Awesome Techs

So  the first Zero day a.k.a. 0day vulnerability for windows 7. The details of this exploit were posted on the Full Disclosure mailing list.

The newly found bug was discovered by Laurent Gaffie. You can view the Details and POC here.

It is caused by a flaw in the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that forms the backbone of Windows file sharing. When triggered, the flaw results in an infinite loop that renders the computer useless, or at least more useless than it was before when Windows was still running.

And till now Microsoft don’t have any patches for this. The author recommends Closing the SMB feature and ports, until a real audit is provided. The vulnerability hits Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Since this exploit is just for crashing the system, you don’t have to panic about losing sensitive data. And for the same reasons black-hat hackers won’t be much interested in this exploit.

The odd thing is, this exploit has been spotted just a day after the operating system was declared risk free in Microsoft’s monthly security bulletin.

Update:Microsoft Issues SMB Vulnerability Advisory‎ for Windows 7 – Read it Here.

So the global excitement for the Windows 7 is getting increased more and more day by day.

And now according to the NPD groups’ weekly tracking service, Windows 7 software unit sales in the U.S. increased 234% over Windows Vista’s first few days of sales.  “A combination of factors impacted Windows 7 PC sales at the outset, but the trajectory of overall PC sales is very strong leading into the holiday season,” said Stephen Baker at NPD.

234%, well I can say this is HUGE.

The praised as windows 7 rival Ubuntu 9.10 a.k.a. Karmic Koala installation causes frustration and disappointment. All the early installers of this ubuntu had lots of problems as thregister reported.

Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize harddrives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 kernel, failure to get encryption running etc etc the problems are driving the users nuts. They really wish they never had installed this version.

According to a poll in ubuntuforums.org, only around 10% people reported to have a complete flawless experience.

anyway here in this case, as far as the things happened, the clean installation is performing better and the problems are easily solvable as compared with the upgrade.

The problems causing the biggest headaches are in graphics, with reports of flickering or dead screens.

Lets hope they will release the fixes for this version and help us get a reason to prefer this to win7 and install. With all these bug I will never recommend using this though a clean install is not that much buggy.

If you are having this, don’t just freak out. More more users are experiencing these  problems. actually apples support forums are filled with queries regarding this nowadays.

The posts report that – in most cases – iTunes 9 for Windows will recognize the iPhone, but when a sync is attempted, users are greeted with a cryptic “error 0xE8000065″ – an iPhone-connection failure notification.

“Although the reported configurations that are unable to sync iPhones with iTunes for Windows are many and varied, they have one thing in common: Intel’s new P55 Express chipset.”

The register said about this.

Either Apple or microsoft have to do something. As per the register reports, microsoft has already took a step and currently they are investigating the issue, whether this has something to deal with Windows 7.

Ubuntu 9.10 – aka Karmic Koala – is taking the fight to Microsoft and its new Windows 7 operating system.

The Koala – due for its official release today – brings faster boot times, a revamped software installer, better disk encryption, online services, and quite a bit more to the popular Linux desktop.

There are lots of new features for this new version of ubuntu.

• This time they have transitioned to Upstart native jobs, to let users get to their desktop faster after boot.

Upstart is an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon which handles starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running. Read more about upstart here.

• Ubuntu 9.10 RC includes the Ubuntu Software Center, developed by Michael Vogt, replacing ‘Add/Remove’ in the Applications menu.

The new software center is almost blindly operable even by starters in linux. As it stands with the 9.10 release Software Center doesn’t really do anything Add/Remove didn’t, but the interface is considerably cleaner and will likely be easier for Linux newbies to navigate.

• Ubuntu 9.10 RC includes the latest GNOME 2.28 desktop environment with a number of great new features.

Empathy has replaced Pidgin as the default instant messaging client, introducing the Telepathy framework. The gdm 2.28 login manager by William Jon McCann is a complete rewrite compared to the version in earlier Ubuntu releases, permitting a more integrated login experience. Evince, the GNOME document viewer, now ships with an enforcing AppArmor profile. This greatly increases security by protecting you against flaws in the historically problematic PDF and image libraries. Users who use a non-standard location for their home directory will need to adjust the home tunable in /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home. This profile has been developed by the Ubuntu Security team.

• Encryption is included.

• Under the hood of Ubuntu 9.10 there are some nice improvements including GRUB2, which is now the default bootloader, along with an improved AppArmor and disk encryption utilities.

• Ubuntu has included the AppArmor enhanced access control framework ever since the 7.10 release. However, Ubuntu has never surfaced or promoted AppArmor as much as other distros like Fedora. That continues with Karmic Koala where, for example, there’s a new Firefox sandbox policy, but it’s disabled by default.
• Ubuntu One cloud storage tools that come baked in with the latest release.

• Kubutnu – Kubuntu 9.10 includes the first Kubuntu Netbook release, Social from the Start and the latest KDE packages.
• Ubuntu One – For all our Backup needs.

Its a simple way to backup, sync and share files over the web. Ubuntu One offers 2GB of storage for free, with a 50GB option available for the price of 10 per month. Ubuntu One also offers public shared folders, which other Ubuntu users can access from their desktop. Anyone not using Ubuntu can still access the files through their browser.

• Filesystem ext4 by default.

Karmic Koala is the first Ubuntu release to use the ext4 filesystem by default.

For more information Read this.