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This will be a continuously updated list of the most useful topics in this section.

Computer Security by ilw
How to convert, mount, and burn DVDs, VCDs, ISOs, and BIN/CUEs by MUSCLEMAN
IRC FAQ and first-time setup guide by blo_inc
Microsoft JVM Downloads by SharedHolder
Missing a .DLL File? by SharedHolder
Need Codecs? by SharedHolder
Red Hat 9 by haxor41789
The Ultimate Guide to .RAR, .R01, and .001 Files by DWk
What Is Spyware? by SharedHolder

Firefox Add-ons by blo_inc
Movie Terms Key by SharedHolder
Softmodding an Xbox by haxor41789
SP2 Flaws by firefox

videolan
if you want to add videolan to klite tools and preview menu go here
look for klite codec pack full

GSpot
GSpot is a nice little tool that allows you to see what audio and video codecs the video file uses in order to determine what you need to install on your system to watch it.

Where to find more info:
http://www.doom9.org/
http://www.dvdrhelp.com/

download the klite codec pack and videolan, klite codec pack has bs player and gspot, between the bsplayer and videolan you can play anything and the gspot you can use to see if the files are real or fake, you can also use videolan for preview your files.

Researcher warns of impending PDF attack wave

A design flaw in Adobe's popular PDF format will quickly be exploited by hackers to install financial malware on users' computers, a security company argued today.

The bug, which is not strictly a security vulnerability but actually part of the PDF specification, was first disclosed by Belgium researcher Didier Stevens last week. Stevens demonstrated how a multistage attack using the PDF specification's "/Launch" function could successfully exploit a fully-patched copy of Adobe Reader.

Unlike other attacks based on rogue PDFs, Stevens' technique does not require an underlying vulnerability in Adobe's Reader or Acrobat, but instead relies on social engineering tactics to dupe users into opening a malicious PDF. In his demo, Stevens used a PDF document containing attack code that he was then able to execute using the /Launch function. Although Reader and Acrobat display a warning when an executable inside a PDF file is launched, Stevens found a way to partially modify the alert to further trick a potential victim into approving the action.

It will be easy for hackers to replicate Stevens' strategy, said Mickey Boodaei, CEO of security company Trusteer, best known for Rapport, a security service that helps online banks, brokerages, and retailers secure customers' desktops.

"Didier's information is very clear, very easy to reproduce, and the attack seems to be very effective," said Boodaei. Although Stevens did not release proof-of-concept attack code, Trusteer's engineers were easily able to duplicate his attack, including the modifications to Reader's and Acrobat's warnings.

Boodaei assumes that criminals will be able to replicate the attack -- within days, if they haven't already -- and believes that they will immediately add it to the already-in-place multi-exploit kits that they've hidden on compromised legitimate sites.

"All the infrastructure is in place," Boodaei said, citing the networks of hacked sites that criminals use to launch drive-by attacks, which typically try multiple exploits or attack vectors, in order to infect as many victims as possible. "This is just another vulnerability they can use," he said.

Adobe has acknowledged the bug, but has not yet committed to producing a patch to stymie attacks. However, the company has urged users to change Reader's and Acrobat's settings to disable the /Launch function.

In a blog post Tuesday, Adobe Reader group product manager Steve Gottwals recommended that consumers block attacks by unchecking a box marked "Allow opening of non-PDF file attachments with external applications" in the programs' preferences panes. By default, Reader and Acrobat have the box checked, meaning that the behavior Stevens exploited is allowed.

Gottwals also showed how enterprise IT administrators can force users' copies of Reader and Acrobat into the unchecked state by pushing a change to Windows' registry.

On Thursday, another Adobe executive said Adobe is considering several options to plug the hole, among them an update to Reader and Acrobat that would change the default state of the setting to off. "We're still evaluating," said Brad Arkin, Adobe's director for product security and privacy in an interview yesterday. "The biggest thing is to make sure that any changes we do don't impact all the ways that people use the software today."

Adobe has used the same explanation when it has said it will not strip JavaScript functionality from PDF documents; over the last year, hackers have frequently exploited vulnerabilities in Reader's and Acrobat's implementation of that scripting language.

"I think Adobe should act quickly," said Boodaei, who then admitted that's unlikely. "Because of the huge distribution of their software, nearly 100% in some cases, they have to go through very extensive testing before releasing any fix to make sure it doesn't break the functionality."

Boodaei's bet? "I'm guessing that it will take them some time, unless they see an increase in attacks," he said.

And those attacks are coming. "We are seeing an increase in the sophistication of social engineered attacks. They're becoming more and more common, especially in financially-motivated attacks, whether on financial institutions or consumers," Boodaei said.

He wasn't optimistic about the ability of consumers to ward off the impending attacks. "For enterprises, it's probably easier, since security administrators can evaluate the threat on their networks and push out [Adobe's workaround] through a centralized system. But consumers will find it harder," said Boodaei.

"First, very small numbers of users will even hear about this, and of those that do, I'm not sure they'll understand what they need to do," he added.

Adobe has announced it will update Reader and Acrobat on Tuesday, April 13, to patch an unspecified number of security vulnerabilities. But a fix for Stevens' attack approach won't be included in the collection, Arkin confirmed yesterday.

New Critical Vulnerability Affects All Internet Explorer Versions
Details will not be shared with Microsoft for free

French vulnerability research company VUPEN Security reports the discovery of a use-after-free vulnerability affecting all versions of Internet Explorer that could possibly lead to code execution. According to the company's new "no more bugs for free" policy, details of the flaw will not be shared with Microsoft unless it pays.

"We Discovered the 10th Unpatched Use-after-free Vulnerability in MS Internet Explorer. IE 8/7/6 are all affected," a short announcement from VUPEN posted on Twitter reads. However, the research will only be available to its paying customers.

Use-after-free conditions occur when a program continues to use a pointer to a location in memory that has already been deleted or freed. According to an article from OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) this type of vulnerability poses a very high risk level and has a high exploitation likelihood.

"The use of previously freed memory can have any number of adverse consequences - ranging from the corruption of valid data to the execution of arbitrary code, depending on the instantiation and timing of the flaw. If the newly allocated data chances to hold a class, in C++ for example, various function pointers may be scattered within the heap data. If one of these function pointers is overwritten with an address to valid shellcode, execution of arbitrary code can be achieved," is explained in the article.

VUPEN Security, which was previously known as FrSIRT, has been credited with discovering numerous critical vulnerabilities in widely deployed software, including Microsoft products. The company recently claimed to have discovered the first two vulnerabilities in the new Microsoft Office 2010 suite.

However, VUPEN is no longer willing to give away its research for free to the affected vendors. Instead, it practices responsible disclosure only with software developers that pay for the information. "Why should security services providers give away for free information aimed at making paid-for software more secure?," Chaouki Bekrar, VUPEN's chief executive officer, commented for Heise Media.

The company continues to provide intelligence about the unpatched vulnerabilities, to various governments who are members of its Threat Protection Program, even if the vendor has not been informed. The information includes full binary analysis and detection guidelines.

This "no more bugs for free" policy appears to be a growing trend between security researchers. Proeminent white hat hackers like Charlie Miller, Alex Sotirov or Dino Dai Zovi have already already adopted this stance since a year ago. Evgeny Legerov, founder of Moscow-based vulnerability research company Intevydis, who declared himself a responsible disclosure contester, compared the practice with doing free Quality Assurance work for vendors.

I just installed Windows 7 on my desktop computer and looking for a free bookmark manager software that works best with Internet Explorer 8 for managing bookmarks. I searched online and found many apps are available, but choosing the best one is a daunting task. Does anyone have any recommendations and advice on best bookmark manager software.?

Thanks in advance.

i want to learn more on MS word and excel so i want a website to download free tutorials so that i can develop more and also teach my younger brother. i maily want it to be free to download.

Ok I know about the pivots. I got this huge data of share of shelf for different months, for 3 categories and many store types. I need to make an excel thing that i click on a menu and chose for example - CATEGORY: FEM CARE, MEASURE: SHARE OF SHELF, STORE TYPE: WALMART

Life after Windows: What happens to tech if Microsoft dies

It's the thought experiment we all like to engage in. What would life be like without Microsoft Windows? To listen to the free open source software crowd, the demise of Windows -- and by extension, Microsoft's hegemony over the PC universe -- would signal a kind of rebirth for information technology. Software would finally be free of the corporate shackles that have stifled innovation and dragged down the best and brightest among us.

Such thinking is naïve, at best. Rather than freeing IT, the demise of Microsoft would plunge the industry into an apocalyptic tailspin of biblical proportions -- no visions of hippie utopia here. The withdrawal of the Redmond giant's steady hand would cause today's computing landscape to tear itself apart at the seams, with application and device compatibility and interoperability devolving into the kind of Wild West chaos unseen since the days of the DOS big three: Lotus, WordPerfect, and Ashton-Tate.

And don't believe that the Web will somehow mitigate the impact of Windows' demise. Although Google talks a good story about supplanting traditional compute models with a Web-centric paradigm, the truth is that the folks from Mountain View are no less sinister when it comes to grandiose plans for world domination. If anything, the rise of Google -- or any dominant cloud-computing player -- should be perceived as a potential threat to IT independence. As the saying goes, never put all your IT eggs into a single vendor's basket.

But come, let us ponder together the implications of a world without that shiny, four-colored Windows logo. A world where standards are fleeting and where creativity and innovation have run amok. A post-apocalyptic vision worthy of the full Roland Emmerich disaster porn treatment. Here, in the spirit of the History Channel's "Life after People" series, I present my vision of life after Windows.

Client applications: Kiss consistency good-bye The client application landscape will be almost unrecognizable in a post-Microsoft world. The deprecation of the legacy Windows API, coupled with the move to an entirely Web-based delivery model, will open the floodgates of innovation -- and create massive headaches for support personnel, who must now contend with the rich variety of UI designs and implementations that define the Web application experience.

Basically, you can kiss consistency good-bye. With developers free to create their own interface primitives, many arbitrary decisions will worm their way into the larger UI consciousness. Steps to complete even basic tasks -- for example, manipulating and formatting lists of data -- will vary widely among implementations. And while common Web metaphors (hyperlinks, form fields) will continue to function as expected, more exotic constructs -- like the Webified version of a tools palette -- will take on increasingly diverse modes of interaction. You'll still click on things (or, more likely, touch them on screen with a finger or stylus), but the resulting actions will be anything but predictable.

Cross-application integration will be another sore spot. With OLE/COM/VBA out of the picture, the job of linking data between disparate applications will fall to a mixture of JavaScript and various cloud-hosted APIs and resources. In some cases -- most notably, suites of applications from a single vendor -- this integration will occur seamlessly on the back end. However, without a robust, widely adopted standard for data exchange, such integration will be difficult to achieve between the various vendor-specific silos that will make up the future cloud computing fabric.

One bright spot in this post-Microsoft client application future will be the elimination of the traditional software distribution model. No longer will IT shops have to track and manage a huge library of installed, stand-alone applications. With everything streaming from the cloud, the days of corrupted MSI packages and nasty DLL-hell scenarios will become a distant memory. The flip side of this equation is that the capability of working "offline" will also become a thing of the past. Your entire application infrastructure will be wholly dependent on uninterrupted connectivity to the cloud, making the Internet itself your new single point of failure.

Bottom line: Expect increased support and training costs as users struggle to master common functions across disparate applications. You may also want to update your disaster planning to include the pre-apocalyptic nightmare scenario where a backhoe operator takes out your now cloud-dependent IT infrastructure with an errant swing of his mighty shovel.

Developer tools: Bloody purges and API turf wars will shape the new standards As with client applications, the developer tools landscape will be fundamentally altered by the inevitable decline of the Win32 API. Programmers will face a plethora of new and potentially critical design decisions, including how to create a workable UI in a world where the old Windows rules no longer apply. The potential for freedom of expression and true innovation will need to be balanced against the reality of having to test early and often to ensure that your latest idea for a revolutionary new interface paradigm still plays in Peoria.

One of your first challenges will be achieving the level of UI richness that you became accustomed to in the pre-decline Windows era. AJAX, CSS, and HTML will have come a long way since the days when YouTube and Facebook were household names. However, these and similar Web technologies will still be restricted by the limitations of the underlying document model. And with the world's regulatory agencies eventually banning Adobe Flash (and similar RIA solutions) for the good of the Internet -- which was collapsing under the stress of a gazillion animated Viagra ads -- you may find your options for creating a compelling UI to be limited to strategically placed GIF images, DIV tags, and some clever use of HTML table borders and shading.

Another consideration will be how to integrate any newly designed application with the broader Web. Popular back-end data exchange APIs will abound, each with its own camp of fervent supporters, so you'll need to choose wisely. The last thing you want is for your world-changing killer application to be relegated to obscurity due to a lack of interoperability with the rest of the cloud.

On the plus side, the demise of Windows means you'll never again have to worry if the user has the correct version of a critical DLL or library installed so that they can run your application. Likewise, the chicken-and-egg debate over the .Net framework will be finally resolved (in favor of the chicken). However, the days of the "standardized" UI will be over, making the job of creating applications that work consistently, and which interact with both the user and other applications in a predictable manner, that much more challenging.

Bottom line: Expect much confusion as the newly cloud-centric world reorders itself through a series of bloody purges and API turf wars. Navigating this minefield of fleeting pseudo standards and technology dead ends will help to separate the wheat from the developer chaff. Only the strong will survive.

Hardware ecosystem: Chaos until a new overlord rises Perhaps the most powerful ripples of the post-Windows shockwave will be felt in the PC hardware and peripherals marketplace. The lack of a dominant OS target will cause the once homogenized device driver landscape to fracture, with vendors chasing after the popular platforms du jour while neglecting their legacy installed base. Plug and play will be replaced by "plug and pray" as frustrated customers struggle to match devices to their respective OS choices, while wondering if they'll regret their selections once the next tide of disruptive development rolls in.

In this chaotic world of hyperinnovation, vendors will seek to align themselves with the perceived market leaders of the day. Products will be judged not by their features or design quality, but by how many "works with x" or "ready for y" logos the vendor manages to squeeze onto the product packaging. Shopping for a new product will become a sick game of Sudoku, with customers scrambling to align the various component values into the correct sequential pattern. Success equals finding a group of complementary products that all sport at least one common logo program certification -- sort of the new Holy Grail of post-Windows IT.

The good news is that nature abhors a vacuum. In time, new players will emerge to redefine the PC hardware ecosystem around their particular platforms. This, in turn, will cause a shakeout among the software and hardware vendor communities, with those who bet on the wrong platform falling by the wayside. But the real question will be: What kind of force will this newly ascendant leader wield? Will it follow in the footsteps of Microsoft and use its standards-setting power to level the playing field? Or will it take the 1980s-era IBM approach and try to consolidate its death grip through proprietary lock-ins and similarly anticompetitive practices?

Bottom line: Just because Windows is out of the picture doesn't mean that you should expect a renaissance period of hardware innovation. The post-Microsoft world is just as likely to be a chaotic nightmare, full of competing vendor fiefdoms and walled technology encampments -- in other words, a return to the real Dark Ages of PC hardware.

Abandon all hope? The picture I've painted here is indeed grim: Chaos. Confusion. A descent into the very ugliness that defined personal computing before Microsoft's ascendancy.

However, there may still be hope on the horizon. Google may prove to be a better steward of the post-Microsoft leadership mantle than I'm predicting here (though its handling of the recent China debacle doesn't instill confidence). Perhaps Google will help to establish standards for the presentation of application content and data through Web-centric user interfaces. Even the move to a non-Windows-centric hardware ecosystem may prove less disruptive than I'm imagining -- provided the current trend toward integrated, all-in-one devices (netbooks, tablet PCs) continues.

Maybe things will work out for the best. Or maybe -- and this is the scenario I consider most likely -- Microsoft will continue to co-opt each emerging, paradigm-shifting technology and leverage its billion-strong Windows installed base to keep software and hardware vendor communities focused squarely on that shiny, four-colored logo. As a person who favors stability over chaotic, disruptive change, I know which future I'm rooting for.

This article, "Life after Windows: What happens to tech if Microsoft dies," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments on Windows and Microsoft at InfoWorld.com.

Windows XP: No IE9 for you
Microsoft becomes first major browser maker to drop support for world's most popular OS

Computerworld - Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), will not run on Windows XP, now or when the software eventually ships, the company confirmed Tuesday.

The move makes Microsoft the first major browser developer to drop support for XP, the world's most popular operating system, in a future release.

Although Microsoft excluded Windows XP from the list for the IE9 developer preview, it sidestepped the question about which versions of Windows the final browser would support. In an IE9 FAQ, for example, Microsoft responded, "It's too early to talk about features of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta" to the query, "Will Internet Explorer 9 run on Windows XP?"

That caused some users to demand a straight answer. "Please tell whether the final version will run on Windows XP SP3 or not," said someone identified as "eXPerience" in a comment to a blog post by Dean Hachamovich, Microsoft's general manager for the IE team. "If not, please be clear about it. Really, enough is enough of keeping users in the lurch about Windows XP support."

Others bashed Microsoft on the assumption that IE9 would never run on XP. "Dropping Windows XP support is one of the worst decisions ever taken by [the] IE team, probably even worse than disbanding the IE team back in the IE6 days," claimed an anonymous commenter.

Microsoft had offered up broad hints that IE9 was not in Windows XP's future, however. Tuesday, a company spokeswoman said the new browser needs a "modern operating system," a phrase that hasn't been paired with Window XP for years. "Internet Explorer 9 requires the modern graphics and security underpinnings that have come since 2001," she added, clearly referring to XP, which appeared that year.

Windows XP's inability to run the Platform Preview or the final browser stems from, IE9's graphics hardware acceleration, which relies on the Direct2D and DirectWrite DirectX APIs (applications programming interfaces). Support for those APIs is built into Windows 7, and was added to Vista and Windows Server 2008 last October, but cannot be extended to Windows XP.

Some users worried that by halting browser development for Windows XP, Microsoft would repeat a current problem, getting customers to ditch IE6 for a newer version. "Those who choose to stay with XP will be forced to [then] stay forever on IE8, which will become the new IE6," said a user named Danny Gibbons in a comment on Hachamovich's blog.

Tough, said Sheri McLeish, Forrester Research's browser analyst. "This is the stick to get off XP," she said. Windows XP users will solve the browser problem themselves when they upgrade, as most eventually will, to Windows 7. "What are they going to do, go to Linux or run XP forever?" she asked.

Still, IE9's inability to run on Windows XP will prevent it from becoming widespread until the nearly-nine-year-old OS loses significant share to Windows 7. According to Web metrics company NetApplications' most recent data, if IE9 was released today, it would be able to run on just over a quarter -- 27% -- of all Windows machines.

No other major browser maker has announced plans to stop supporting Windows XP, but several have dropped other operating systems or platforms. Last month, for instance, Mozilla said it would not support Apple's Mac OS X 10.4, known as "Tiger," in future upgrades to Firefox. Google's Chrome for the Mac, meanwhile, only runs on Intel-based Macs, not on the older PowerPC-based machines that were discontinued in 2006.

The IE9 Platform Preview can be downloaded from Microsoft's site. It requires Windows 7, Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 or Windows 2008 R2.

Have you guys seen any issues with Windows 7 64bit and getsmile?

I was using it tonight with IE8 and when I click on a smile in getsmile to insert the smile in the forum IE 8 would only flash for a second but not insert it.....

Have you all seen this?

Most Windows 7 PCs max out memory
Most Windows 7 systems consume nearly all RAM; less than half of XP PCs do

Most Windows 7 PCs max out their memory, resulting in performance bottlenecks, a researcher said today.

Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.

The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory "saturation" point, said Barth. The most recent snapshot of XPnet's 23,000-plus PCs -- taken yesterday -- pegs only 40% of XP systems as running low on memory.

"The vast majority of Windows 7 machines over the last several months are very heavily-memory saturated," said Barth today. "From a performance standpoint, that has an immediate impact on the machine."

The low-memory condition of most Windows 7 PCs is even more notable considering the amount of RAM in Windows 7 systems: According to XPnet's polling, Windows 7 PCs sport an average of 3.3GB of memory, compared to 1.7GB in the average Windows XP computer. (Machines running Windows Vista contain an average of 2.7GB.)

"Windows 7 machines have almost twice as much memory to work with," said Barth, "but the numbers show just how much larger and more complex Windows 7 is than XP."

Barth acknowledged that XPnet's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications, but said that Devil Mountain would start working on finding which is the dominant factor in increased memory use.

Other data that Devil Mountain collates as part of a new metric dubbed "Windows Composite Performance Index" (WCPI) quantifies peak processor workload and I/O performance. Both of those measurements are also higher for Windows 7 systems than for XP machines. While 85% of the former are running at peak I/O loads, only 36% of the latter do; the numbers for CPU workload are closer, as 44% of Windows 7 computers are running a computational backlog that delays processing tasks, compared to 36% of the XP systems.

"This is alarming," Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. "For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is."

Long-time computer users are more familiar with the opposite: that hardware stays ahead of operating system requirements. "On current-generation hardware right out of the gate, Windows 7 is maxing out the resources. The old trend just isn't the case anymore. Now, everything that Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away," Barth said.

"I think this is something that everyone in their gut knew, but now we have data," said Barth. "The metrics don't lie."

Users who want to compare their computers to the current WCPI numbers can do so by registering with XPnet and then installing the DMS Clarity Tracker Agent from Devil Mountain's site.

New exploit technique nullifies major Windows defense
Google engineer posts sample code to show how to bypass DEP in Windows

The disclosure of a new exploit technique that bypasses an important Windows security feature may result in more successful attacks against Microsoft's newer operating systems, researchers said today.

On Monday, Berend-Jan Wever, a Google security software engineer who goes by the moniker "Skylined" when he posts exploit research, published proof-of-concept code that bypasses DEP, or data error prevention, one of two major security enhancements Microsoft has added to Windows since 2004. The other: ASLR, for address space layout randomization.

DEP prevents malicious code from executing in sections of memory not intended for code execution, and is a defense against, among other things, attacks based on buffer overflows. ASLR, meanwhile, randomly shuffles the positions of key memory areas, making it much more difficult for hackers to predict whether their exploit code will actually run.

Microsoft introduced DEP in Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), the security-oriented refresh launched in 2004, and it debuted ASLR in Windows Vista three years later.

"I am releasing this because I feel it helps explain why ASLR+DEP are not a mitigation to put a lot of faith in, especially on x86 platforms," said Wever in a post to his personal blog on Monday.

Wever should know about Windows: According to his LinkedIn account, he worked for Microsoft as a security software engineer from 2006 to 2008.

In 2005, Wever helped popularize "heap spraying," a technique that made exploits, especially those against browsers, more efficient. Hackers quickly picked up on heap spraying, and have applied it in several prominent attacks, including one a year ago against a then-unpatched bug in Adobe's Reader.

"This is pretty significant," said David Sancho, a senior threat researcher with Trend Micro, when asked to peg the importance of Wever's demonstration. "This can be used to further enhance exploits, and I expect that we'll start seeing it being used within exploits fairly soon."

There have been DEP workarounds making the rounds, Sancho acknowledged. "But this is generic enough that it will work within any exploit," he said.

Earlier today, another Trend Micro researcher also predicted that Wever's disclosure will likely lead to attacks that regularly shove aside DEP's defenses. "After Wever released his heap-spraying exploit codes in 2005, a lot of new exploits started using that technique," said Trend's Ria Rivera in an entry on the company's malware blog . "It would thus be not farfetched that the release of this new proof-of-concept could lead to the same scenario -- new exploits could start using 'return-to-libc' to achieve DEP bypass."

Wever's new technique requires that ASLR be bypassed as well, but that's not a solid barrier, said Sancho. Attackers have taken to running their exploit code many times, in many parts of memory, in the hope of one landing in a executable location. "Yes, attacks need to bypass both ASLR and DEP, but [Wever's proof-of-concept] makes it all easier," Sancho emphasized.

The proof-of-concept that Wever published doesn't actually do damage, as it is wrapped around an exploit of a bug in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) that was patched years ago.

"This exploit targets a bug that was fixed in IE6 in 2005, which explains why it does not affect any recent install," said Wever in a comment he added to his blog entry. "This release is for academic purpose only, it is not an 0-day that script-kiddies can use to pwn your grandma's computer."

From Sancho's viewpoint, the DEP bypass doesn't exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft's code, but rather takes advantage of a design flaw. "Microsoft can fix this, and I have faith they will," he said.

Microsoft was not immediately available to answer questions about Wever's proof-of-concept DEP bypass, and whether it would -- and if so, when -- revamp the security feature in Windows.

Windows patch cripples XP with blue screen, users claim
Angry customers blame MS10-015 for Blue Screen of Death, XP reboot hell

Tuesday's security updates from Microsoft have crippled Windows XP PCs with the notorious Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), users have reported on the company's support forum.

Complaints began early yesterday, and gained momentum throughout the day.

"I updated 11 Windows XP updates today and restarted my PC like it asked me to," said a user identified as "tansenroy" who kicked off a growing support thread. "From then on, Windows cannot restart again! It is stopping at the blue screen with the following message: 'A problem has been detected and Windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.'"

Others joined in with similar reports. "There is something seriously wrong with the update. I can't even open in safe mode," said "Ghellow," referring to Windows diagnostic mode that's often a last-chance way to boot a PC.

"I am not very happy with Microsoft as I got to work this morning to find my helpdesk flooded with messages that the PC has the famous Blue Screen," said "brawfab."

"I had to go to work and use my Mac to get online to find out what is going on with the XP updates last night," complained "moosewalk" on the same thread. "I am this much closer to switching over to a Mac for good."

The support thread, which was first noticed by security blogger Brian Krebs, contained more than 120 messages as of early Thursday, making it the third-longest on the Windows Update support forum. The thread had been viewed more than 2,800 times since its inception.

Several users posted solutions, but the one laid out by "maxyimus" was marked by a Microsoft support engineer as the way out of the perpetual blue screens. To regain control of their PCs, users were told to boot from their Windows XP installation disc, launch the Recovery Console and enter a series of commands.

Unfortunately, that left netbook users out of luck, since most of the lightweight, inexpensive laptops lack an optical drive, and so can't boot from an XP installation disc. "Are there any fixes for netbooks, or am I essentially screwed for the time being?" asked "HimDen."

Several users tentatively identified the MS10-015 update as the one which triggered the BSOD, and claimed that uninstalling that security fix -- which was labeled as KB977165 -- returned their PC to working condition.

MS10-015, one of 13 security updates Microsoft issued Tuesday, patched a 17-year-old kernel bug in all 32-bit versions of Windows. The vulnerability went public three weeks ago when a Google engineer disclosed the bug and posted proof-of-concept attack code.

This was not the first time that a Microsoft update has incapacitated Windows PCs. Two years ago, a set of updates for Vista sent an unknown number of machines into an endless series of reboots. Similar problems stymied users who tried to upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) in May 2008, and others attempting to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 last October.

Microsoft was not immediately available for comment early Thursday.