06.12.09
Gemini version available ♊︎Opposition Links: Daily Chunk of Articles
• Microsoft Won’t Fix Windows 7′s UAC
After lots and lots of user complaints about how people were annoyed by UAC prompts in Windows Vista, Microsoft gave in to the whiners, and created something called auto-elevation, which allows certain parts of the system to auto-elevate themselves without bringing up any UAC prompts. This way, Microsoft was able to bring down the amount of prompts.
A clever programmer – not a security researcher – quickly found out that this was a pretty braindead decision by Microsoft, as it is now possible to quickly, easily, and silently bypass UAC completely by anything injecting code into the memory of another process, a process with auto-elevation capabilities, using standard, documented APIs. Some noted that this only works for administrators and not for standard user accounts, but since Microsoft still defaults to administrator accounts, that point becomes a bit moot.
• Microsoft wins competition court case
The Seoul District Court in South Korea accepted that Microsoft’s behaviour broke South Korean competition law, but said the companies had not provided evidence that their losses were Microsoft’s fault, according to AP.
[...]
Korean regulators found Microsoft guilty of anti-competitive behaviour over its bundling strategy in 2006. It agreed to pay a fine and offer versions of Windows which offered links to alternative messenger services.
• New DOS attacks threaten wireless data networks
Forget spam, viruses, worms, malware and phishing. These threats are apparently old school when compared to a new class of denial-of-service (DOS) attacks that threaten wireless data networks.
The latest wireless network threats were outlined in a talk here Thursday by Krishan Sabnani, vice president of networking research at Bell Labs, at the Cyber Infrastructure Protection Conference at City College of New York.
• Snow Leopard kisses ZFS bye-bye
Apple’s Snow Leopard padded across the Mac World for the first time in public this week, accompanied by its silent twin, Snow Leopard Server – leaving little trace of ZFS.
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