The Geek News

Dropbox's public folders might soon be a thing of the past.

According to German site Mobiflip (Translate), Dropbox has e-mailed developers, informing them that as of August 1, public folders will no longer be supported by the service. Public folders will be officially replaced by a new Link feature the company announced in April, according to the e-mail.

"After July 31, we will no longer create Public folders in any new Dropbox accounts," the e-mail reportedly reads. "If your app depends on Public folders, we recommend switching to the /shares API call. Public folders in existing accounts, however, will continue to function as before."

Dropbox's public folders have become one of the easiest ways for users to share files over the Web. Users need only to drop the file into their public folder and direct folks to it, who can then download it. With the new links function, however, Dropbox users need to choose the "get link" option to share a file or folder with others.

Windows Utilities Launcher is wonderfully simple to set up…just unzip the exe file, place it in a “Program Files” folder, and create a shortcut. Get ready for instant access goodness!

This is what you will see as soon as you start Windows Utilities Launcher… In the “Utilities Tab Area” you can quickly access the utilities shown with a single click of the button beneath each listing. Notice that you can easily minimize Windows Utilities Launcher to the “System Tray” or exit the program using the two buttons in the lower right corner. Windows Utilities Launcher will also display the version of Windows that you are using in the “Status Bar”.

The “Settings Tab Area” lets you decide if you would like to have Windows Utilities Launcher start up with Windows each time and if you would like to have the app start as minimized.

The “About Tab Area” provides basic app information and also a way to contact the developer.

Time for a closer look at the “Right Click Menu” setup for Windows Utilities Launcher. Here you can see the main menu… Notice that there are two additional apps that you can access here (Notepad & Calculator).

Use the “Windows Utilities” sub-menu as an alternate way to quickly access individual Windows Utilities.

For our example we decided to access the “Date and Time Utility”. With a single click the “Date and Time” window opened very quickly. We had the same great result on any of the other utilities that we chose…quick and easy access.

Windows Utilities Launcher is still in the earlier stages of development, but this little app is already demonstrating how easy it should and can be to access common Windows Utilities. This is definitely worth trying out…have fun!

Works On: Windows XP – 7

Installed On: Windows Vista (32 bit), Service Pack 2

Turn your desktop into a night-time paradise with the second in our series of Moonlit Nights Wallpaper collections.

"When a user connects to MariaDB/MySQL, a token (SHAover a password and a random scramble string) is calculated and comparedwith the expected value. Because of incorrect casting, it might'vehappened that the token and the expected value were considered equal,even if the memcmp() returned a non-zero value. In this caseMySQL/MariaDB would think that the password is correct, even while it isnot. Because the protocol uses random strings, the probability ofhitting this bug is about 1/256."

"Which means, if one knows a user name to connect (and "root" almostalways exists), she can connect using *any* password by repeatingconnection attempts. ~300 attempts takes only a fraction of second, sobasically account password protection is as good as nonexistent.Any client will do, there's no need for a special libmysqlclient library."

Defense: The first rule of securing MySQL is to not expose to the network at large in the first place. Most Linux distributions bind the MySQL daemon to localhost, preventing remote access to the service. In cases where network access must be provided, MySQL also provides host-based access controls. There are few use cases where the MySQL daemon should be intentionally exposed to the wider network and without any form of host-based access control.

the easiest thing to do is to modify the my.cnf file in order to restrict access to the local system. Open my.cnf with the editor of your choice, find the section labeled [mysqld] and change (or add a new line to set) the "bind-address" parameter to "127.0.0.1". Restart the MySQL service to apply this setting.

Note: Download The Latest Exploits for CVE-2012-2122 From our TOOLS YARD section.