Technology Blog, Web Design and SEO

The recently reported clickjacking vulnerability affecting Adobe Flash Player could also allow a hacker to remotely activate a computer’s microphone and webcam (meaning they could see and hear what you were doing).

The Adobe Security Blog is reporting that a Flash Player patch should be available by the end of October and until it is released, they are encouraging users to change their browser’s Flash Player settings by following these steps as a temporary workaround:

1. Access the Flash Player’s Global Privacy Settings panel at the following URL: http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager02.html
2. Click “Always deny”
3. Click ‘Confirm’

Completing those steps will keep the bad guys from remotely accessing your computer’s webcam and microphone - although I am not sure why that ability was even an option in the first place with Flash Player.  Why would someone, good guy or bad, even need the ability to remotely access and control another person’s microphone?

Since YouTube and other online video sites use Flash to display the videos, users that frequent those types of sites could be particularly vulnerable, I would think.

My wife and I wanted to rent a movie and do the “home body” thing this past weekend, so Friday I went to our local video store to see what caught my eye.  We take turns selecting the movies and it was my turn.  The pressure was on.  My mouth was dry.

After wading through the TONS of movies out there, I was leaning toward a George Clooney movie: Leatherheads. My wife and I agree on most romantic comedies and with George Clooney and Rene Zellweger starring, surely this movie is going to be great!

I am also one of those people that scans the cover of the movie box to read the review snippets and there were two placed prominently on the cover to further convince me of the wise choice I was getting ready to make:

“Hilarious!” - Christina Vandre (KARE-TV)

“Clooney and Zellweger are comic gold.” - Kevin Steincross (Fox-TV)

Even though I had never heard of either of those two, I felt that surely they must be in the know when it comes to movies.  “They both work for TV stations”, I mused, “and TV stations are responsible for the things that display on people’s TV screens and movies are also shown on screens.”  The connection was obvious to me.

Selection in hand, I proceeded to the checkout.  In my world, things were moving perfectly.

Upon my arrival home, it became clear to me that my wife did not share my enthusiasm.  She was apprehensive about having to watch a “football” movie.  “But, honey”, I assured her, “two TV people said it was a score.  Look, right here on the cover.  Read that.”  I was confident that she could not deny my logic.  She was unimpressed.

Undaunted, I inserted the movie into the DVD player.  It was about that time that things fell apart.

Leatherheads could have been more entertaining were it made as a silent movie.  At least then there would be justification for keeping one’s eyes open and focused on the screen throughout as opposed to a) dozing off or b) reading the list of ingredients on the box of candy one was eating.

I have seen tomato plants that were more entertaining.

I cannot elaborate on the details of why this movie was a dud. Mainly because of these two reasons:

1. I dozed off in parts.
2. We turned it off halfway through, reasoning that we had already gambled and lost an hour of our lives and, since the movie was going to be 2 hours long, decided to not lose any more.

I can, however, tell you that a box of Good and Plenty candy has NO fat but does have nearly 150 grams of carbohydrates, most of that being sugar .

Here are couple of tech news tidbits that I ran across recently (translation: I am too lazy to do a real blog post):

• According to Nielsen, by the end of the 2008, an estimated 20% of U.S. households will have ditched the phone company and will only have mobile phones (they will be years behind us because we have exclusively used mobile phones since 2003 ).
• A recent software update for the Microsoft Zune gives its owners the ability to use Wi-Fi connections at 9,800 participating U.S. McDonald’s restaurants.  Microsoft partnered up with Wayport to help make that possible.

Secunia is reporting a vulnerability with Autodesk’s Design Review DWF Viewer which can lead to a compromised PC.

The vulnerability stems from a flaw in the ActiveX control including the insecure “SaveAs()” method. If exploited, arbitrary files on the compromised computer can be overwritten.

This vulnerability was originally discovered by “bruiser” from Nine Situations Group and outlined here.  Bruiser tested the vulnerability using Internet Explorer 6 along with Revit Architecture 2009 SP2 and Autodesk Design Review 2009.

DWF is a very popular file format for quickly and easily sending drawing files through email, among other things.  Many CAD users prefer DWF because of its vector based capabilities, small file size and the ability for people to view drawing files without having AutoCad installed.  I previously posted on the benefits of DWF for CAD users.

For all you travelers out there with a bazillion pictures from the hundreds of trips you have taken, here is a pretty cool piece of software that will allow you to Geotag your photos with ease.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools allows photographers to easily geotag photos, assign GPS coordinates, edit a picture’s meta data and lots more.  These types of functions will make it really easy to integrate your photos into Web2.0 mapping software.

There are dozens of programs out there that will do this type of thing and many of them are even open-source, but if you want a set of tools geared toward the professional photographer, this one has some powerful functionality and is priced right at $0.00.

To install Pro Photo Tools, you will need the .Net 3.0 framework in place. You can get that here.