A place for the neat stuff the surrounds my life
Open Your Mind to a Banned Book!
This is the Banned Book Week 2003, sponsored by the American Library Assocation. I am a big supporter of libraries, as well as an almost daily user. Learn about books that have been challanged or banned in various areas of the US and why it is important to fight these attempts by a vocal minority to silence opinions with which they disagree.
Career Column
Career-Op: It's a Blast!
by Douglas E. Welch, ComputorEdge Magazine
As anyone in high-tech knows, the MBLAST Worm program made a shambles of many PCs and servers over the last month. Despite promises from Microsoft to increase the security of their software, people continue to find, and exploit these flaws to greater and greater effect. Among the hue and cry that is raised with each new attack, high-tech professionals can be heard disclaiming any culpability. “Microsoft is to blame for lousy software.” “Hackers and script kiddies are to blame for writing the exploits.” “Users aren’t bright enough to protect themselves from attack.” While I don’t deny the truth behind any or even all of these statements, I have some difficult news for high-tech workers. Despite all these problems, protecting your systems is your responsibility. Regardless of the culpability of any of the above parties, when you let your systems become infected, and, even worse, infect others, you have failed in one of the basic missions of any high-tech job. Failing to patch for known flaws, especially when you know an attack will be forthcoming, makes you part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
Microsoft WILL NOT email you security updates!
Just a word of warning about an ongoing virus attack via email.
The Swen, W32/Swen@MM, Gibe, and W32/Gibe-F strain of virus often arrives in an email masquerading as a security update from Microsoft. As the title of this post says, Microsoft will never distribute a security update in this fashion. All updates are downloaded directly via http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
This virus can exploit an old bug in Windows that allows it to execute itself, so please be sure you have all necessary updates from Microsoft. It would be embarrassing to be infected by something that was fixed 2 years ago. (SMILE)
If you get such an email, it is a virus or other hoax.
