Is often the motto of the freelance techie, and make it work you can often do. Some of the most talented innovative and resourceful people I know are technicians, and many of them pride themselves on making things work. However, sometimes the “˜make it work’ motto is one that can get you into a lot of bother, especially when providing technical support, help, fixes or advice for larger organisations.
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There is a bug about an ActiveX control in the software called Yahoo! Widgets. This bug can cause a buffer overflow error and it can also compromised a PC.

Recently, Yahoo! has issued an update to fix this flaw.

A Danish security tracker, Secunia, rated it as “extremely critical” which is the second-highest rating in its five step rating scale.

The users of this software reported that they have not been notified about the patch even though they have automatic updates that are turned on.

The Mac OS X version of Yahoo! Widgets is not affected and does not need to receive an update.

Source: Computerworld

A company called Heatsoft has released a free software that can do a lot of helpful things for a user. It has three specific functions.

The first one is called Replacer. It allows the user to:
-find and delete text blocks.
-insert new text blocks at the beginning or end of a text file
-insert some text anywhere in a text file

The second tool is Renamer which lets a user rename files quickly.

Handy File Tool is the name of the third function and it makes it easier for a user to work with a large number of files.

Source: PRWeb

Accounting is a word that will make most computer technicians shudder. We start our own computer businesses because of our technical prowess, we can build a complete computer in under 15 minutes and know how to fix most computer issues that come our way. We don’t get into this business to be sitting at a desk counting numbers.

However, as I have mentioned in the past, when you start your own business you become not only the computer technician but the manager, marketer, secretary and accountant as well. In this article we’ll explain why you need to do it and show you how to get started.
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Sophos has reported a new spam two days ago which is an advertisement for webmasters.

The spam is about a product called ExitGrabber. Its goal is to make the webmaster’s visitor go back to their website as they were about to leave the webmaster’s site.

The author of the Sophos blog reported that when he was about to close the box, a pop-up shows up which says “STOP” in red letters. Below it says “Our intelligent “exit grabber” software has detected that you were thinking about leaving this page.”

There are screen shots which are available on the link below.

Source: Sophos

According to ENT News, Microsoft has confirmed that they will release another service pack for their XP operating system.

It will be released next year but there are only a few details on what the service pack will be about.

“We’re currently planning to deliver SP3 for Windows XP in the first half of CY2008. This date is preliminary, and we don’t have any more details to share at this time,” said a Microsoft spokesperson in an email.

Microsoft originally planned to release another service pack after the second release but there were rumors that they will not release another one.

Source: ENT News

We don’t mean the Mafia, we mean working your own family. Doing any computer work for relative can be dangerous as it totally changes the rules of business. You want to help them out but you don’t want them to call you all the time as if you were their own personal tech support. In this article we’ll show you how to deal with relatives and business.
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A security-audit firm Watchfire has found away to take advantage of a dangling point flaw in Internet Information Sever (IIS) 5.1.

Microsoft already knew that this problem existed but they did not release a patch because the vulnerability seemed impossible to be exploited.

This flaw happens when an IIS service process attempts to use a memory that was freed by a program. High school programmers may have heard about this type of pointer in their courses.

“In other words, this is not a buffer/stack overflow exploit and it will therefore not enable anyone to execute code on the web server,” said Inge Henriksen who is a technology consultant.

Source: The Register

Its been about two months since we last asked what you think of the site and where we can improve. As a webmaster, I love hearing any feedback from our readers so that I can keep on doing what I am doing right, and implement any suggestions you guys have. The main suggestion from last time was to increase the amount of updates; so we now one each work day. The main praise last time was our Repair Tool Of the Week section which we will definitely be keeping on here permanently.

So, Hows our driving now? What do you love about the site? What do you hate about the site? Got an idea or a suggestion? Whatever it is we’d love to hear about it. Comments are open as always, you don’t need to sign up to make a comment and you can even post anonymously if you like.

Just hit the “Discuss” Link below this post to leave a comment.

Secunia, a danish security vendor, has released a software called Personal Software Inspector. It was designed to check whether the programs in a user’s PC needs to have an update. It’s currently in a beta stage and it has ability to check approximately 4,200 programs.

One of the goals of this software is let users apply patches to their programs to prevent getting hacked in the future.

“I’ll argue we are more reliable than other update mechanisms,” said Thomas Kristensen who is Secunia’s chief technology officer.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD