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Wednesday, July 23, 2003 |
Microsoft reveals 'critical' flaw. The software giant issues another passel of warnings about security holes, including a "critical" flaw affecting most Windows PCs. [CNET News.com]
Now MIDI files are the source of danger to the vaunted Windows OS. Thankyou DirectX, the secret bypass API that talks straight to the metal and gives us all kinds of gains in sound and graphics performance. A buffer overrun in the DirectSound driver MIDI handler will allow all kinds of commands to be executed in other memory spaces.
9:12:03 PM 
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IBM unveils toolkit for talking computers. Big Blue's new software toolkit helps developers build speech-recognition and other "multimodal" applications for Linux computers. [CNET News.com]
Fits, starts and slow crawling progress are the norm for voice recognition. L&H have fallen by the wayside. ScanSoft now owns Dragon and IBM stands alone, but somehow they are still selling the promise of Voice Recognition. One day there will be a killer app. for this technology.
8:02:58 PM
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Cracking Windows passwords in seconds. Researchers outline a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds from 1 minute 41 seconds. [CNET News.com]
Being a frequent reader of EETimes and the more consumer oriented Tom's Hardware Guide, I know PC motherboards come out and wildly fast rates. Advances hit Taiwan manufacturing lines in record time, the board designers crank out the new multi-layer Printed Circuit Boards in record time and dump it in our laps ready for consumption. One of those trends is increasing RAM capacity. This has been increasing at the rate of 256MB every year I would say. The advent of WinXP required at least 512MB, now machines regularly have a capacity of 2GB. That means you can do wickedly fast brute force attacks on NTHash password files and break passwords in 30 seconds. Is it any wonder that things don't get hacked more often?
8:00:43 PM
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Alerts Were Lacking, NASA Shuttle Manager Says. In her first public statement, the official who ran shuttle management meetings during the fatal Columbia mission depicted an agency in which internal communications broke down. By Matthew L. Wald with John Schwartz. [New York Times: Technology]
Linda Ham, the mission manager really wanted to hear what she wanted to hear it seems. And other nagging problems like waterleaks and temperature fluctuations were far more in the foreground than worrying about anything that happened at launch. That plus the fact, all the engineers thought the tile hit tiles on the bottom of the shuttle and NOT on the leading edge, and there was no clear picture what was going to happen. Linda's worst admission is that since they had no plan or clear path to solve a problem like a foam strike that knocked off too man tiles, that they didn't want to consider it as a possibility. It seemed highly unlikely based on the size and weight of the foam, but even so, what the hell would they do if it DID knock off too many tiles? Linda didn't want to hear that, and other nagging problems were far more important to deal with.
7:27:23 PM
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Reel life. Havana dispatch: Stark, beautiful and politically ambivalent, a new silent film chronicling a day in Havana is packing cinemas in the Cuban capital. Giles Tremlett explains. [Guardian Unlimited]
A few years ago, the head of the George Eastman Film Archive found a little film rescued from an Archive in Russia, called I am Cuba. It was made after the revolution by a Soviet Film crew and it was as astounding as this new film is today. It was black and white film with an odd extended sensitivity to Infra-Red so all the plants and trees wound up looking really white. It followed 3 different archetypical characters through Cuba during what would have been days before and during the revolution. It was poetic, beautiful and elegant and for social realism it was still very compelling. Glad to see the cinema lives even in Cuba.
7:19:44 PM
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FBI reports significant progress on IT modernization. The FBI's $400 million enterprise network, known as Trilogy, was completed at the end of March. [Computerworld News]
Well at least the FBI is moving forward and making good on promises made after Sept. 11, 2001. And that's good. But the abomination of an acronym DHS, the Dept. of Homeland Security which Congress itself brought into existence, cannot talk to the new systems the FBI has put into production. Big surprise. Two steps forward, 1 and half steps back.
6:22:30 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Eric Likness.
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