Ugh, stressful cat-herding day today, but I think we’re almost out of the woods now. We’ll see what tomorrow’s mail brings. I’ve had a colossal headache since about 10am, but it’s finally beginning to fade.

Yummy supper with Chris and BHK – BHK made grilled cheese and we ate a veggie plate and leftover split-pea soup. Quite an excellent repast. We watched Titus, The Gorilla King on Nature afterward, once Larry made it to our place. Quite good, and I think that Gorilla babies (or of any age really) are adorable.

BHK is getting into Dexter – I haven’t had a chance to really check it out yet, but the series is available to view on Netflix, at least the first season with the second one arriving shortly. Maybe I’ll download it and watch it one the PSP during transit. Of course, I still haven’t even caught up with Corner Gas, Chuck, Masterpiece and whatever else is being tivo’ed upstairs. I suppose that one day I’ll be snowed in for a week without internet and we’ll catch up.

This is interesting research: given a security patch, can you automatically reverse-engineer the security vulnerability that is being patched and create exploit code to exploit it?

Turns out you can.

What does this mean?

Attackers can simply wait for a patch to be released, use these techniques, and with reasonable chance, produce a working exploit within seconds. Coupled with a worm, all vulnerable hosts could be compromised before most are even aware a patch is available, let alone download it. Thus, Microsoft should redesign Windows Update. We propose solutions which prevent several possible schemes, some of which could be done with existing technology.

Full paper here.

Forget 802.11N. A number of posts suggested that moving backwards to 802.11G or 802.11B fixes the problem. Of course, it’s not as fast as the N mode. You must set your wireless router to the slower mode.

Check the WiFi channel. Some users said that other wireless routers in the neighborhood appeared to be causing interference that can bother the MacBook.