I ran across the Online Etymology Dictionary the other day and was blown away by the well-designed and incredibly useful service they offer. Of course, it’s much nicer to have access to that functionality at a click, so of course I created a Firefox/Mozilla bookmarklet. But I wanted to have the same thing available on my Google homepage, right next to the Dictionary search box and the Wikipedia search box, so I created a “Google Gadget” for it as well.

To use the bookmarklet, drag the link below into your Firefox/Mozilla bookmarks bar.

Find Etymology

To use the “Google Gadget” go to your Google homepage, click on the “Add Stuff” link, click on “Add by URL” and enter http://www.evardsson.com/files/gg_etymonline.xml

Enjoy!

Although it has been said many, many times, be careful how you surf. Make sure your machine is patched, you have anti-virus and spy ware blockers, blah blah blah.

Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then maybe this video will shed some light on the subject (sorry - it is an ad for McAfee, which I neither use nor recommend - just my personal preference) .

Hackers Post Code for New IE Attack

Although the hackers are calling it a 0day exploit, it seems that it isn’t really. It is one of many that can be easily found using the AxMan ActiveX fuzzing engine. It seems that the guys over at xsec.org are trying to take more than reasonable credit for writing code to exploit a known vulnerability.

HD Moore, head of the Metasploit project was quoted in the article as saying:

“This is one of the many exploitable bugs that can be discovered using AxMan and one of the few that I didn’t include in Month of Browser bugs due to the ease of exploitation. I still have three or four left in IE that have similar impact.”

There is also a Secunia Advisory related to this exploit.

Firefox 1.5.0.7 was released this morning which fixes the following security issues:

MFSA 2006-64 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.0.7)
MFSA 2006-62 Popup-blocker cross-site scripting (XSS)
MFSA 2006-61 Frame spoofing using document.open()
MFSA 2006-60 RSA Signature Forgery
MFSA 2006-59 Concurrency-related vulnerability
MFSA 2006-58 Auto-Update compromise through DNS and SSL spoofing
MFSA 2006-57 JavaScript Regular Expression Heap Corruption