Antivirus vendor Avira ran into problems earlier this week when it rolled out Service Pack 0 for its Avira 2012 products. Reportedly, the situation is now resolved. Through May 14th and 15th, Avira Professional Security, Avira Internet Security 2012, and Avira Antivirus Premium 2012 blocked legitimate applications from being able to run after Service Pack 0 was applied.
If you have ever had to work with the attributes to an Active Directory object, either through the Attribute Editor or scripting, you should find this Microsoft TechNet article very helpful. Through a series of annotated screenshots, it maps where the attributes are accessible through the console fields in the Active Directory Users and Computers interface.
Google wants to tell you how Gmail works and how using their data centers reduces the impact on the environment through efficient scaling. On the tour, you will see how an email travels from your computer across the Internet to Google’s control. A series of videos and photos will show you some security mechanisms Google has in place to secure access to your information, how running a warm data center reduces costs and environmental impact, smart water use, efficient servers, Google’s use of clean energy, and their industry recognition.
Using Group Policy, you will likely use Resultant Set of Policies and GPResult to see how group policies are being applied to a user or computer. They are great tools for troubleshooting and ensuring your policies are landing correctly for your clients. One field in GPResult might cause you to do a double-take if you look closely. The output of gpresult will list the Group Policy Objects applying to the computer, the logged in user, and other domain information. In that other domain information is a field labeled ‘Domain Type:’ and its information is likely not accurate for your domain.
Earlier this week, Adobe pushed out four security bulletins. While each bulletin warned of critical vulnerabilities existing in the software packages of Adobe Shockwave Player, Photoshop CS5.5, Illustrator CS5.5, and Flash Professional CS5.5, only the Adobe Shockwave Player received a patch to resolve the issues. The other programs, however, only recommend taking the path of a paid upgrade to Creative Studio 6 versions of the products as their CS6 counterparts resolve the issues. Adobe CS6 just shipped earlier this week.
My ISP has suffered two fiber cuts in the past month, taking out Internet access for all of their customers in a large region for hours at a time with an average repair time of 8 hours according to the company. While twiddling my thumbs waiting for the Internet to return, I began thinking of the five-nines commonly cited in high availability for systems. Is it time for ISPs to offer residential Internet customers a service-level agreement with credit for downtime?
Yesterday, I started doing some long delayed clean up of categories here on 404 Tech Support. I felt like the categories had become too sprawling and too specific. Things could be improved by consolidating similar categories into one. Renaming the categories was the easy part. As I looked at the categories I wanted to merge, there were hundreds of posts in some of the old categories that would need to be updated to align with the end goal.
I dove into phpMyAdmin to run a few SQL queries to update the posts in the term_relationships tables. Unfortunately, as I thought that through, it wasn’t such an easy query. If categories were a 1-to-1 relationship, things would be easier. Unfortunately, categories and posts are many-to-many. If I wanted to get rid of category B, I would update all posts that were in category B to instead be in category A but what if there was a post that was already in category A? The situation was growing more complex, the more I thought about how to address my taxonomy mess in the wp_term_relationships table. Fortunately, a quick search of the WordPress plugins found just the tool to do the job: Term Management Tools.
I read and thoroughly enjoyed Zero Day by Mark Russinovich a few months back. A sequel was announced a little while ago and today the book trailer for that sequel, called Trojan Horse, was released.
Trojan Horse will hit shelves September 4th and you can pre-order now.
In Trojan Horse, cybersecurity expert Jeff Aiken is drawn into a in a globe crossing race against international forces bent on using cyberweapons to protect the development of a weapon that, if completed, could lead the world to the brink of world war three. Find out more here, www.trojanhorsethebook.com
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