On Friday, Immunity Inc released information regarding a flaw in the WINS service that could be exploited to gain remote control of the target system. I don't know what responsible disclosure means to Immunity, but releasing an exploit of this magnitude in the middle of a 4-day US holiday doesn't seem very responsible to me. Color me “annoyed“.

I've been reluctant to mention last weekend's CISSP test for a number of reasons.  For one thing, I didn't think I passed it.  I was already making plans for retaking it in January, the next time it came to Seattle. But I got an email from (ISC)2 this afternoon that began: Congratulations!  It gives me great pleasure to inform you that you have PASSED the Certified Information System Security Professional competency examination If you can picture a 240-lb white guy doing a happy dance, you'll have a pretty good idea of what transpired behind the closed door of my office when I got...

I've been having an increasing number of problems with the Linksys DSL/Cable router that I have been using, and decided to finally replace it with something else.  The Linksys device was randomly disconnecting, and was lately requiring a lot of babysitting to keep up. I replaced the device with a different model last night, but couldn't get it to save any settings.  After sleeping on the problem, I woke up this morning and had it up and running in about 5 minutes.

The guys over at ASP.NETResources have a very nice online source code formatting tool that is designed to beautify code snippets that are destined to be displayed on a web site (like this one).  You simply paste your code of choice into the textbox, and out comes nicely colored and formatted code, ready to be displayed on a web page or blog.  They even include a css file for you. Check it out here.

I was reflecting yesterday over lunch with a friend that, with the exception of my wife, nobody in my immediate circle of friends was expected to vote for Bush.  He shrugged, and said “This is Washington.” But, in the first of what was to be many surprises from Election Day, the race in Washington was much closer than I would have predicted.  And the race for Governor is still too close to call at the time of this writing. Some other surprises from yesterday: Despite popular belief, this wasn't the “Year of the Youth Vote“, as was largely expected.  Only 1 in 10...