Vista Beta 2 released to the public June 7. Want to try it? Here’s the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/default.mspx
Archive for June, 2006
Vista Beta 2 released to the public
Thursday, June 8th, 2006Vista Birthing
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006The Beta 2 of Microsoft Vista, or more technically “Vista Consumer CTP” or Community Technology Preview, should be released at any moment. Reports from those using this Beta 2 will be the big clue as to whether Microsoft can meet their delivery date of getting Vista to major customers in Novemeber and to the public in January. Beta 2 has to be stable enough for day-to-day work, or the testers can’t complete their work on time. Manufacturing has to start soon, so the Beta 2 stability is a critical issue for the January release.
Microsoft released in May the final hardware specs to run Vista:
Vista Capable (Just to run Vista)
800 Mhz processor
512M RAM
DirectX 9 support at graphics processor
PCs with all Vista Features
1GHz processor
1G RAM
128 Mb of video memory
Direct 9 capable, plus WDDM suppport, Pixel Shader 2 support, and a color depth of 32 bits a pixel
Remember that the processor support with Vista is much more demanding, so you should expect slower response on any current system unless you have upgraded the hardware to handle the extra load.
Good Resources
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006Here are a few good web sites for developers:
Lost your site?
You try to pull up your site on the Internet and it won’t come up. Is it your computer, the network, or your server? A quick way to find out is to go to http://www.alertra.com. For free, they will attempt to reach your site from various cities around the world and tell you how much time it takes to reach your site from each location. They also offer a subscription service if you want them to continuously monitor your up time.
Are You On a Spammer Black List?
Your mail may be filtered by various servers if you are on one of these black lists. This site will check your IP on those lists and verify your IP is good. Go to http://rbls.org.
Who sent that Spam?
So you got illegal spam. Do you know how to trace it to the source host? Use your email program to read the header. Although much of the header can be forged, those lines beginning “Received: from…” are very difficult for a sender to forge. Check your email program to find out how to read the header, then look for those “Received: from…” lines going top down - remember, the header is tracing backwards through the various relay points. The last one is generally the one with the IP of the sender’s host. Here is an example of the last “Received: from…” line from an illegal spam today:
Received: from source ([59.23.108.165]) by exprod7mx54.postini.com ([64.18.6.10]) with SMTP;
Tue, 06 Jun 2006 09:04:12 EDT
This spam is from a host at 59.23.108.
Take that IP and go to http://www.samspade.org or http://www.netsol.com or http://www.tucows.com to find the spammer’s host.
Any email listing on this registrar is often non-functional or, in some cases, an abuse email listing that generates only an auto-reply. The best way to stop the spammer is to put the IP on your own black list (as we do) and make it available to hackers for their fun. You have to take charge of your own spam problem.
How is Your Internet Speed?
What’s your true Internet speed? You can use the web site at http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/ to test your site and get your speed.
How’s Your Firewall?
This site will test your firewall, check to see you have no reverse DNS (generally, you do not want reverse DNS), and tell you your current IP. All free. This is Steve Gibson’s famous Shields Up site”
>https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2.
How’s Your Anti-Virus?
GFI will test your anti-virus protection free at:
http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/, but don’t expect to past this. They sell the really good enterprise-level stuff, so your home system may not pass this one.
Note: the anti-virus and firewall testing tools will NOT damage your system, but if you are on a network you should check with the network administrator first. He may get worried if he or she sees someone trying to get through the network defense system.
Comcast Using Spamming IPs
Thursday, June 1st, 2006One of our clients recently complained that suddenly they couldn’t send any email. Their outgoing email (SMTP) was through Comcast, and it was being was filtered with a spam filter. The commercial black list used for that had their IP listed as a spamming IP and blocking their outgoing email. Their outgoing IP belonged to Comcast.
Comcast uses dynamic IP addressing by default. About once a week, they tell me, the IP is reset. Normally, it’s reset to the same value. About once a month, however, it is reset to a new IP. The new IP he got was black listed as a spamming IP.
Comcast has a serious problem with this. On our own black list at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm
we list several Comcast IPs that have spammed us. This list is public, and goes to hackers with our encouragement. These incoming emails are illegal. We notify Comcast on their abuse email at the current time when this happens, but so far they have not replied except with an auto-reply and they seem to have no concern about clearing any listing here. The resulting IPs would be unstable along with their host system because we encourage hackers to use this list for their development and nuking.
If you wish to see if your own IP is listed on the commercial black lists, you can check:
http://rbls.org
Just remember - if you are using Comcast, you have no assurance that the IP they roll into you is clean. If you have your own host for email and use Comcast for SMTP, you should be sure your host has a good spam filter (using a commercial black list) and can protect you.