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Microsoft disables HTTPS of Hotmail in more than 16 countries by mistake

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On the 16th of March Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found out that Microsoft was blocking the use of HTTPS to the Hotmail users from more than 16 countries, amongst which Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. There was a reaction immediately since most of the countries are either Middle Eastern or African since the assumption was that probably Microsoft changed its policy and it would disable the feature for those countries which it introduced in December 2010.

Finally, Microsoft replied through the media that this was because of a bug which also affected countries such as Bahamas, Cayman Islands, and Fiji.

Microsoft ready to introduce a new version of Windows Live Messenger

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Microsoft will introduce a new version of Windows Live Messenger which will support updates from social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Other websites from which the user will be able to receive updates from about his/her friends will be Flickr, Zune and YouTube.

Many programs already offer services like that, the fact that Windows Live Messenger users are around 320 million all over the world enabling them to exchange messages with each other (about 10 billion messages every day), makes it a very important step in connecting together the social networks that exist.

Ballmer previews Microsoft’s next Messenger on CNET

TÜV says that IE 8 is safe

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TÜV Trust IT using a special designed methodology tested the security functions of IE 8. More information can be found here (the page is in German). This validation comes one week after the annual Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest security show which took place in Vancouver where researchers demonstrated that they could hack a non-jailbroken iPhone, Safari running on Snow Leopard and Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox on Windows 7.

To hack IE 8, Peter Vreugdenhil (an independent security researcher from the Netherlands) said he exploited two vulnerabilities in a four-part attack that involved bypassing ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) and evading DEP (Date Execution Prevention), which are designed to help stop attacks on the browser.

The Vista DHCP flag problem

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Since Microsoft Windows Vista became available in the market, all my friends started asking me about a problem through which their computer isn’t able to access a local network while putting the network cable on or while trying to connect through wireless connection.

In both cases, the reason is a change between the “old way” (the Windows XP SP2 one) and the “new way” (the Windows Vista one) through which the computer obtains a new address automatically from the device responsible for routing the network. Microsoft published a support article about that problem on the 17th of June 2008 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233). As stated in the article, the user has to disable the BROADCAST flag by editing the registry of the operating system since the problem is caused by routers which don’t support that new option.

Most of my friends wouldn’t want to edit the registry on their own since it is quite dangerous if they are not careful to easily destroy their operating system installation. So, instead of editing the registry, a very handy tool was developed by Johnathan Yew called DHCP Fix Tool. The most recent version of the tool can be found following this link while the instructions are quite clear (copy-paste from the original site):

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1. Click on “Query Adapter” to get the list of network adapters in your system.

2. Select the adapter you wish to fix. Reboot your system and see if you can get an IP from DHCP.

3. If you wish to undo the fix, select the adapter and choose “Reset to Vista Default”.