Thursday, October 07, 2004 - Posts
My daily check on Secunia has reported a new vulnerability on Microsoft Word. 
From Secunia: this vulnerability can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) and potentially compromise a user's system.
The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error within the parsing of document files and may lead to a stack-based buffer overflow. This can be exploited to crash the process when the user opens a specially crafted document. However, due to the nature of the problem, execution of arbitrary code may potentially also be possible, though it has not been proven.
The vulnerability has been confirmed in Microsoft Word 2000, but has also been reported in Microsoft Word 2002.
Solution:
Open trusted documents only.
For Internet Explorer users, documents on web sites can be opened automatically in the browser, unless the security level for the "Internet" security zone is set to "High" or the "File download" setting has been disabled.
A patch is attended... 
Just received this news via email...
Google next weeks is planning to introduce a new wireless service, Google SMS. Users of wireless devices could query the search engine for retrieving informations. What is good is that you can send the query via sms exactly in the same way you can enter it on the search engine homepage.
Obviously, the service will start to work only in USA, but it's a great start...
IBM and the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department are working on a great idea: a Search Engine for Java code.
If you're a Java developer and you're searching for a piece of code useful for your work, you can use this tool to perform a quick search on the net 
. Code-named "Prospector," the engine seeks out code examples that use any or all of J2SE 1.4, Eclipse 3.0, and Eclipse GEF (Graphical Editing Framework) code.
This is a great idea... how many times do you have searched for a piece of code on the net? Sometimes is really difficult to find what you want and the main reason is that there is not a central code repository that anyone can access freely (and this is not only for the Java world but for every programming platforms). This project could be the solution.
What about a Search Engine for .NET code?