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Visual Studio LightSwitch

hiranthah — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 15:36:58 +0000

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch gives you a simpler and faster way to create high-quality business applications for the desktop and the cloud. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family. Visit this page often to learn more about this exciting product.

See “What’s New in Beta 2” for information on new capabilities, installation options, and compatibility notes for this release. Unfortunately, due to the many improvements in Beta 2, projects created in Beta 1 cannot be opened or upgraded. You can find instructions for moving your existing projects forward on the LightSwitch team blog.

Download : Microsoft Downloads

Speed up the internet with DNS Settings

hiranthah — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 04:43:00 +0000

When Google launched its own DNS service a year ago, one of the main stated goals behind the project was speed. While there are alternative services such as OpenDNS and UltaDNS, the problem is that most Internet users have no idea what a DNS server is, let alone how to configure one, or test how fast it is.

Google created Namebench, a piece of software to find the fastest DNS server available for you to use. The program is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, and the entire thing has been open sourced.

Resources :

Windows 7/2008 R2 SP1

hiranthah — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 03:25:59 +0000

The very first service pack for Windows 7 should be popping into your Windows Update right around now. There are few areas that might cause some issues. Here’s what to watch for.

Whitelisting / Blacklisting: Whitelisting software may not have checksums yet to verify all the files that are modified by the service pack.
Firewalls: Third party firewalls may find that some of the low level hooks they use have changed.
Disk Encryption: In particular full disk encryption that modifies the boot process may find that some of the changes it did are undone by the SP install
Custom hardware: If you are using drivers other then those that are included in Windows 7 (or 2008 R2)
Dual boot : Linux dual boot might cause some issues

Resources :

International Data Privacy day

hiranthah — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:46:38 +0000

Today is the fourth annual Data Privacy Day. Dozens of countries have been celebrating with events throughout the week to inform and educate us all about our personal data rights and protections

Few topics worth watching/reading;

Privacy & Innovation: A Data Privacy Day Reflection by Ryan Calo

Data Privacy Day 2011

The Technology of Privacy: When Geeks Meet Wonks – Panel discussion 10AM EST

European Research Consortium to Pilot Digital Privacy Solutions at University and Secondary School

Android 3.0 SDK Released

hiranthah — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:21:19 +0000

Google has officially made available the SDK, and further official details about the new version of Android, codenamed Honeycomb.

it appears that the new version of Android does not target mobile phones, but only larger devices such as tablets, as the interface has received a complete overhaul to become more tablet friendly. New features include a new 2D and 3D framework, a new system bar (found at the bottom of the screen), an action bar for quick OS-wide actions, five new customizable home screens, a redesigned keyboard and new text selection tools.

Android 3.0 Platform Preview and Updated SDK Tools

Microsoft Attack Surface Analyzer – Beta

hiranthah — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:58:37 +0000

Attack Surface Analyzer is the same tool used by Microsoft’s internal product teams to catalogue changes made to the operating system by the installation of new software.
Attack Surface Analyzer takes a snapshot of your system state before and after the installation of product(s) and displays the changes to a number of key elements of the Windows attack surface.

This allows:

Developers to view changes in the attack surface resulting from the introduction of their code on to the Windows platform
IT Professionals to assess the aggregate Attack Surface change by the installation of an organization’s line of business applications
IT Security Auditors evaluate the risk of a particular piece of software installed on the Windows platform during threat risk reviews
IT Security Incident Responders to gain a better understanding of the state of a systems security during investigations (if a baseline scan was taken of the system during the deployment phase)

Download Attack Surface Analyzer – Beta

BinScope Binary Analyzer

hiranthah — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:59:43 +0000

BinScope is a Microsoft verification tool that analyzes binaries on a project-wide level to ensure that they have been built in compliance with Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) requirements and recommendations.

BinScope checks that SDL-required compiler/linker flags are being set, strong-named assemblies are in use, up-to-date build tools are in place, and the latest good ATL headers are being used. BinScope also reports on dangerous constructs that are prohibited by SDL

Download BinScope Binary Analyzer

Microsoft’s Secure Developer Tools

hiranthah — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 09:27:04 +0000

Microsoft released some updates to its secure development tools. Microsoft did some very nice work with these tools. While these tools are not necessarily limited to .Net, I highly recommend that .Net developers take a look at them.

VMware ESX/ESXi Updates

hiranthah — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:43:32 +0000

VMWare released a security update pertaining to ESX/ESXi which addresses a number of security vulnerabilities (43 or so) in ESX/ESXi 4.0.

Complete update can be found here : http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2010/000093.html

resource for hardening vShere : http://blogs.vmware.com/security/2010/04/vsphere-40-hardening-guide-released.html

How Unique is your web Browser ?

hiranthah — Fri, 21 May 2010 02:08:12 +0000

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a paper on browsers being tracked by it’s unique fingerprint. It turns out our browsers are more unique than we would like to think they are so it is possible for websites to track users around using the unique fingerprint. While it may not be possible to know the exact user’s identity, tracking from one web location to another is definitely a possibility. User agent string, system fonts, screen resolutions and much more of the computer attributes all contributes to the unique fingerprint of computer + browser combination. Disabling Javascript and active contents help with this a little bit but you need to decide whether privacy is worth losing the ability to view the active content.

To test how unique your computer + browser combination, goto https://panopticlick.eff.org/ and click on the "Test Me" button.

Full paper can be found at https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf