Crafty Syntax Live support Help - Free download and open source:
"A multi-user, multi-operator, multi-department live Help support chat system that allows the operators of the websites to monitor their visitors as they are browsing the site and proactively open a chat session with the visitor. Is in PHP and uses either Mysql or Text based database . Other features include AUTO INVITE!, referer tracking, page tracking, chat notification, user is typing message, multiple chat sessions, sound alert, leave a message if offline, push urls, quick responses, and multiple operators. runs on your server and is open source GPL."

http://www.craftysyntax.com/CSLH/

Online Swindlers, Called 'Phishers,' Lure Unwary:
"EarthLink, the big Internet access provider, went hunting for phishers.

It started a campaign to track down people who were sending e-mail messages that pretended to be from EarthLink but were actually fraudulent attempts to steal customers' passwords, credit card numbers and other information. What it found was that of the dozen or so people it could clearly identify as engaged in the practice known as phishing, more than half were under 18."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/technology/24PHIS.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Hotmail, Yahoo Users at Risk of PC Takeover:
"A potentially serious security flaw found in Web-based e-mail services offered by Microsoft and Yahoo could put millions of PCs at risk of takeover, an Internet security research firm warned Tuesday.…"

The vulnerability only affects Hotmail and Yahoo running on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

"When the victim attempts to read this email, the code executes and may result in severe consequences," the company said. Successful exploit could lead to theft of a user's login and password, disclosure of the content of any e-mail in the mailbox and disclosure of all contacts within the address book.

Additionally, GreyMagic said the attacker could manipulate the system to automatically send e-mails from the mailbox and to exploit vulnerabilities in IE to access the user's file system and eventually take over his or her machine.

The company said Microsoft reacted to its warning with a fix for the flaw. However, GreyMagic said all attempts to contact Yahoo's security department failed, meaning that Yahoo's users are still vulnerable. Efforts by internetnews.com to contact Yahoo at press time were unsuccessful.

…the vulnerability makes use of an IE technology called HTML+TIME (based on SMIL), which is meant to add timing and media synchronization support to HTML pages.

One of the features of HTML+TIME is the ability to manipulate any attribute on an element via special control elements.…

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/print.php/3329821

MSDN Flash:
"Volume 8, Number 6 March 23, 2004"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/flash/currentissue.htm

Netsky.P Spreads Through Ancient Security Hole:
"McAfee's Avert labs is reporting that a new variant of the Netsky worm, Netsky.P, is spreading quickly. Both McAfee and Trend Micro Inc. rate Netsky.P as a 'medium' threat and Symantec Corp. has rated it a '2' (for 'Low,' on a scale of 1 to 5). This is the first new variant of Netsky seen in about a week, a long hiatus for recent times. "

This new variant is very much like other Netsky versions with two differences, according to Vincent Gullotto, vice president of the McAfee Avert Virus and Vulnerability Emergency Response Team. The initial seeding of the worm, referring to the initial group of users to whom the virus author distributed it, appears to have been in Australia. It's not clear whether or how this would facilitate spreading of the worm, but it is unusual.

The other interesting and unusual characteristic of this worm is that is utilizes a very old vulnerability in Internet Explorer, the Incorrect MIME Header (MS01-020) bug. This bug, patched almost three years ago, allowed a hostile HTML e-mail to execute arbitrary code if viewed in the preview pane of a mail client.

Once very much in vogue among virus writers, it has fallen into disuse in recent times.…

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1552315,00.asp?kc=EWNWS032204DTX1K0000599

Fast-Moving Worm Crashes Computers:
"Witty, a new worm that hit the Internet Saturday, looked late Monday to be running down. It corrupts the hard drives of machines running vulnerable versions of ISS' BlackIce products."

The Witty worm, which took hold of the Internet for a short time during the weekend, appears to have peaked thanks to its habit of destroying the machines it infects.

Witty made a dramatic entrance Saturday morning, quickly infecting more than 6,000 computers, which then began scanning the Internet for other machines to attack. But within 24 hours, the number of Witty-infected PCs scanning the Internet had dropped to around 2,000. That number dropped even further, to around 1,000 machines by Monday morning, according to data compiled by The SANS Institute, based in Bethesda, Md.

Unlike most worms, which exist for the lone purpose of spreading themselves, Witty is capable of corrupting the hard drives of infected machines, preventing normal operation of the PC and eventually causing it to crash. The worm attacks via random UDP ports; however, it always comes from UDP source port 4000, according to various analyses of the code by security experts. Infected machines will begin sending out large amounts of UDP traffic as the worm attempts to infect other machines.

Rebooting an infected machine appears to remove the worm, experts said on the weekend.

The main reason for the drop-off seems to be that Witty gradually corrupts the hard drives of infected machines, eventually causing them to crash and preventing them from scanning any longer. At the peak of the outbreak Saturday, SANS was seeing as many as 300,000 Witty-related packets per hour. Witty exploits a flaw in a component of Internet Security Systems Inc.'s BlackIce protection software. The vulnerable component also is found in several other ISS products, but the Atlanta-based company said they are not susceptible to the worm.

Once it infects a given machine, the worm generates a random IP address and sends its payload to that PC. It repeats this process 20,000 times, then turns its attention back to the local machine it's on. Witty opens a random drive on the PC and writes 65 kb of data to a random location.…

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1552000,00.asp?kc=EWNWS032204DTX1K0000599

Use JavaScript to Create a Scrolling Grid - WebReference.com-:
"A problem often encountered in web design is condensing large tables of data into a standard 800x600 web page. If the table is too big, the user will need to scroll the browser window to see all of the data, which means that the surrounding text and any row or header columns cannot be seen."

http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column4/index.html

Experts Debate Danger of Phatbot Worm:
"Security discussion lists and reports were abuzz Wednesday with talk of a new worm, named 'Phatbot,' that had spread to as many as hundreds of thousands of systems. But not all security experts agreed that the worm was widespread.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, no major antivirus company had listed the worm as more than a 'low' risk. "

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1550393,00.asp?kc=EWNWS031804DTX1K0000599

New Bagle Worm Variant Can Run Without Launching Attachment:
"A series of new variants of the prolific Bagle worm has raised alarms in the security community through an innovative infection mechanism: The e-mail message in which the variants arrive may have no file attachment, and it's possible for a user to become infected without having to launch one. "

The message includes a Windows ActiveX control and uses a vulnerability announced and patched by Microsoft Corp. in August and another problem from last October. The most recent Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer also includes a fix for the more recently discovered flaw.

The ActiveX control does not contain the actual worm, according to McAfee Security. Instead, it creates and runs a VBScript on the system, which downloads and executes the worm from one of a list of IP addresses. According to McAfee, as of 06:45 PST on March 18, "The majority of the 590 IP addresses seen have been closed down. At the time of writing, 39 were still responding."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1550835,00.asp?kc=EWNWS031804DTX1K0000599

New Homeland Security Guidelines Called Vendor-Driven:
"A task force formed by the Department of Homeland Security is set to unveil a set of security recommendations this week for both enterprises and home users, but many industry observers say the guidelines are too little, too late. "

The guidelines are the work of the Awareness for Home Users and Small Businesses task force, formed late last year by DHS and private industry at the National Cybersecurity Summit. The group and several others formed at the same event are designed to help foster better cooperation between government and industry and to tackle topics such as creating early warning systems, writing secure software and bolstering security in corporate governance.

The groups mainly comprise executives from security and software vendors such as Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., RSA Security Inc. and Internet Security Systems Inc., as well as government officials and security experts in academia.

The recommendations, scheduled to be released Thursday, are intended as a follow-up to the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, released in early 2003 and widely panned in the industry for being long on platitudes and short on definitive action. The new offering reportedly centers on increasing users' awareness about security issues through education and communication.

"Because this is driven mainly by the vendors, it will be about blaming the users," said Alan Paller, research director at The SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md. "Private industry isn't doing its part to fix the problems we have with software and processes. It's like telling drivers to drive safely and not fixing the bumpers and the seat belts."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1549954,00.asp?kc=EWNWS031704DTX1K0000599

Microsoft Renews Its Commitment to Security Education:
"If you lead customers to the security trough, will they drink?

Microsoft seems convinced they will. And the company is pulling out all the stops to continue to educate its users, reasoning that a more educated customer base will be a more secure customer base.…"

Microsoft will release for download on Wednesday, March 17, a new scripting capability for its Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 1.2, a product which performs scans of Windows systems for security misconfigurations. The new scripting tool will allow users to scan an unlimited number of computers or IP addresses from a single input file.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1549876,00.a

Help Yourself:
"Although it's easy to pick up the phone and call that friend who always has an answer, or post a message to your favorite tech forum, you might want to take a few steps to try to solve the problem on your own—or at least be prepared with the information your geek in shining armor will need to troubleshoot the problem for you. Here are ten steps that can help you solve your problems faster.…"

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1544176,00.asp

Java(TM) Boutique - Using FOP with Java:
"In data-centric applications, you are often required to produce reports and documents in various formats. One of the challenges facing the developer world is to find a generic and consistent way of manipulating a structurally diverse data set to produce formatted reports. For example, if you write a program to accept a certain data set and produce a PDF formatted report, than in order to produce an HTML report on the same data set you might have to write a different program. In this article, we will see a relatively new technology involving W3C standard named XSL-FO. FOP gives us the flexibility to operate on XML structured data, apply an XSL Stylesheet, do the XSLT transformation and publish the data in various formats such as PDF, PCL, SVG, TXT and many other…"

http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/FOP/

The Hidden Power of Photoshop CS: Chapter 2: Color Separations. Pt. 2. By Sybex - WebReference.com-:
"A second way to achieve manual duotoning is to create the effect using spot color channels. This creates an image with the spot color built in, and essentially it will be press ready as a separation. In the following techniques you will use both the manual layer method just described in the previous section and Photoshop’s duotone interface to create duotone results."

http://www.webreference.com/graphics/ps2/

Office update clogs spam filters - News - ZDNet:
"A recent update for Microsoft's Office software is blocking several popular spam filters, and software makers are scrambling to find a fix to the fixes.

The problems have occurred since the release earlier this week of Service Pack 3 for Office XP and 2000, which are recent versions of Microsoft's widespread productivity package. The patches and big fixes in SP3 included a number of security fixes for Office's widely used e-mail client, Outlook.

Shortly after SP3 was released, users started reporting problems to the makers of several popular products for filtering out junk e-mail. They said every time their spam filter tried to intercept a message, Outlook would pop up a warning message that another application was trying to access Outlook's address book. …"

"If they were to click, 'yes,' 'yes,' 'yes' (in Outlook), it would work for them," Fahey said. "It's just a pain.…"

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5172968.html

Building ASP.NET Applications with C#Builder for Microsoft .NET:
"Among the many features of C#Builder is an ASP.NET application development environment. With full support for WYSIWYG design and access to HTML and C# code, C#Builder is an excellent tool for building entire Web sites."

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=169672

Video Codec Shootout:
"There are a great many considerations when it comes to digital video -- such as streaming capabilities, server software and processor load, and licensing costs for packaged media -- that are of more concern to businesses than home users. For the most part, we're not going to focus on these enterprise-oriented issues.

Rather, this is an article for those who want to compress video for home use: to e-mail to family members, put up on a Web site, burn onto a CD, re-compress to fit on a PDA or portable video player, or just archive for later use. Our focus is on middle-of-the-road bitrates suitable for download or CD archives, not extremely low bitrates for streaming over the Internet or very high bitrates for DVD-ROM based packaged media. "

http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,1583,a=121163,00.asp

Microsoft Raises Threat Level of Outlook Hole:
"The Redmond, Wash., software maker increased the threat level of the Outlook security vulnerability to its highest level of four — "critical." The Outlook 2002 hole could let an attacker run malicious code on a user's machine.

Microsoft originally had labeled the vulnerability as "important" and believed that attackers could only exploit the hole if users had set the Outlook Today folder as the default view for Outlook 2002, said Mike Reavey, a Microsoft security program manager.

After issuing a fix for the Outlook hole, as part of Microsoft's March security bulletin releases, the company learned from the researcher who discovered the vulnerability that attackers could reach a wider number of users by forcing them into the view in order to run an exploit, Reavey said."

"It has the potential to affect users that are in any (Outlook 2002) view at all," he said.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1546968,00.asp?kc=EWNWS031104DTX1K0000599

The ASP.NET Resource Kit is available:
"The ASP.NET Resource Kit is available for download free of charge from http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/asprk. Developers can also order a copy of the Resource Kit on CD for a small shipping and handling fee.

The MSDN ASP.NET Migration Center and the ASP to ASP.NET and PHP to ASP.NET Migration Guides are located at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/using/migrating/."

http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/asprk

Advanced Placement Digital Library in Biology, Physics, and Chemistry:
"Advanced Placement (AP) teachers and students will find resources linked to the AP content outlines, published by the College Board, in biology, physics, and chemistry."

http://apdl.rice.edu/DesktopDefault.aspx