after the previous release, Ekiga 4.0—also known as ‘The Victory Release’ – is now available, offering a fresh new Skype alternative for users of Linux and Windows alike.

‘This is a major release with many major improvements,’ wrote the software’s developers in the announcement last week on the project site.

Here’s a rundown of some of the highlights.

A brand-new interface

At the top of the list of the changes in Ekiga 4.0 is a “completely new” user interface, the developers say, featuring an improved roster, a separate call window, and improved chat and accounts windows. The screenshot above offers a taste of the new GUI.

Ekiga 4.0 also offers faster startup than its predecessor did, and the software’s GNOME 3 integration has been improved with better notifications and removal of the tray icon.

A new PulseAudio plugin has been added to Ekiga along with new audio codecs such as SILK—which is used by Skype—G.722.1 (also known as Siren 7), and G.722.2 (a.k.a. GSM-AMR Wide band). New H.264 optimizations have been added as well.

Rounding out the list of key new features are call auto-answer, partial support for handling multiple video streams, improved audio accuracy on select audio cards, and a variety of usability and interoperability fixes.

Highly interoperable

Microsoft has surprised many in the Linux community by continuing to update Skype for Linux, and of course we now have offerings including Google+ chat and hangouts and Google Talk with video as well.

Still, Ekiga brings with it all the many benefits of open source software in addition to support for both the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323 protocol, making it highly interoperable.”

This is bad. Even though I don’t use it, I don’t like to see a trend of free services getting cut back.

Google stops offering Google Apps for free to focus on providing a paid-for experience

“Google has announced a significant decision that will see it cease allowing users to sign up to its Google Apps service free of charge.

In a blog post, Clay Bavor, director of product management for Google Apps, explains that the move is being made in order to focus the quality of the user experience on the needs of paying, business users, with fuller support. However, those that have already signed up for the service for free will still be able to use it as before.

‘When we launched the premium business version we kept our free, basic version as well,’ Bavor explains. ‘Both businesses and individuals signed up for this version, but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn’t quite right for either group. Businesses quickly outgrow the basic version and want things like 24/7 customer support and larger inboxes. Similarly, consumers often have to wait to get new features while we make them business-ready.’

Google is now encouraging users to sign up to Gmail, storage service Google Drive and its other consumer-facing products, instead of Google Apps. Those that do want to use Google Apps can get the premium version, which remains $50 per user, per year.

Google says that the end of the free version will allow it to focus on providing business-grade service, including 24/7 phone support for issues, a 25GB inbox and its 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

The Wall Street Journal reports that subscriptions to Google Apps and its mapping service for businesses and governments have netted the company some $1 billion over the last year.

Stats-wise, more than 5 million businesses are said to use Google Apps, but the overwhelming majority use the free version. The service — both free and paid — is said to be used by more than 40 million users worldwide.

The move to end free usage makes a lot of sense, and has been much expected, given the investment Google has made in its consumer-targeted cloud offerings, which includes the creation of Dropbox rival Google Drive. The company is also likely to make big changes to Gmail after it hired the team behind much-lauded iOS and Mac mail client Sparrow in August.

The search giant has increased the linkage between the two services lately. Last month it began allowing users to add 10GB of Google Drive files into Gmail emails, and we can expect further alignment of the services going forward.”

Sometime back, I did a post on my perfect Fedora build. It was a step-by-step guide, in geek shorthand, on what to install, and how to set up a highly usable desktop, if you are me. Well, you obviously aren’t me, but you may want some of the same features I do, one geek to another, so to speak! So, since I have decided that Linux Mint is completely “da bomb” and that we should all move to it and tell Microsoft to go jump in a very, very cold lake, so there! ;-)

So, here we go… again, this is geek shorthand guidance, and assumes that you can “read between the lines” and get ‘er done!

My personal “perfect” Linux Mint build:

Download the appropriate (32-bit or 64-bit, depending on your machine) .iso from linuxmint.com

Burn the .iso to a DVD

Boot from the DVD, select Full Install

Sign-in with the user ID created during install

Install Dropbox from Dropbox.com

Set up background (the official Cool Stylin’ Linux Mint background image) available here: Cool Stylin’ Linux Mint Background Image

Install the Chromium Browser from Software Manager

Install Audacity from Software Manager

Install RecordMyDesktop from Software Manager

Install Easytag from Software Manager

Install VMware View 5 Client from Software Manager

Install Filezilla FTP Client from Software Manager

Install Skype from Software Manager

Install winff from Software Manager

Install ffmpeg from Software Manager

Install wine from Software Manager

Install e-Sword from e-sword.net website (under wine)

Log into your Google account and allow sync to occur in Chromium

Install Lastpass from lastpass.com web site (using Firefox)

Install Lastpass from lastpass.com web site (using Chromium)

Extract install script from file downloaded from lastpass.com web site

sudo ./install_lastpass.sh

Go into both Firefox and Chromium and login to Lastpass to activate it.

Do a Google search for “citrix receiver for linux” and choose “Citrix – Receiver for Linux 12.1”

Choose .deb version

Install motif-clients from Software Manager

Run, and set up options in Citrix Reciever (Connections – New – Click drop-down, setup Login, etc.)

Go to teamviewer.com – download .deb version

Install, set-up and sign-in to Teamviewer

Right-click on apps under menu and click “Add to Desktop” on those I want on desktop.

Enjoy the best desktop known to mankind! Dewd!

So, you install an Ubuntu based Linux. (Such as Ubuntu itself, or, my current favorite, Linux Mint!) You go to update the installation to be sure that everything is OK.

So, you go to Update Manager and try and run that, or, you do a:

sudo apt-get update

Then, you get the error:

“E:Encountered a section with no Package: header…”

Bummer, man!

Well, worry not! The fix is to do this:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf

Then run:

sudo apt-get update

Kabing! It is fixed!