Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Caveat Russian Code Breakers
Immediately after installing the Russian  Metafile Hot Fix my keyboard and mouse [wireless] began misbehaving.  I uninstalled the fix, but the problem persisted.  I took my keyboard apart and washed it in soapy water (lotta crap in there), and reassembled.  Still no change,  so I just now Restored my system to  yesterday afternoon, and all symptoms disappeared. 

Just now I noticed this comment to my original post, for what it's worth:
Comments: From Russia? Are you kidding?
Most of the phishing efforts out there are coming from Russia, and the problem this fix is supposed to resolve... vulnerabilities that can aid in ID theft from Russians.
Uninstall this fix if you can... ASAP. Seriously. Look for a patch from MS, which should be out shortly.

4 comments:

  1. WWW.hexbolg.org is Ilfak Guilfanov's site. He is The main author of IDA and considered one of the best low level Windows experts in the world. His fix is recommended by several top notch security providers (including F-Secure). Although that part of the world is a prime territory for phishing and other malware, if you went to the real hexblog.org you should not be worried about catching anything there. I don't know why his fix blew up you computer, but I'm glad to hear it's fixed. There are other "work-arounds" such as disabling the shim "shimgvm.dll". I have used this on numerous computers without any heartburn. When Microsoft has the real patch available just re-enable the shim. Google can show you how. It is a piece of cake.

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  2. OOPS! My bad. www.hexblog.com is the correct site, not hexblog.org.

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  3. To paraphrase General Buck Turgidson, 'Never trust those Ruskies.'

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  4. took my keyboard apart and washed it in soapy water

    so *that's* how ya avoid viruses and germs....

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