May Contain Blueberries

the sometimes journal of Jeremy Beker





I have written an opinion piece on my main website entitled:

Why Standards?

It covers why I have chosen to use the accepted web standards even though they seem not to be very well accepted. This is probably a topic many of you feel strongly about, so here is a place to let your feelings be known and rip my arguments to shreds. Time to belly up to the bar!


This is just a quick “thank you” to all the people who helped in my birthday events. It was lots of fun; and beyond what I was expecting. Getting older is not so bad.





So Matt and I were talking about having a pool to guess when the US would invade Iraq. So what does any red-blooded geek do? He creates an online, database driven, extensible pool system.

pool.confusticate.com

Remember: Databases are good, but Web-enabled databases are better!


All of you know my opinions on Microsoft and security. Normally the security problems Microsoft products have are the result of sloppy programming (and are relatively easy to fix), but every once in a while we get a serious design flaw.

This is one of those cases. Read on for details The link provided below gives intricate details, and I recommend any technically oriented (whether you are a programmer or not) person to read it. If you don’t write win32 code, you won’t get it all, but the implications are still clear.

The article describes a simple manner that any user no matter how few privileges they have on a Window’s desktop can get LocalSystem (effectively administrator) privileges.

I am just stunned at the simplicity of this hole, and the fact that I agree with the author that it probably can’t be fixed.

Exploiting design flaws in the Win32 API for privilege escalation.