While Microsoft Money is an application that resides on a computer’s hard drive, the service also integrates online access to information and services. Users can upload their personal finance files onto the Web and access the information over the ‘net while away from home.

However, some users of the service found themselves locked out of their accounts on Monday afternoon and the lock out persisted until late last night.

According to Russ Paul Jones of Microsoft the problem occurred because “one of our servers was updated and inadvertently pointed to the wrong location to verify authentication”.

Microsoft posted directions on how to log in again for affected users last night at 10:30pm.

This should serve as a salutory reminder to people not to rely completely on remote IT services without some kind of local backup.

According to an article in eWeek Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Microsoft IE development team, said in a weekly security-focused Webcast, that a fix for the vulnerability exploited by the Download.Ject attacks in June will arrive sometime next week.

The release is due next week a couple of weeks ahead of the next scheduled Microsoft patch release date.

Now if they would just fix all the other bugs in Internet Explorer!

I read in InfoWorld today where CA have announced that they intend to release a version of ingres at LinuxWorld in San Francisco under its own CA Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL) next Wednesday.

Tony Gaughan, senior vice president, CA said that this iteration of Ingres, dubbed r3, will outperform Microsoft’s SQL Server database, and is more attractive price-wise because it is open source.

Microsoft have not run any tests against Ingres as they don’t currently see it as a competitor. In any case, migrating from one rdbms to another is not a trivial undertaking so CA’s initial customer base will have to be people starting out on the rdbms route.

I came across a downloadable pdf document while browsing the Net-Security site today.

The document has 50 pages of attack classifications as well as an appendix on HTTP Response Splitting and another on Web Server/Application Fingerprinting.

Yet another document to be read and added to your web security library!

I found a really good article on OS X maintenance and troubleshooting today. The article is for the maintenance of OS X 10.2 and 10.3 and the tools recommended, if they don’t already come with OS X, are freely downloadable!

You can’t say better than that!

For anyone who has had a hard disk crash and burn (and who in the tech world hasn’t) the latest announcement from Seagate that it will offer a 5 year warranty on all drives manufactured since June 1st 2004 is the best of news.

This should spur the competition to similar offerings and eventually lead to more reliable hard drives.

Seagate’s fortunes of late have suffered a little of late reporting a net loss of $33 million in it’s July 20th Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2004 report.

Let’s hope this latest announcement bouys their sales and that they are still around in five years to honour any warranty claims that may arise!

Interesting article in Microsoft Watch on how Microsoft appear to be getting ready to release more products to the Open Source community.

Maybe if they released Internet Explorer, the open source community might fix it for them!

I read an article in News.com recently which said that Flexiety software are giving 30 days free support when you download OpenOffice from their website.

Sounds like a nice way to get some support for this app – don’t know how the support office handles support calls from Europe (outside of US office hours) though.

If you can’t wait for mozilla to release V 1.0 of their Firefox browser with its in-built RSS reader, you can always download Sage – Sage is an Extension for Firefox which creates a Sidebar (available under View -> Sidebar -> Sage) allowing you to browse your RSS sites from within the browser.

There is also an import function which is supposed to allow you to import your RSS Feeds from your RSS Reader apps although I couldn’t get this to work with either NetNewsWire or Shrook OPML files.

See screenshot below to see it in action: