Computer Security Weekly, February 22, 1999


For the past few years, Henri Delger's VirusHelp mailing list has been the only regular, reliable, moderated source of virus information sent out. With the upcoming demise of Prodigy Classic service, there will have to be some changes in the contact information. The Website to subscribe and unsubscribe will be here, which should also contain pointers to other changes.
More in the ongoing Intel Pentium III serial number battle. Lauren Weinstein, moderator of the PRIVACY Forum mailing list, has kicked in with yet another observation. In regard to e-commerce, serial numbers on the CPU are also redundant. Unique, hardware based serial numbers have long existed on objects like Ethernet network cards, where a unique ID has been mandatory for operation ...
Microsoft, in security bulletin MS99-005, has admitted to the BackOffice installation bug noted here earlier. More details are contained in Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q217004.
Recently it has been noted that Microsoft Access, under certain conditions, stores the password for supposed secure and encrypted files as plain text. In addition, the encryption scheme for encrypted passwords is fairly trivial to break. This also applies to the MS Money program, since it uses the Microsoft Access database format.
Cyber Patrol, one of the controversial Internet filters that not only blocks access to pornography, but also a number of sites and organizations with liberal political views, is under attack again. A program has been released that will circumvent Cyber Patrol's access restrictions, without needing to know the password. read the complete story here.
Simson Garfinkel notes that there are a number of "orphan" programs, no longer supported or sold by the companies that own them, which still have useful life and work left in them. Many of these are superior to products now on the market. Unfortunately, even if you have copies of these older programs, it is illegal for you to make copies for those who may need them, despite the fact that they can't get legal copies from the owners. In a sense, he says, this is a kind of a crime against humanity, or at least computer users.

In the ongoing fight about copyright, yet another note ...

Microsoft is already starting to quietly promote its "Java Killer" programming language, code named "Cool". However, there are indications that a fight is on within the halls of Redmond about just what, exactly, the language will be. How can that be? Ah, yes. The most interesting fact out of this story -- "Cool" hasn't even been defined yet, much less implemented ... ZDNet's story.
The copyright of the article Computer Security Weekly, February 22, 1999 in Computer Security is owned by Robert Slade. Permission to republish Computer Security Weekly, February 22, 1999 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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