Safari for Windows remote exploit
Just one day after it’s release, there are already exploits circulating for Safari for Windows. Thor Larholm has discovered a remote command execution vulnerability and some other researchers have reportedly discovered more vulnerabilities too.
The hole can be used to execute arbitrary code simply by making a user view a malicious web page in Safari. So much for “Why you’ll love Safari for Windows” reason #12: “Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one”. Secure indeed!
Safari available for Windows! 5
Apple’s Safari browser has just been made available for Windows, although it’s still in beta. This caught me totally by surprise, but it seems there have been rumours going around for a bit now. Even if I had of seen the rumors I wouldn’t have believed it! Here’s some screenshots of it in action:
The download weighs in at just over 8Mb. It seems to run a little sluggishly for me, and I’ve a Intel Core 2 Duo 7600 with 4Gb of RAM. Some of the usual plug-ins are available including Java and Flash.
Trying to get into astronomy
A few months back I purchased a Meade ETX-80 telescope and managed to get everything up and running. I was able to view some excellent shots of the Moon and also of Jupiter. Part of the draw of this telescope is it’s “Autostar” controller, which once programmed and aligned allows you to simply enter what you wish to view and it will turn and rotate to zone in on the object you selected.
There is also the option to connect the telescope to your laptop and use the AutoStar package to it. I was going to purchase the cable to connect it up until I came across the Meade MySky. It’s not available just yet, but it looks excellent. You can simply turn it on, point it at a object, and then pull the trigger to identify planets, stars, nebula and galaxies. It has a 480x234 full-color LCD screen, uses SD cards for storage and a 12 channel GPS unit. Best of all, it will connect to my existing ETX-80 telescope and control it too. I’ll have to get my hands on one as soon as they are available.
Moving away from Dreamhost
I’ve decided to move my blog and the Urlmarkr site away from Dreamhost and to a VPS hosted with Bitfolk. The main reason for the move is that now my exams are finished I hope to be able to spend some time working on urlmarkr and a few other projects and Dreamhost’s Ruby setup just didn’t cut it.
The Urlmarkr site is now running on Mongrel with Lighttpd 1.5 at the frontend. So far everything seems pretty stable. The new VPS is also a lot closer to home than Dreamhost, only 4 hops away with a response time of less than 20ms compared to the 18 hops and 200ms response from Dreamhost.