Monday, November 8, 2010

IE Flaw Exploit In Hacker Kit 'Raises the Stakes'

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CWmike writes "Roger Thompson, chief research officer of AVG Technologies, said Sunday that an exploit for the newest IE flaw had been added to the Eleonore crimeware attack kit. 'This raises the stakes considerably, as it means that anyone can buy the kit for a few hundred bucks, and they have a working zero-day,' Thompson said on his company's blog. Microsoft has promised to patch the vulnerability, but last week said the threat didn't warrant an 'out-of-band' update. Microsoft will deliver three security updates Nov. 9, but won't fix the IE bug then."

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Posted via email from Tony Burkhart

In Praise of Procrastination

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Ponca City writes "Every year, millions of Americans pay needless penalties because they don't file their taxes on time, forgo huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never get around to signing up for a retirement plan, and risk blindness from glaucoma because they don't use their eyedrops regularly. James Surowiecki writes that procrastination is a basic human impulse, a peculiar irrationality stemming from our relationship to time — in particular, from a tendency that economists call 'hyperbolic discounting,' the ability to make rational choices when they're thinking about the future, but, as a future event gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. Game theorist Thomas Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves a collection of competing selves, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control, where one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. Philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: 'Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.'"

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Posted via email from Tony Burkhart