Adobe Reader X: Now With Sandboxing
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
Adobe has released a new major version of its free Adobe Reader, the program that allows you to view PDF files. A significant new security feature is sandboxing. For those not familiar with the concept, the main program interacts with the outside world (i.e., the operating system) through a second, supervisor program. The supervisor typically just echoes the requests straight to the operating system, but it also ensures that any unauthorized or unsafe requests are denied. So even if a vulnerability is discovered and successfully exploited, the sandbox mechanism will prevent it from doing anything. Note that using the regular Adobe Reader update function will not get you version X—you’ll need to go to the download page and manually start the installation.
Link: http://www.eweek.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
During World War II, it was important for the allies to be able to estimate German tank production. The Germans made this task easier by using a simple range of serial numbers that began with “1” and were incremented by one for each new tank. Thus the allies could read the numbers off captured/destroyed tanks and use statistics to estimate the total number of tanks produced. After the war, when the production records were available to the allies, they found that the predicted number was nearly identical to the actual value, and that the estimate from traditional intelligence sources was off by a factor of five.
One of Google’s stated reasons for releasing 
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Here at Chad’s News, we’ve been 
I’m not quite old enough to remember when phone numbers were something like “WHItehall 1212”, but I’ve seen references to that nomenclature in older movies and books. I do, however, remember only needing to dial the last 5 digits (e.g., 6-4085 versus 856-4085) after moving to Wyoming in 1976. How things have changed in a few short decades—these days I have to dial the full 10 digits because Denver has two area codes. For those like myself who are curious about these types of things, the linked article explains the older numbering system and its history.
A professor at a Swedish university had his laptop stolen. It contained 10 years of academic work, which he had not backed up. But disaster was averted when the considerate thief dumped all the data to a USB drive and mailed it to the professor. The man should purchase a lottery ticket, with luck like that.
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