11 Microsoft Security Bulletins for August has been released
Critical (6)
MS08-046 - Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Image Color Management System Could Allow Remote Code Execution (952954)
MS08-045 - Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (953838)
MS08-041 - Vulnerability in the ActiveX Control for the Snapshot Viewer for Microsoft Access Could Allow Remote Code Execution (955617)
MS08-043 - Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (954066)
MS08-051 - Vulnerabilities in Microsoft PowerPoint Could Allow Remote Code Execution (949785)
MS08-044 - Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Filters Could Allow Remote Code Execution (924090)
Important (5)
MS08-047 - Vulnerability in IPsec Policy Processing Could Allow Information Disclosure (953733)
MS08-049 - Vulnerabilities in Event System Could Allow Remote Code Execution (950974)
MS08-048 - Security Update for Outlook Express and Windows Mail (951066)
MS08-050 - Vulnerability in Windows Messenger Could Allow Information Disclosure (955702)
MS08-042 - Vulnerability in Microsoft Word Could Allow Remote Code Execution (955048)
This represents our regularly scheduled monthly bulletin release (second Tuesday of each month). Please note that Microsoft may release bulletins out side of this schedule if we determine the need to do so.
If you have any questions regarding the patch or its implementation after reading the above listed bulletin you should contact Product Support Services in the United States at 1-866-PCSafety (1-866-727-2338). International customers should contact their local subsidiary.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Livestation has been updated
Livestation is a free software application that provides a range of live news television channels and radio stations (over 500) that can be received on a computer anywhere with a basic broadband connection. You can watch television on your desktop, or on your laptop, at home, at work, on the move, or in a hotel room, provided you have a broadband internet connection or wireless access.
Livestation allows you to receive live TV and radio news from the world’s leading broadcasters on your PC, via a multi-channel interactive application on the desktop giving you a unique window on the world’s news. You can watch Livestation full screen or minimised to fit in the corner of your screen, enabling you to carry on with other tasks while also keeping an eye on the news. You can flick between channels just as you would on your TV set.
Livestation is legal, safe, free and comes with no strings attached.
Current features include:
- High quality live audio and video
- Channel selection and programme guide
- Programme information overlay
- Ability to scale player window from 50% to 200%
- Always on top window setting
- Full screen playback option
- Volume control and mute.
Other functions, including support for subtitles and audio description, and many other interactive features, will be added in future releases.
What’s new in Livestation 1.0.77.3:
- Fixed Silverlight installation issue
- Added support for more user streams
Minimum requirements:
* Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Vista
* Internet Explorer 6+
* 1.5 Ghz processor
* A network of at least 800 kbps.
* Microsoft Silverlight
* Free registration: Publisher’s website
Livestation is available for download at this address
Alternate download location: Livestation-1.0.77.3-Installer.zip (3.2 MB)
Link: Livestation Home Page
Source
IE8 and Reliability
Developing technologies that work reliably on their own and as part of the computing ecosystem is core to our mission and is an important part of our commitment to Trustworthy Computing. Our customers and partners expect technologies and services they can depend on anytime, anywhere, and on any device. We focus on constant improvements to the dependability of our technologies and services.
For Internet Explorer, reliability means that the browser should always start quickly, perform well, connect to the Internet, and show Web sites without crashing or hanging. Most users want their browser to work, recover smoothly after a crash, and display the Web correctly. Users are not as concerned with what causes the problem, whether that be a poorly functioning add-on or poorly performing website. As part of our ongoing commitment to improve reliability, we have done a great deal of work in IE8 to make the browser more robust in all of these areas: performance, recovery and display. In particular I will discuss:
- Loosely-Coupled IE: An architectural feature that helps isolate different parts of the browser from each other for smoother browsing performance.
- Automatic Crash Recovery: A feature that is designed to get users back to browsing as quickly as possible after a crash.
- Windows Error Reporting: A way for our customers to provide us with information to improve the reliability of Internet Explorer.
Source- IEBlog
Microsoft confirms IE 8 will ship this year
Quick update from Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM): Microsoft Senior Vice President of Online Services and Windows, Bill Veghte, just told attendees that Microsoft will release the final version of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 to the Web “later this year.”
Microsoft has tried its best not to provide a ship target for IE 8 — like most of its Windows client family of products. Company officials did acknowledge last month that a second public beta of IE 8 is due out in August.
source- ZDnet
Microsoft Announces Reorganization of Windows and Online Services Business
Microsoft Corp. today announced that the Platforms & Services Division (PSD) will be split into two groups: Windows/Windows Live and Online Services, with both groups reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer. Microsoft also announced that PSD President Kevin Johnson will be leaving the company. Johnson will work to ensure a smooth transition.
“Kevin has built a supremely talented organization and laid the foundation for the future success of Windows and our Online Services Business. This new structure will give us more agility and focus in two very competitive arenas,” Ballmer said. “It has been a pleasure to work with Kevin, and we wish him well in the future.”
Effective immediately, senior vice presidents Steven Sinofsky, Jon DeVaan and Bill Veghte will report directly to Ballmer to lead Windows/Windows Live. The Windows organization recently announced strong annual sales, with more than 180 million copies of Windows Vista sold globally, and it has driven more than 100 million installs of its Windows Live suite. The organization’s innovation pipeline includes a new version of Windows Internet Explorer, the next version of Windows and the next generation of the Windows Live product suite.
In the Online Services Business, Microsoft will create a new senior lead position and will conduct a search that will span internal and external candidates. In the meantime, Senior Vice President Satya Nadella will continue to lead Microsoft’s search, MSN and ad platform engineering efforts. Microsoft recently announced a strategy to redefine search through innovations in the user experience and business models. As an example, the company’s cashback search program, announced in May, is already generating strong momentum among online shoppers and advertisers.
Source- Microsoft Press Release
IE8 AJAX Navigation
One of the AJAX improvements we adopted in IE8 from HTML5 is AJAX page navigations. In IE8 mode, we provide support for script to update the travel log components (for e.g. back/forward buttons, address bar) to reflect client-side updates to documents. This allows a better user experience where users can navigate back and forth without messing the AJAX application state.
For more information regarding the feature and sample code, refer to the Internet Explorer MIX08 Hands-on Labs for AJAX and IE8 Beta 1 for Developers. For an example of how this can be used to hook navigation in Silverlight (with sample code!), see Michael Scherotter’s blog posts titled How IE8 Enables Silverlight Deep Linking and Browser Back/Forward Navigation and IE8 Forward/Back in a Silverlight 2 (Beta 2) Application for further details.
Source- IE Blog
Windows SteadyState 2.5
Windows® SteadyState™ 2.5 is now available on Windows XP and Windows Vista. Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet café, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them.
Windows SteadyState runs on genuine copies of Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, and Windows Vista Starter. And, Windows SteadyState is offered free of charge to Windows Genuine Advantage customers!
SteadyState Helps Make it Easier to Manage Your Shared Computers Shared computers are commonly found in schools, Internet and gaming cafés, libraries, and community centers. It is increasingly common for owners, teachers, or non-technical personnel to manage shared computers in addition to their many other responsibilities.
Managing shared computers can be difficult, technically challenging, time-consuming, and expensive. And what’s more, without system restrictions and protections, users can inadvertently change the desktop appearance, reconfigure system settings, and introduce unwanted software, viruses, and other harmful programs. Repairing damaged shared computers can require significant time and effort.
User privacy is also an issue for shared computer environments. Shared computers often use shared user accounts that make Internet history, saved documents, and cached Web pages available to subsequent users.
Windows SteadyState provides a more effective way to help defend shared computers from changes by untrusted users and unwanted software installations. It can also help safeguard system resources.
Windows SteadyState Features Windows SteadyState includes the following features to help you manage your shared computers:
- Getting Started – Provides the initial steps to help you during your first time use of Windows SteadyState.
- Windows Disk Protection – Help protect the Windows partition, which contains the Windows operating system and other programs, from being modified without administrator approval.Windows SteadyState allows you to set Windows Disk Protection to remove all changes upon restart, to remove changes at a certain date and time, or to not remove changes at all. If you choose to use Windows Disk Protection to remove changes, any changes made by shared users when they are logged on to the computer are removed when the computer is restarted
- User Restrictions and Settings – The user restrictions and settings can help to enhance and simplify the user experience. Restrict user access to programs, settings, Start menu items, and options in Windows. You can also lock shared user accounts to prevent changes from being retained from one session to the next.
- User Account Manager – Create and delete user accounts. You can use Windows SteadyState to create user accounts on alternative drives that will retain user data and settings even when Windows Disk Protection is turned on. You can also import and export user settings from one computer to another—saving valuable time and resources.
- Computer Restrictions – Control security settings, privacy settings, and more, such as preventing users from creating and storing folders in drive C and from opening Microsoft Office documents from Internet Explorer®.
- Schedule Software Updates – Update your shared computer with the latest software and security updates when it is convenient for you and your shared users.
IE8 Security Part V: Comprehensive Protection
I’m excited to share with you details on the significant investments we’ve made in Security for Internet Explorer 8. As you might guess from the length of this post, we’ve done a lot of security work for this release. As an end-user, simply upgrade to IE8 to benefit from these security improvements. As a domain administrator, you can use Group Policy and the IEAK to set secure defaults for your network. As web-developer, you can build upon some of these new features to help protect your users and web applications.
As we were planning Internet Explorer 8, our security teams looked closely at the common attacks in the wild and the trends that suggest where attackers will be focusing their attention next. While we were building new Security features, we also worked hard to ensure that powerful new features (like Activities and Web Slices) minimize attack surface and don’t provide attackers with new targets. Out of our planning work, we classified threats into three major categories: Web Application Vulnerabilities, Browser & Add-on Vulnerabilities, and Social Engineering Threats. For each class of threat, we developed a set of layered mitigations to provide defense-in-depth protection against exploits.
Source- IE blog
