Steve Gibson's WMF Backdoor & Mousetrap

Since I bought my iPod I've been sampling a few of the technology podcasts that are available in the iTunes music store. One of them being "Security Now" with Steve Gibson from GRC.com. I found the recent episodes (22 and 23) about the WMF vulnerability quite entertaining.

Steve's opinion: The recently announced WMF vulnerability is a backdoor intentionally created by a programmer at Microsoft. He's dubbed the exploit M.I.C.E (Metafile Image Code Execution) and created a vulnerability testing utility, called "MouseTrap" :-)

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An iPod convert at last

One of my Xmas presents to myself was an Apple iPod (Black, 60GB, Video) which I bought to use in the car (with my Dension iCeLink). I've resisted the iPod for so long (after having bought a 1GB Sony NWE507 only 3 months ago). One of the main reasons I didn't want to go for the iPod was being stuck with iTunes.

The Sony MP3 software (SonicStage) is awful, though. It runs horribly slow on my PC, so bad its hard to use - it makes Media Player 10 seem lightening fast.

So I thought iTunes couldnt be any worse. And its not that bad. Although there are a few things I don't like. One of them is its terrible management of the music library. If I rip songs using Media Player, iTunes wont detect they've been added - you have to do it manually. Now that sucks. Deleted songs stay in the library etc. I'm sure I'm not the first iTunes user to hate these little 'features'.

I discovered the iTunes Library Updater today. It worked like a treat! Now all I've got to figure out is how I can run it on a regular basis - without it tying up 100% cpu for 15 minutes.

Lets try that again

Well I've decided its time to start Blogging again. Hopefully I'll be able to make a better effort of it this year. Only time will tell I guess...you never know what life will throw at you.