revelation0 - Slashdot User

Homemade PDF Patch Beats Adobe By Two Weeks 238

Posted by kdawson on Monday February 23, 2009 @08:54PM from the p-d-q dept.

CWmike writes "Sourcefire security researcher Lurene Grenier has published a home-brewed patch for the critical Adobe Reader vulnerability that hackers are exploiting in the wild using malicious PDF files, beating Adobe Systems Inc. to the punch by more than two weeks. Grenier posted the patch on Sunday with the caveats that it applies only to the Windows version of Adobe Reader 9.0 and comes with no guarantees. Also, PhishLabs has created a batch file that resets a Windows registry key to de-fang the hack by disabling JavaScript in Adobe Reader 9.0, giving administrators a way to automate the process."

Comment How does this relate to AJAX exactly? (Score 2, Informative) 97

by revelation0 on Tuesday March 25, 2008 @08:57PM (#22864986) Attached to: Multi-Channel Communication Patent Up For Sale

Abstract of mentioned patent:

A new method of distributed computing, sideband computing, that is global, scalable and can utilize many idle CPU resources worldwide. Sideband is defined as when a user connects to some (normal) network services, a separate communication channel is opened, through which a server distributes its tasks to all the clients and collects the results later. By this method, any network server which has a lot of clients can compute very large parallel computing problems by dividing it into small individual parts and have them calculated by its clients. With little cost, the network server can act as a supercomputer.

It is laying out a way to distribute parallel processing tasks to a large number of clients, which SETI@Home thought up a full two years prior. The only argument I can see is they seem to be saying they can do this discreetly while the client is using some other service? I don't have time to go and pick through the entire patent right now, but it seems that this nonsense has gone beyond simply being out of hand.

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