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Wow, multiple security update in one day. Details of the updates are as follows:

Read the rest of Slackware Security Updates: Mozilla, kdenetwork, fetchmail, zlib and gxine »

Like I mentioned in the last WCS, I got some news to share. Yeah, I know that I said it’ll be made known on Tuesday, but guess what… I lied. Heh!

Anyway, Tuesday was my last day with SSD. I really enjoyed working with the highly experienced and knowledgable people there, however, I would very much prefer the direction of my career to head towards IT. I find my experiences being the Operations Manager at SSD to be a highly rewarding one. I’m a much better person today than I was before joining SSD.

I guess some of you might ask, “What are you doing now?”. Well, I’m now working as an Analyst Programmer at a company which I wouldn’t want to name at present. I’m currently under probation, so probably when my employment is confirmed, I would be more comfortable to reveal my new employers

So far, I’ve been working for two days… and I must say it sure feels “different” to (again) be working in a “big” company. But hey, I got a company laptop… how’s that for corporate perks! I’ll update more when I feel comfortable doing so

Straight to the issues, I received two emails from Slackware Security mailing list detailing the following issues (italicised text is added myself):

New emacs packages are available for Slackware 10.1 and -current to (fix) a security issue with the movemail utility for retrieving mail from a POP mail server. If used to connect to a malicious POP server, it is possible for the server to cause the execution of arbitrary code as the user running emacs.

New dnsmasq packages are available for Slackware 10.0, 10.1, and -current to fix security issues. An off-by-one overflow vulnerability may allow a DHCP client to create a denial of service condition. Additional code was also added to detect and defeat attempts to poison the DNS cache.

More details about these issues may be found in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database:

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2005-0876
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2005-0877

There are also tons of updates for Slackware-current, including heavy stuff like the glibc packages. You can use the Slackware package browser to obtain an updated version of these packages for your Slackware installation. Lazier and smarter people like me will use updating tools such as Swaret or slapt-get

It seems that the recent Firefox, Thunderbird and the Mozilla Suite security updates may have caused some problems with third party extensions.

C|Net news has coverage on this issue. As a consequence of this impending update, developers have been asked to temporarily halt their localisation efforts. This seems to have caused a storm in the dev circle, here’s a quote from the C|Net article:

“We are getting lots of e-mails from Firefox users in Poland asking us about why isn’t Firefox 1.0.5 available in Polish,” wrote one developer in the localization newsgroup.

“A few days more, and it’s gonna be a big public relations disaster for Firefox outside the U.S.A.,” the developer added.

Another developer attacked the foundation in its bug-reporting forum.

“Tens of millions of users are still using 1.0.4 while critical security bugs are already published after en-US (U.S. English) 1.0.5 release,” the developer wrote.

At the time of this post, both the Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla web sites have yet to update the download link to point to the new versions.

It is truly a sad day when a good samaritan is tragically killed when he’s trying to help others. 19 year old Mohd Noor Afifi Mohamad Rosli was spending his third semester break at his parents’ house in Kampung Paya Jeras Hilir. He was also doing his practical training and was due to return to College Negri in Seremban this week. Here’s an excerpt from a The Star article highlighting the incident:

Yesterday, the 19-year-old automotive diploma student went to the aid of an accident victim trapped in a car but his humanitarian deed was dealt a tragic blow when another car rammed into him and two others.

Mohd Noor Afifi and wireman Koo Tian Foo, 24, were killed in a horrific incident in Jalan Sungai Buloh that wrecked four cars and also had one victim in a coma.

My deepest condolences go to the families and friends of Mohd Noor Afifi and others who perished or are receiving treatment for their injuries. It is unfortunate that a life of a hero ends in such tragic circumstances.