Build Date: Sun Dec 22 08:30:16 2024 UTC
On two concert I'm should've collective photo, but such small fat bald-headed technologist be insane.
-- Boris, as quoted by Henry Rollins
Microsoft: Who do you want to 0wn today?
2003-08-17 12:19:03
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 826369 describes a free tool from Redmond that enables criminals, terrorists, and hackers to quickly identify 0wnable computers around the world.
According to the article, the poetically named KB826369Scan.exe is designed to "scan remote host computers without requiring authentication [...] to identify host computers that do not have the 823980 security patch (MS03-026) installed." MS03-026, FYI, is the awful, awful RPC DCOM vulnerability, for which there are plenty of sploits available (most of which much quieter and more useful than W32.Blaster).
In other words, Microsoft is offering a quick, reliable, and unlimited targeting system to any old criminal-terrorist-hacker who comes around looking for details on the Worst Microsoft Security Problem Ever.
Heck, not even no-no-notorious eEye Digital Security included such broad functionality in their early RPC DCOM vulnerability scanner, released weeks before Microsoft's. eEye's Retina scanner (like all other free eEye products) limits s'kiddies to one Class-C scan at a time -- if you want to 0wn the world, you need to pay up first. Microsoft's tool also outperforms ISS's Scanms command-line scanner in terms of both speed and stealth.
If you ask me, Microsoft's utility sure looks, walks, and quacks like a "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of cicumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a copyrighted work -- specifically, Microsoft Windows, and all the copyrighted stuff that's sitting around on all those Winders machines. Free Dmitry!
T O P S T O R I E S
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
There are two kinds of Assmen in this world. Wild, hairy assmen, who put stickers that say things like "Why Be Normal?" all over their trucks and drink Corona beer and wear fezzes at parties for attention; these are the Assman Desperados. Our job is to ferret them out and expose them. (More...)
All this talk about death, wakes and Moloch recently has, frankly, got me a little worried. What if I'm next to go? I could slip on a wet banana peel and slam my head against an enormous brass statue at almost any time. I'm not planning well enough for this sort of thing. Who will talk for me when this terrible day comes? (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
Three Days and 25 Spocktails: A Cautionary Tale
Johnnie Royale picked me up from the dental surgery. I felt warm, safe, cradled in the anathesia's loving embrace. The pharmacy downstairs gave me a bottle of Vicodin and a few instructions: take it with food, don't mix with alcohol, don't operate heavy machinery. I put it in my pocket and we left. "Do you want to go home, or do you want to go to a bar?" asked Johnnie. (More...)
Report from Spiritual Machines
Arkuat gives you the inside scoop on the "Spiritual Machines" panel and conclave. Wacky excitement ensues! (More...)
