Leave it to some smart folks at black hat to work out a way to jump out of the browser, and right into your operating system.

The full paper on the hack is right here, and overall presents some interesting viewpoints into not only how Vista is secured, but how the hackers were able to escape out of the security system to load code of choice through the browser.

In a presentation at the Black Hat briefings, Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. will discuss the new methods they’ve found to get around Vista protections such as Address Space Layout Randomization(ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and others by using Java, ActiveX controls and .NET objects to load arbitrary content into Web browsers. Source: Techtarget

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I had this problem before with Windows Media Player 11 (and it seems from searching Google that the problem is widespread) but was hoping someone out there might know how to fix it.

Basically when I try to rip a CD with Windows Media Player 11 it does not populate the album information and metadata. Even when I right click on the album (which shows unknown album when I put it into my PC) and select “Find Album Info” and WMP finds the correct album from their meta data provider, when I click “Finish” and try to apply the metadata it does not get applied to the CD that I’m trying to rip.

This problem happens with all CDs that I try to rip on my brand new Dell PC. I do have “connect to the internet” checked in my settings.

Although I could delete my Windows Media Player folder and try to start over from scratch, I’m hesitant to do this because my media library is large and it takes at least a day to repopulate my library on my PC and another day each for my three XBox 360 extenders.

Does anyone know of a way to force WMP11 to accept the album metadata under the “find album info” command when it won’t accept it?

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Microsoft is currently developing Windows Mobile 7, the first revolutionary change to its mobile device operating system. Recently, I was given a document by a source inside Microsoft that details the touch and gesture plans for Mobile 7.

This document is a confidential internal use only document, used to explain the plans for Mobile 7, and contains well over a hundred pages of designs, ideas, and changes to the way we interact with our mobile devices.

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One of the unexpected outcomes of a Bittorrent system admin from elite torrents is the courts order to use Windows.

The reason for this is that their tracking software that is used only works on windows, and not on Linux, which the hacker would prefer. Scott McCausland, who’s tag is sk0t, has been ordered to install windows if he wants to use his computer while he is on probation. (more…)