According to this article at NetCraft, the Comment Spammers (read slugs and bums), have become so prevalent that some ISP’s are disabling comments in Moveable Type because of load on the server. There are unique rebuild issues that make MT more prone to server drag than some other types of blog software apparently. A rapid fix is proposed.

We have typically choosen WordPress for our blogging (or sometimes poorboys free CMS — or Content Management System if you prefer — solution), comment spam has caused bandwidth drain and headaches for us as well. With the newest release of WordPress, 1.2.2 as of yesterday, spam relief is still not built in. They do in the release announcement offer several solutions. We have in fact used one of those solutions (after some improvements by us) to hopefully eliminate the issue for the time being.
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For those of you who have yet to experience Firefox 1.0 get with the program. Firefox is the best thing in browsers since … well the beginning of internet browsers. It is faster, safer, and well, it is just good. They are already looking ahead to Firefox 2.0 with the next major date first quarter of 2005.

Security company Secunia, has found another serious security flaw in Internet Explorer that can be used by nasty types in cross site scripting attacks. The new flaw effects all versions of IE6 including both SP1 and SP2 patched versions. The answer to the problem, is to disable active scripting in Internet Explorer until a patch is created. Unfortunately Windows update won’t work without active scripting, and neither will a good many other sites.

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MicroSoft has released a patch for a bug in XP SP2 systems where in some instances the firewall will consider the entire Internet as part of an internal network, and trust it as such. The patch was released quietly without the fanfare of normal releases. The flaw effects XP Home Edition SP2, XP Pro SP2, XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 and XP Media Center Edition SP2. And these guys really want people to buy security products from them?

In other news, they have bought an anti-spyware company called Giant, and there are rumours that they will soon release an enterprise class anti-spyware and anti-virus product. The question remains though, will companies buy protection from the company that makes the software that requires such protection in the first place? After all, let’s face it, Microsoft doesn’t have a particularly good security reputation.

Franki

The PHP development team have suggested that everyone immediately upgrade to PHP 4.3.10 due to a number of very serious flaws in previous versions that can result in your server being “owned”.

Expect most Linux distro’s to release patched versions of PHP in the coming days. If your using a Windows server you’ll have to dig up an updated version yourself, using Windows, you’ve already put yourself at a security disadvantage, so you really should make this a priority.

Franki

One of the things that for some strange reason seems to impress programmers is writing a program that achieves a specific goal in as few lines of code as possible. To that end, a gentleman by the name of Matthew Skala has written a peer to peer file sharing program in just 9 lines of Perl code.

The idea of this and another such program written in 15 lines of Python is to demonstrate that there is no real way the movie and record companies can stop peer to peer file trading using litigation, because any moderately accomplished programmer can knock one up themselves.

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I’ve been a long-time supporter of upgradeable video cards in laptops for some time. The days of buying a several thousand dollar machine every year or two should be at an end. I started an online petition some time back to encourage manufacturers to do the right thing.

Although Dell offered the XPS and 9100 systems not long ago, which do provide a single video upgrade, they are not true upgradeable laptops because it is entirely up to Dell to decide what you should be able to upgrade to, and we know they would prefer you just bought another laptop.

A Canadian company called Eurocom has just released a PCI express MXM architecture desktop replacement laptop, MXM is an Nvidia technology that provides a similar function to laptops that a normal AGP or PCIE slot does in a desktop machine, an interchangeable video adaptor system.

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