One year ago today I cut off my beard. I did it because I thought I shouldn't start my first job looking like a Maddog wannabe. I have since realised that nobody cares, and am proud to say that it is back in full swing. It grows much slower in the lofty heights of Johannesburg (humidity makes a difference, who would've though). I am still without mustache however, this bothers me somewhat.
I have run into many people who don't like beards because they feel people with beards have something to hide, I find this quite amusing. The rest either think it makes me look good/bad with no clear winner as yet. I do look noticeably older however, I quite enjoy the fact that clients don't ask me how old I am as much. Instead of having to show them how incredibly bright I am like before, I can now slip into the annals of mediocrity :)
I am deliberately not including any pictures, so I can continue to get those wide-eyed reactions from my friends.
Here are some URL's that can be used to demonstrate the Adobe Acrobat XSS vulnerability to people, and hopefully get them to patch.
- Short - http://tinyurl.com/yjeeoc
- Long - http://singe.za.net/docs/pdf_check.pdf#blah=javascript:alert('Please go to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html and update your copy of Acrobat reader, you are vulnerable to a rather serious exploit.');location.href='http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html'
As an interesting aside, it seems Google has added the following HTTP header to requests for PDFs from their servers:
Content-Disposition: attachment;
This forces PDFs to be opened outside of the browser. Nice work Google.
VMWare will run on an openMosix node, but instances cannot be migrated across nodes, nor will VMWare be aware of the other nodes. I mention this so that you do not waste your time, as I have, based on information in the openMosix wiki which states the exact opposite:
If you intend to run VMWare under openMosix so that openMosix would load-balance several instances of that (yes, that works).
Just to be clear, the above is untrue, as confirmed both by my testing and Moshe Bar's comments. Moshe being the founder of openMosix:
On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Moshe Bar wrote:
I would think it's next to impossible to migrate vmware instances simply because of Vmware's architecture. Vmware scans the exucutable [sic] VM pages of the virtual machine ahead of execution and replaces call to ring 0 of the CPU with system calls and pointers to it's own software. I doubt if a Vmware machine would be able to run on the remote node after migration.
Stephan Esser just posted about a potentially universal XSS in Adobe's PDF plugin first mentioned here. All it requires is appending "#something=javascript:<insert script here>;" to the end of the link and Adobe PDF will happily execute the JavaScript.
You should probably disable Adobe's PDF plugin in the meantime. If you don't think XSS attacks are particularly interesting, check out what you can do with XSSProxy.