Ever wanted to test your website in various versions of Internet Explorer?It is possible to run Internet Explorer in standalone mode without having to over-write previous versions thanks to Joe Maddalone who came up with a way of achieving that in November 2003. Basically, Internet Explorer is run by exploiting a known workaround to DLL hell - which was introduced in Windows 2000 and later versions - called DLL redirection.

Yousif over at TredoSoft has written a nice multiple IE installer which includes the following versions; IE3, IE4.01, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6. Combine that with the latest release of IE7 (now also for people without genuine Windows versions), and you can see how your pages looks through the eyes of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer from the early Internet ages until today.

Very handy but also very frustrating when you consider how far away Microsoft still are when it comes to keeping up with web standards etc.

UpdateStar is a small program that lets you stay up-to-date with all of your personal software. Whether it be Freeware, Shareware and commercial software products, UpdateStar covers all of your software. UpdateStar knows more than 80.000 software products and lets you know once an update is available for you.

It’s still in the “beta” stages (like most programs today) but worked quite nice. Even though most of the bigger software companies today comes with an auto-update feature, some of the smaller (and easy to forget) doesn’t. After testing it earlier today I found a few useful updates I might have overlooked otherwise.

Click the screen shot below to get your copy of this useful little FREE tool:

The inventor of the HomePub, a fridge freezer with built-in draught beer system, is, it goes without saying, a genius. Designed with special people in mind, the kind who like to pour beer on their cornflakes or drink their coffee with beer and two sugars, there’s designated space for two five-litre kegs.

Source: GIZMODO

Vixta is a Fedora-based Linux distribution designed to be user-friendly and eye-catching, with a GUI similar to Windows Vista, but (hopefully) not as slow and annoying…

Screenshot (Click image for more)

The project’s overall goals are:

• Bring Linux to the “masses”
• Absolutly NoConfig (ANB)
• User-friendly
• Eye-catching
• “Vista” a like

The latest version of Vixta (0.94) released yesterday are available for immediate download (ISO image).

Secunia reported earlier today that they’ve discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the Sun Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment):

1. Multiple unspecified errors in the Java Runtime Environment can be exploited by e.g. a malicious applet or by using Java APIs to establish network connections to certain services on machines other than the originating host.
2. Multiple unspecified errors in Java Web Start can be exploited by a malicious applet to read/write local files or determine the location of the Java Web Start cache.
3. An unspecified error in the Java Runtime Environment can be exploited to move or copy arbitrary files on the system by e.g. tricking a user into dragging and dropping a file from an applet to a desktop application that has the proper permissions.

Secunia has constructed the Secunia Software Inspector, which you can use to check if your system is vulnerable: secunia.com/software_inspector/

Solution:
Update to the fixed versions.

JDK and JRE 6 Update 3:
java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

JDK and JRE 5.0 Update 13:
java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index_jdk5.jsp

SDK and JRE 1.4.2_16:
java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html

SDK and JRE 1.3.1 for Solaris 8:
java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download.html

NOTE: Some vulnerabilities only affect certain versions or browsers. Please see the vendor’s advisories for details [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ]