Technology News and Happenings – Techpresso.org

Published at LXer: One of the highlights of the behind-the-scenes changes in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the addition of Grand Central Dispatch. Apple have now open sourced the code to Grand Central under an Apache 2.0 licence. Grand Central is a user and kernel space library which adds new language features, runtime libraries and other enhancements to support concurrent code execution on multi-core hardware. Read More...

Novell INC’s (NasdaqGS: NOVL ) SuSE Linux unit has announced an early week security update focusing on Mozilla Foundations’ Firefox 3.0.12 release. Specifically, the implementation of Firefox previous to 3.0.12 is vulnerable to security issues leading to remote code execution. More information, including the full text announcement, MITRE CVE enumerated vulnerability listings ( CVE-2009-1194, CVE-2009-2462, CVE-2009-2463, CVE-2009-2464, CVE-2009-2465, CVE-2009-2466, CVE-2009-2467,

Web browsers will always have security flaws, especially due to the possibility of the remote code execution through JavaScript routines. In case of the recently released Firefox 3.5 browser, the highly critical security flaw was solved in the updated version (Firefox 3.5.1) launched on July 16, 2009 by Mozilla. Alongside the severe security issue reported by Secunia and other similar sites, in this new Firefox release, additional security and stability related problems were also patched.In a pr

It’s the end of the road for Win98 and Win ME. Microsoft has just updated a bulletin about them not going to issue a patch for the 2 operating systems. This is due to the fact that the patch if administrated, may cause certain applications to break.?Ǭ†Anyhow,?Ǭ†it is said that Microsoft would be stopping support for?Ǭ†the Win 98 and?Ǭ†Win Me line some time soon.

Microsoft has given up on the idea of patching a critical security vulnerability in Windows 98 and Windows ME. The company is set to cease support for the two operating systems shortly.?Ǭ†

The flaw has to do with the way Windows Explorer handles the Component Object Model objects used by Windows programs. Attackers could take over a system by tricking users into visiting a website that would then connect them to a remote file server. “This remote file server could then cause Windows Explorer to fail in a way that could allow code execution,” Microsoft said.?Ǭ†?Ǭ†

Source: TechWorld.com

I should tell my ex company to change all their operating systems, after all they wouldn’t be any support left.

On 9 Sep 2005, Secunia has released a security advisory on a vulnerability on Firefox. It was rated “highly critical”. Your system could be compromised!! Well, nothing is 100% secure and safe in the cyber world. Take a look at the advisory below:

Description:
Tom Ferris has discovered a vulnerability in Firefox, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or potentially to compromise a user’s system.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of an URL that contains the 0xAD character in its domain name. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow.

Successful exploitation crashes Firefox and may potentially allow code execution but requires that the user is tricked into visiting a malicious web site or open a specially crafted HTML file.

The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 1.0.6, and is reported to affect versions prior to 1.0.6, and version 1.5 Beta 1.

Solution:
Don’t browse untrusted web sites.

Source: http://secunia.com/advisories/16764/

Mozilla has released a fix for this vulnerability for Firefox 1.0.6 on their FTP site.
For users who are using the 1.5 Beta version, you can expect this to be fixed on the later versions.