Common Symptoms Of A Dirty Windows Registry

A faulty registry is something no computer owner wants to have. Unfortunately though, many of them don’t have a choice in the matter, as nearly every windows registry will receive it’s fair share of errors. “If that’s true, then what’s so bad about having a dirty registry?” Well, for starters, it can significantly decrease the performance of your PC — and in some cases, it has even been known to cause irreparable damage to some of the hardware. Having said that, it is a good idea to familiarize yourself with the common symptoms of a faulty registry — Either that, or prepare to spend hundreds of dollars on a new computer every single year.

There are numerous reasons why a computer may behave erratically and become unstable, and many of those reasons stem directly from windows registry issues. Below are just a few of the typical signs that should raise the “I have a faulty registry” flag.

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Microsoft offers assistance to combat mass SQL injection

Microsoft has provided security advice to web developers using its products after many such sites were compromised. Last week, hundreds of thousands of web pages were infected with a malicious iframe which tries to infect visitors with a trojan. Many high profile sites including the United Nations (un.org), the UK government (gov.uk) and the US Department of Homeland Security were affected. The attack exploits SQL injection vulnerabilities to inject the iframe into the database behind the web pages. It can thereafter contaminate all pages served by the database backend with code that tries to inject a trojan. Microsoft has analysed the attacks and has now published tips to help administrators protect their web servers.

In its security and IIS blogs, Microsoft explains that the attackers do not exploit any vulnerabilities in Internet Information Server (IIS), ASP and ASP.Net or in the MS SQL server. Microsoft also objects to the widespread assumption that a hole in Windows is exploited to escalate user privileges.

According to Redmond’s security experts the attackers use automated tools to look for SQL injection holes in web applications which have not been developed according to Microsoft’s “Best Practices”. The “Best Practices” guidelines explain how to configure and implement applications to make them as secure and error-free as possible.

Administrators and web developers who are not yet aware of Microsoft’s “Best Practices” guidelines for developing web applications and MS SQL servers should take this opportunity to implement the measures suggested in these guidelines.

Source: Heise Security

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Filtering Google Searches By Freshness

One of the more useful Google advanced search features is the date filter, which limits results to recent pages. Results can be limited to the past day, week, month, year, etc. Google’s Matt Cutts and GoogleOperatingSystem wrote about it late last year.

You can access the search via the URL as well, by simply adding “&as_qdr=d” to the end of any query (Apple v. Apple in last day). simply change the =d to d5 for 5 days, or w5 for five weeks, or y5 for 5 years, etc. With Google indexing sites so regularly now, it would be great if they let users refine searches down to the hour as well.

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Hackers Focus Efforts on Firefox, Safari

Many people are switching from Internet Explorer to alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Though that might make them feel more secure, the shift has also opened new doors for bad guys.

Case in point: We have no IE bugs to report this month, but both Firefox and Safari have been hit hard.

So forget the idea that just because you’ve switched to a new browser, you’re magically safer. You may be for a time, but to stay safe with any software, you need to keep current with fixes.

In a somewhat dubious recognition of Firefox’s growing popularity, hackers have focused their attention on it, leading to a rash of newly discovered holes. The folks at Mozilla recently released two Firefox updates in less than six weeks, fixing a total of five critical security vulnerabilities. All five can be exploited by planting a poisoned JavaScript file in a Web site and waiting for you to stumble across it.

In an actual attack–neither the Safari nor the Firefox bugs have elicited one so far–a bad guy could take over your PC or steal your navigation history.

The latest versions of Firefox–2.0.0.13 on–will stop all five bugs. Mozilla’s Thunderbird and SeaMonkey are also at risk (if you have JavaScript enabled), so download   updated versions.

Think you’re safe because you don’t have Safari? You may have it without realizing it. Apple now distributes its browser with iTunes updates. Forget to uncheck a box in one of these updates, and it’s there.

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Tweak Firefox’s “Responsiveness” Config Setting

Have you ever noticed that sometimes Firefox isn’t very responsive while loading a page? As a frequent StumbleUpon user, this behavior grates on my nerves so I went looking for a solution.

When Firefox is loading a page it uses one of two modes: There’s a high priority mode that doesn’t pay as much attention to your mouse and keyboard, but loads the page faster. There’s also a lower priority mode that interrupts the parser more often to respond to input events. It’s even documented at Mozillazine.

What we can do is tweak the amount of time before Firefox switches from lower priority mode back into high priority mode.

Type about:config into the Firefox address bar, and then filter by the following:

content.switch.threshold

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