In this issue:
- HTML email viruses are becoming more sophisticated
- Microsoft Rental Software
- Removing items from the NEW menu
- Page size confusion
- Performance Optimizer
- Task Manager in W2K
- Assigned old diaries to new users.
- Firewall Overview
- Obscure Excel shortcut maybe very useful
- Edit hyperlink in Office 97, 2000, and XP
- Topic: Re: Drill a hole
HTML EMAIL VIRUSES ARE BECOMING MORE SOPHISTICATED
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HTML email viruses are becoming more dangerous and harder to block. Referring to the latest vulnerability to be found in HTML mail that allows viruses to be triggered automatically, GFI has warned that more HTML email viruses are on their way.
The vulnerability recently discovered in HTML mail makes it possible for an email message to run an embedded file attachment when the user simply previews that message in Outlook or Outlook Express. This means the user does not need to open the attachment to activate the virus; in fact, the attachment is invisible to the recipient. This new vulnerability lies in a Malformed Content Type tag, which is exploited using an IFRAME tag. Through the IFRAME tag, a malicious user is able to automatically run his/her file.
A patch that partially fixes this vulnerability has been issued, but it is not a total solution. For full protection, email content filtering at server level is essential.
Mail essentials protects against this type of virus in two ways. Through its file checking module, Mail essentials blocks infected attachments, even if they are hidden. Through its script checking function, Mail essentials removes the actual script that runs the exploit, including IFRAME and other tags that automatically run files. All this is done at email server level, before the email is forwarded to the recipient. This way, organizations are secure against this new type of HTML mail virus.
See http://www.c2000.com/products for more information
MICROSOFT RENTAL SOFTWARE
Is it really a bad thing?
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The IT press has been full of editorial comment about Microsoft's new scheme for Office XP and beyond where you effectively "rent" the software, rather than buy it. Most of this press has uniformly knocked Microsoft for this, but I just want to take a contrary view, that maybe renting software is a good thing.
Here's the problem if you are a software author. Once you've sold a product where does your revenue come from? For Microsoft the answer is clear, they sell more upgrades and make more money.
But that may not be good for users. We would rather have a stable product with a long life span that we don't have to keep upgrading. So it may be in our favour to keep paying Microsoft NOT to bring out an upgrade.
All software companies are under relentless pressure to bring out upgrades and bring them out quickly. As users we want upgrades which have been considered and (crucially) well tested - the exact opposite.
So, maybe software rental isn’t such a bad thing after all.
As an aside, if you think you own the software you've bought, think again, you only ever buy a licence to use the software - and there's an awful lot of small print attached to that.
Thought for the Day was by. . .
See http://www.c2000.com/ for more information
REMOVING ITEMS FROM THE NEW MENU
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Into the registry for this one. Because I'm always trying out various bits of software on my own PC I end up with a very irritating right-click menu for New items with hundreds of items on it (well, 10's). When actually I only ever create folders and the occasional text file.
Anyway, to get rid of them is a registry hack I'm afraid - so don't go there if you don't know what's going on in the registry.
1) Start the registry editor (Regedit.exe)
2) Move to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\., e.g.HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.doc
3) Delete or rename the ShellNew key. It may not always be at the root of the key, but might be in a sub root below it.
4) Close the registry editor
See http://www.c2000.com/mswindow for more information
PAGE SIZE CONFUSION
Letter and A4
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Paper sizes are a real pain in the proverbial and the sooner America switches over to the ISO standard page sizes the better as far as I'm concerned.
In the meantime, if you've bought a Microsoft product there's a good chance when you installed it the wrong paper size was setup. A lot of MS products default to Letter when actually you want A4.
Worse, it can be a real task trying to get some of those default page size changes to stick as well. Windows 2000 seems to be especially irritating on that front.
However, one of the very common causes of confusion is when you set the page size in the application, say Word. It all looks OK, but in fact you also need to change the page size for the printer as well.
Open Settings, Printers, Properties - then you will have a different panels displayed depending upon your printer, but somewhere there you will have a default paper type.
Also, the reverse can occur. Even though you've set the printer settings, your application may not pick it up. Word and so on generally seem to be OK, but Outlook never seems to pick up the change, so you need to edit the print styles for Outlook after setting your printer settings.
Since Word 97 there has also been an "auto-fit" option which is supposed to take your document from Letter to A4 (or vice versa) but I've never seen this work in practice.
See http://www.c2000.com/mswindow for more information
Exchange 5.x comes with Performance Optimizer. In many sites this is run once during installation and then never again. Of course you can run it pretty much any time, but there are some key events which should remind you to run it soon:
1) An Exchange server's functions have changed
2) Users have been added to the server
3) Users have been added to the organization
4) Resources (such as memory or disks) have been added to the server
Performance optimiser only reports on disk store issues, but underneath the hood it also sets up a number of Exchange parameters. For example if you see this message: "The total number of threads (XX) configured for the Information Store is too
low. Assuming YY threads."
Now, because this isn't a STOP message, most people ignore it, but actually running the optimiser will reconfigure exchange for you.
See http://www.c2000.com/mswindow for more information
The revised Task Manager in Windows 2000 has some new features that are quite handy. Right-click on your taskbar to call it up, (or use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Escape).
Then, on the Processes tab you can see all the running processes. Click on the column name and the column is automatically sorted. So very quickly from here you can see which processes are using the most CPU time and memory - quite enlightening.
As I sit here now, running a fairly chunky Access database and host of smaller services, Outlook stands a mile out as the greatest CPU user and memory user.
Click on View and you select additional columns to view, Peak Mem Usage and VM Usage (virtual memory) are probably the most useful as these give you the high-water marks for any process. (Yep, Outlook again)
See http://www.c2000.com/mswindow for more information
ASSIGNED OLD DIARIES TO NEW USERS.
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Interesting little problem, once you know how to do this it is trivial, the experimenting takes a while though...
1) As the old user set full read/write permissions to ALL in the diary.
2) As superuser (root) change the ownership and group of the diary files (in /usr/UAP/diary/diary) for the old user to the new users settings.
3) As the new user, change the diary permissions to the required settings (even if they were the same as before).
See http://www.c2000.com/uniplex for more information
FIREWALL OVERVIEW
A quick technical outline
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A very popular class of firewalls at the moment are so called proxy servers. What does that word mean to begin with? 'Proxy' simply means that the machine runs an application 'on behalf of' services that run on a system that is hidden behind the proxy server. It is a type of firewall that helps you to securely communicate with the Internet, which we call 'untrusted'.
Untrusted because it is a scary place out there. You would be surprised how many would-be hackers are trying to penetrate systems on an hourly basis and what holes they find.
One other type of firewall that is used a lot are essentially routers that filter packets and translate IP addresses based on a set of rules. (But they do not process the data that sits inside the packets).
Now, the three technologies in order of increasing security are:
1) Packet Filters
2) Circuit-level Proxies
3) Application-level Proxies
1) Packet Filters
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There are two sorts of these: static and dynamic. Static packet filters simply inspect the IP address and port number of traffic passing through the firewall and either route or drop the packet based on rules defined by you, the administrator.
Dynamic packet filtering firewalls can open and close ports 'on the fly'. They do this based on the type of initial connection request and the port numbers that the client and remote server negotiate. In this way, packets based on protocols that do not use fixed port numbers, such as the popular Remote Procedure Calls (RPC's) can be let through by opening just one port instead of a whole range of ports.
Dynamic firewalls sometimes have the latest technology built in. This is called "stateful inspection". That is a technique which uses even more intelligence in tracking the progress of a connection and looking for unexpected changes of state that might indicate a hacker attack. MS Proxy Server V2.0 supports dynamic filters but not stateful inspection. The new MS ISA Server 2000 adds support for stateful inspection, but not for all protocols.
2) Circuit-level Proxies
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TCP/IP uses special identifiers called 'sockets' to make sure that packets intended for a particular application are not only routed to the correct host, but are also directed to the correct application in that host. The special upgrades that were made by MS to the WinSock API (which handles TCP/IP packets in Windows) allow you can securely 'remote' a socket to a proxy server.
That allows the proxy server to perform the low-level networking functions on behalf of the client. Until the client initiates a "circuit" with the proxy, the network traffic from the client is completely hidden from the outside. A proxy erver uses its own (outside) IP address to communicate via the Internet instead of the actual IP address of the client which remains hidden this way. A plus with ircuit-level proxies is you can base access rules on the requester's name or group membership. A minus is that they are unsuitable for peer-to-peer protocols like SMTP, or Voice-over-IP.
3) Application-level Proxies
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These are generally considered to have the tightest security of the three methods. But it's expensive in resources on the proxy server. Application proxies provide separate processes for a few high-level protocols like http, https, smtp, and dns.
For instance, with http, the app-level proxy looks like the requested web server to the client, and in turn emulates the client to the web server. It intercepts the browser's requests, inspects the http content to ensure validity and then repackages the packet and sends it to the actual web server, while giving its (external) IP address as the source address. The process is reversed when the requested content comes back. MS Proxy Server V2.0 and the new MS ISA Server 2000 include application-level proxies for http, https, and ftp protocols.
Some other security features:
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All firewalls can log traffic, and you can configure rules to send alerts when specific types of activity occur. But a major headache is false positives. They happen too much and drive everyone mad. When a real attack occurs it gets dis-regarded. You can normally configure the firewall so that some traffic is denied based on source or destination IP address, protocol types and in some cases on user and/or group names. Quite a few third party tools interface with both MS proxy server and ISA server to filter out various classes of Internet content.
(grateful acknowledgements to www.directionsonmicrosoft.com and Stu at sunbelt-software.com)
See http://www.c2000.com/products/pr_sec.htm for more information
OBSCURE EXCEL SHORTCUT MAYBE VERY USEFUL
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How about a shortcut which find cells that DON'T match your current cell?
This sort of makes sense, you can find data that is not what it should be, or maybe you only have one or two different entries in a row or column anyway. Maybe you want to find all non-UK sales?
Ctrl-\
Select cells in a row that don't match the value in the active cell in that ROW.
Ctrl+Shift +|
Select cells in a column that don't match the value in the active cell in that COLUMN.
See http://www.c2000.com/mswindow for more information
EDIT HYPERLINK IN OFFICE 97, 2000, AND XP
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When you enter a complete URL in Office 97, 2000 or XP it is automatically setup as a link, ready for you to click. So, if you click on it and it starts up Explorer, how do you edit it?
In office 97 or 2000 just highlight the text and press CTRL-K, this opens a hyperlink dialog box for you to edit the link.
In Office XP bizarrely you can't. If you enter the hyperlink wrong your stuck! Worse, you can change the text part, but the link underneath does NOT get changed. So you can have a document which looks correct but actually isn't.
Goodness knows why Microsoft decided to do this, very brain-damaged if you ask me!
See http://www.c2000.com/mswindow for more information
Topic: Re: Drill a hole
From: mark edward hardwidge
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
Nero K. Amily wrote:
> What a terrible thought!
> Imagine if all of our gravity escaped through a
> hole in the Earth.
> I wonder where it would go.
It goes into my apartment, I think. That's why it's so hard for me to get up each morning.
See http://www.c2000.com/fun for more information
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