The Bits 2.0

Unlike most other boring Patch Tuesdays, Microsoft released a rather interesting eye-catching “patch” yesterday called “Security Update of ActiveX Kill Bits (KB948881)“. The security update is actually a registry hack that disables the critically flawed Yahoo! Music Jukebox ActiveX control that if exploited, the remote attacker could gain control over your computer.

Despite Yahoo! prompt action in fixing the flaw and releasing an updated version of the ActiveX control, probably Yahoo! knew it very well that 90% of users out there are just ignorant and never bothered to patch.

In December 2005, Microsoft slaughtered Sony BMG’s controversial root kit using a kill bit.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/……&articleId=9075918

This brief tutorial teaches you how to disable Autorun to better protect yourself from malwares spreaded via USB flash drives and other removable media on Windows PCs.

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Problem: Adobe Illustrator CS3 crashes whenever you try to save a document in its default format.
Cause: The print spooler service is not started.
Solution: Start the print spooler via services.msc or this command:

net start spooler

Spare your sanity. If you don want this to happen, never ever install Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional on a Windows Vista system with UAC enabled and Microsoft Office 2007 installed:

No amount of reinstalling solved the problem. You could either disable UAC, which leaves a big security hole in your system because almost everything will be running with administrator level permission, or you could reinstall Windows. I ended up reinstalling Windows because this Adobe piece of wondrous shit is making me go crazy.

IMHO, Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional just suck! It’s a freaking bloatware that takes up several gigabytes of your hard disk space installing nonsense and bloated libraries. The best thing to do is to get rid of that bloated crap. Here are your options:

1. Use Microsoft XPS – Comes installed with Windows Vista and .Net Framework 3.5
2. Can’t live without PDF? Use the open source PDF Creator. It creates PDFs and its free!
3. Use Foxit PDF reader - It reads PDF, its free and its only 2.2MB

March 18, 2008 – Microsoft has finally released the first service pack for Windows Vista to consumers after months of delays due to technical and compatibility issues. The RTM version of the service has already been released to MSDN and Technet subscribers since early March.

For users who don’t want to wait for SP1 to be available on Windows Update mid-April, you can download the standalone installer here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb738089.aspx?tapm=A80S01A01

The official SP1 build is 6001.longhorn_rtm.080118-1840

The extented forms are:
Vista x86 : 6001.18000.x86fre.longhorn_rtm.080118-1840
Vista x64: 6001.18000.amd64fre.longhorn_rtm.080118-1840

Direct download links:

Vista 32-bit: http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/a/9/3a9b72c2-527d-4694-8a49-84c056d4c34d/Windows6.0-KB936330-X86-wave0.exe
Vista 64-bit: http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/3/b/83b8c814-b000-44a4-b667-8c1f58727b8b/Windows6.0-KB936330-X64-wave0.exe

Note: You must uninstall any previous beta editions of SP1 before you can install the official release. The installation will take about 30 to 60 minutes depending on system performance.