JPEGs Will Destroy All Life As We Know It

As the panic over yesterday's MS04-028 patch (mentioned in the previous diary) begins spiraling wildly out of control, I'd like to offer myself up as a calm, reasonable head in this tumult of madness. Some may suggest disabling or stripping JPEG images to prevent slow patchers from being annihilated by a JPEG of Doom. I, for one, say this is folly, as it leaves end users open to attack from TIFFs & GIFs, PNGs & MNGs, not to mention the near DoS-level bandwidth consumption of BMPs!!!

I'd like to propose a return to a simpler time. A time when ANSI graphics reigned supreme. Have we really become so shallow since the days of Tradewars on a 9600 baud Renegade BBS that we demand our images be made up of *tiny* colored blocks instead of *giant* colored blocks? Advanced graphics have brought us nothing but trouble in the form of expensive graphics cards and vulnerabilities! Sure, none of these vulnerabilities have generated a decent exploit (yet?), but I'm not about to shut the barn door after the horse has already owned my box.

Mozilla, Firefox Have Vulnerabilities Too!

Not to be outdone, the Mozilla project released updates that fix a number of vulnerabilities in the Mozilla & Firefox browsers, as well as the Thunderbird mail client. Problems fixed include buffer overflows leading to remote system access, so it's recommended that users upgrade. This is actually a great excuse to upgrade to the just-released Firefox 1.0 Preview Release, which I'm loving. Updates to all Mozilla products are available here:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/ Detailed information on the vulnerabilities fixed with these updates is available here:
http://secunia.com/advisories/12526/

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Cory Altheide

Handler-On-Duty

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