Security Alert from MS regarding.. erm... images?!

.
Watch out theres some dodgy cursor .ANIs about!:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6509865.stm

(Ive just been reminded why i only use windows for games and b3d)



---edit----
LOL! well, thats ok then :) my old win98 laptop is safe.

I don't get it.

They say it effects Windows Vista, then in the next breath it says Vista users with IE7 are *not* affected.

Surely Vista comes preinstalled with IE7?

Any excuse for a cheap shot at MS, if you ask me.

win98 FTW! :D

yeah, its an old libretto ct100 (those videocassette sized ones), i use it as a paperweight

Yeah, its a bit odd, but on closer reading they are actually quotes from different sources, it says MS say theres a possible problem with vista, but the security firms are saying its ok with V+IE7, go figure :/
It may mean that ie7 is safe as long as you have all the default security stuff enabled. Some less security concious people turn this stuff off, because something wont work or gets 'annoying messages' on their favorite teenage chat / dating site (or some such adware infested site).

How? the bbc are only reporting what MS said themselves. Unless theyre in to cheap shooting themselves now.

How the f*ck does MS design an operating system that can be hijacked with an animated cursor?

lol. That's what I was wondering. Did make me laugh, though.

I'm gona have to investigate this a little, but at a guess. @ Big10p and Lwoks. I would say its the file format, and the way the OS reads in the file.

Giving an example, I have seen php driven websites which enable you to set your own avatar, I with permission from the site owner was able to take an image, inject some sql into it after the first few bites, and then have it executed on the site in question, this is actually common or was a while back, it was easy to grab peoples sessionID's and gain access to forums or permissions you wernt supposed to have.

In terms of Vista, and these animated Cursors, I think its probably something similar, which is why IE7 negates the issue, the file gets injected with some misc code, and then when the cursor is loaded, your code is run.

Thats mostly just a guess tho, I will look into it later when I have time.

Rather excellently.

Lol!

I thought I'd share this. I've gone back to XP as vista was getting on my nerves. It truly is the most unstable operating system I've ever used.

I kept on getting the "Surrogate has failed" bullcrap and the OS would stop responding. It came to the point where I could predict when it would happen because the Sidebar would crash and not start up anymore.

Vista is Fast, don't get me wrong. You just have to make sure nothing else is installed and it will happily work well.

Don't try downloading large files from the Internet in Vista because when the transfer is at 99% Vista reports this Surrogate bullcrap again.

I must have gotten about 500 surrogate warnings in Vista one time while I had it installed. Needless to say it's not an OS I'll be going back to in a hurry.

I'm a little embarrased that I've been bigging Vista up and dissing Linux. Oh well. :)

Jebus, is that error message meant to mean anything to someone who's not computer savvy. Hell, even I have no idea what it means. :/

Surrogate?,
:/ ive no idea. At a guess at the language used, i would assume it to be a non-native process like a non-windows codec or driver hence 'surrogate'

I think ill stick to my surrogate OS :)

Does make you wonder in this day and age, especially after that similar .GIF fiasco a while back.

I've seen this before, over and over, and it gets me so irritated (nothing personal though, I swear) that I just have to speak out.

Vista is indeed unstable. It was, as I feared it would be, pushed out long before it was market-ready. But guess what?

THAT HAPPENED WITH EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF WINDOWS SINCE 98!!!!!

The general public, apparently, has the memory span of a gipsy moth. Yes, Vista is unstable, and yes, it's being dissed all over the place, but the oh-so-wonderful Xp that everyone's running back to had the EXACT SAME PROBLEM!!! It was pushed out too soon, was unstable, and everyone said to stick with 2000/98/NT/ME. Now, it's the OS of choice for everyone that uses any version of Windows! (I'm not dragging Macs into this comparison, so don't bother to.)

Lemme put it this way. Any time a new Windows OS is released, don't say anything at first. It will probably ALWAYS be pushed out prematurely. Wait about a year. If Microsoft's previous record is anything to go by, it'll take about that long for the new OS to become a full-fledged improvement. If it still isn't, THEN you can honestly diss it.

In the mean time, feel free to diss Microsoft... It's still idiotic for them to keep shovin' their crap out too fast.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-Vista-Suicide-Courtesy-of-McAfee-50761.shtml

For some reason I couldn't stop laughing while watching the embedded YouTube video putting the bug to action.

Except Win2K.

They had to. It was already a year and a half late, and they had already taken out anything remotely original.

All that aside, I think it's a rather absurd form of reasoning that "Because every other Windows OS (except NT4, 2K and 98SE) was crap at launch" it's okay for Vista not to deliver on it's way over due promises. Does that work in any industry, or for any other company besides Microsoft?

Yes, well, I'll let you know when I start experiencing those sorts of problems, but until then, I'd be more likely to blame some dodgy softwares you had installed.

I agree. Dodgy software was installed. It's called IE7.

MAC OSX rulez

You already said it -> MS design


Apparently they can't do/design security apps either, this was on the sidebar news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6418965.stm

I've changed my mind. Probably user error.

I agree. As a user, I made the mistake of using Vista.

> THAT HAPPENED WITH EVERY SINGLE VERSION OF WINDOWS SINCE 98!!!!!

True, but Windows 98 has in my opinion been the safest Windows OS for years because many viruses aren't compatible with it anymore :)

> I agree. As a user, I made the mistake of using Vista.

I did tell you it was pap, I guess you've only got yourself to blame. It's a crazy world, I know Windows is crap, you know Windows is crap, we all know it crashes, is buggy. It's famous for that. But somehow we still all use it?
Just goes to show how utterly stupid mankind is.

Theres been lots of hassle with IE7 at work, we ended up having to use firefox with the SD system as it was not compatible with the intranets oracle generated docs system.

On a personal level, i am left with more 'security' (note the quotes) than i want (or need) on my windows laptop and am not sure how to remove it. It seems to have effected my entire windows including 'my computer/windows explorer'

I read somewhere that the term "Surrogate" within Vista has to do with their COM emulation layer. You probably have some sort of application that's heavily reliant on COM, and hasn't been "updated" to be Vista compatible. That's why there has been such a big panic over software compatibility from ISV over the past few months. A lot of legacy game middlewares in particular that rely on DirectX are COM based.


Well... other than the "over 63,000 potential known defects" from that leaked memo that Mary Foley reported on which got her black-listed for a couple years.

But yeah.. I'd agree that it was definitely the least painful Windows to migrate to.


I agree with ya. This was the same calibre of complaint that went around when XP was introduced.

Early adopters have always been the market sounding board and true beta test group for their OS's. They measure how much a consumer is willing to tolerate, and test true configuration issues from the production builds.

Realistically, they probably do believe that the most lucrative market they'll reach is with an OS somewhere in the middle of XP and Vista. Vista will *probably* become that OS very subtly over the course of the next couple years through patches and silent upgrades. How quickly we get there will really depend on how much they want to spend on end-user support, maintaining ideas that were poorly executed and what they believe an acceptable level of ROI is.

Then another OS will be released that's worse, and the acceptable "middle" (by most) will be where Vista is today. The cycle begins again.

It's like a nerd version of the Lion King....

I'm actually amazed by how many people are having problems with Vista,for me,its doing a fine job and been in my pc since release.

i also dont think ive encountered a program that doesnt work (And i do know there is a few,but i havent met them yet), im getting non of that 'hard-drive jacking' people are reporting,the surrogate mystery is a mystery to me,as ive downloaded a few biggy files and with no hitch?

I just dont understand it,i mean,i paid £150 for the Vista H.P. upgrade (It was the box that did it for me :-]),and after paying that,and it went titties up.i'd go berserk,but it hasnt gone titties up and the migration over from XP has been seamless

very odd

Vista has its faults, we all knew that after Release Candidate 2. But its' stability compared to earlier versions of Windows is unsurpassed - if someone has managed to bring Vista down, chances are they should not be using computers.

That was in part thanks to microsoft's corporate enterprise agreement -- where a large corporation forks over an ungodly amount of money to get free updates for windows / office during a 3-year timeframe. Except as soon as they started selling that deal, three years went by without a windows or office update, and they ended up annoying some of their largest customers quite a bit.

ADAM:
can you please edit your signature? it just messes up the whole "thread post" flow..

I second LarsG's comment. Your sig takes up half of my screen.

I can't make an authoratative statement here, having never actually used a Mac in my life. However, from the numerous magazine articles, consumer reviews, and friends' opinions, what I've gathered about Macs versus Windows is this (please read all the way through before passing judgement):

Windows: Everyone knows that a Windows PC is gonna hit a major problem at least once in its used life, and while the "blue screen of death" has pretty much evaporated with XP, full-blown computer freezes have not. On the flip side of the coin, modern versions of Windows are compatible with enormous libraries of software, and as such are probably the most widely used by the general public. This, of course, means that us game programmers would be foolish to fail to make our games Mac compatible only, as we would miss out on the largest chunk of the computer game market.

Macintosh: The more I hear, the more I like. Macs are user-friendly and powerful not to mention having been innovative from the start; I've yet to hear of anyone whose Mac's frozen up on them even once. Some of the best software is for Macs; even Microsoft has proved this point, by making a Mac-compatible version of MS Office. On the other hand, the list of compatible software for Macs is somewhat (not a lot, though) smaller.

My overall opinion: Macs are "elitist" computers, and I mean that in a good way; they're not used by everyone, they won't work with everything, but when they do, they're unsurpassed. Windows PCs, on the other hand, are widely sold, widely used, and widely compatible "general-purpose" computers. It's kind of like comparing a Prius to a hybrid SUV (like that'll ever happen). The SUV'd be solid, popular, and off-road ready, whereas the Prius would outstrip it in efficiency & style. (For those of you SUV lovers out there, it's just an example; don't get annoyed by it.)

So that's what I feel about Macs versus PCs. Game programmers would, as I said, be fools to ignore the fact that Windows has the lion's share of the gaming market; but we would also be fools to ignore the merits of a Mac.

For all you Windows diehards out there: even if you still think XP is the best, take my word for it. Upgrade to Vista. It will improve with time, but moreover, now that it's out there, it won't be long before XP upgrades & patches halt altogether, and Vista is the only expandable future. Until the next Windows OS.

Now, anyone know a good website where I can by cheap but powerful Mac laptops?

test

HI MARK!!!

*turns away and whispers* Wow, that was random.

I've been having download issues since installing Vista - to the point where for big downloads I would actually do them inside an XP virtual PC I'm keeping for compatibility testing and other issues.

I would be transferring big files (>10 meg), and the download would just stall. That's it; game over.

I suspected an MTU issue, as Vista is supposed to have a self-tuning TCP/IP stack, but seems to like having an MTU of 1500.

To determine your optimal MTU:

ping www.blitzbasic.com -f -l 1472

The final number is the size of the packet you're sending. If you get messages about gragmenting, reduce the packet size. For my system (and many, many others), 1472 seems to be the sweet spot.

Next (and this was the hard bit to find and work out), run RegEdit as Administrator. Navigate to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces. Go the subkey that describes your current network adaptor (I determined mine based on IP address; I'm sure there's a better way to do it). Make a new DWORD key called MTU, and set the decimal value to the number you obtained above.


Back at the command prompt, type ipconfig /release, then ipconfig /renew to stop and restart the network, and see how you go.

LOL, mabe he is testing his new vista install to see if it can handle posting on forums without a bluescreen, hard kernel crash or the mysterious 'surrogate' error :P

Regarding neilo's tip, be careful with it. I tried it out and discovered my downloads to stop working regularly. Removed it again and everything is back to normal. I'd say it's one of those things to do only if you're already having problems, but if you're not, stay the hell away from it.