News from PANUG/BizNix - September 20, 2002
http://panug.org - http://biznix.org

POSTMORTEM
At last night's PANUG meeting, Alan Spaeth surprised
us by presenting an update to his renowned lecture
on Microsoft licensing. We didn't have advanced notice
of this. You can't always tell what will happen at
a meeting based on the meeting announcements.


MS JAVA PATCH
by Alan Spaeth

Following up the discussion at last night's PANUG
meeting regarding the availability of the patch for
the Latest MS Java vulnerability, the patch
(MS02-052, Q329077) does indeed seem to be only
available through Windows Update.  

The Corporate Windows Update site has been retired and
just directs you to the regular Windows Update site.  

One vague possiblity is
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/catalog which
currently requires W2K or XP.

There was also discussion about Windows Update only
being usable with Internet Explorer. To quote
Microsoft when I tried it using Mozilla, "Windows
Update can only be accessed by Internet browsers that
support ActiveX Controls." If IE is just "hidden",
it's still there and would be used for Windows Update.
 
[Ed: It's ironic that downloading security patches
for Microsoft software requires that you use a Web
browser that requires ActiveX. ActiveX, by its very
nature, is a security hole.]