In an earlier post, I wrote a brief overview of Monad’s three main security features:

• Not allowing users to double-click on Monad scripts by default
• Requiring that all scripts be signed by a trusted publisher
• Requiring that users explicitly invoke scripts in the current directory

The discussion was helpful, but a little abstract.  How do the security features of Monad compare to those of other shells?    How exactly do Monad’s security features prevent a scripting virus attack?  I’d like to spend a few minutes to demonstrate that.  We’ll do this from the perspective of a determined attacker, and very willing victim.

Well, Scott and Omar have been busy again, and have just released DasBlog 1.8. It’s added a few helpful new features, and plenty of themes. The upgrade went painlessly as far as I can tell – be sure to let me know if you see any issues!

I’ve set “BlogXP” as my theme – it sure is beautiful. My pet peeve of the old “Discreet Blog Blue” was that the sidebar would float all around, and generally mess with layout. Especially on Administration pages. BlogXP is fully functional, and bug-free so far :)

Just as a reminder, the second Monad technet webcast is happening right now (9:30am PST to 11:00 am PST): http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032277852&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US.

I posted more about the Technet Webcasts here.

[Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.]

If you’ve read Adam’s post ("Preparing for Slashdot",) you probably read how we worked to inform the Slashdot crowd via early entries in the discussion. Luckily, they were moderated up fairly quickly, and people were able to continue commenting with quite a bit more basis in fact than the original article provided.

Often, this is called “Astroturfing,” alluding to “fake grass” in a grass-roots movement.

Scoble brought it up, as have some internal discussions over the past few days. Scoble wrote:

F-Secure has reported on some recent work by Second Part To Hell on a Monad scripting virus ("First Vista Virus Found"). It’s a misleading title, as it’s an issue that affects any vehicle for any executable code on any operating system. There’s an excellent treatment of shell script viruses on Virus Bulletin that covers this issue, but predates it by 2 years: Unix Shell Scripting Malware.

The fact that MSH is used as the execution vehicle is really a side-note, as it does not exploit any vulnerabilities in Monad. The guidance on shell script viruses is the same as the guidance on all viruses and malware: protect yourself against the point of entry, and limit the amount of damage that the malicious code can do.

Just as a reminder, the first Monad technet webcast is happening today (9:30am PST to 11:00 am PST): http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032277850&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US.

The next one is next week, I’ll post a reminder then, as well.

I posted more about the Technet Webcasts here.

[Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.]

I recently stumbled upon this blog entry that expanded on a piece I wrote a few days ago: Command Line Shortcut for Repetitive Operations. (Hankatsu?)’s entry is in Japanese, so I don’t know what it says. In fact, for all I know, he or she could be making fun of me. In any case, the code included with the blog entry shows a quck way to download sequentially numbered files from the internet – such as File001.jpg, File002.jpg, etc. That’s a great use of the technique, and we can improve it even further with a useful script that acts as a download manager.

Josh Ledgard recently wrote an excellent post: Two Ideas to Cut off Duplicate Questions in Online Forums. It deals with a problem that clogs almost every technical community: some users treat the group as their personal support oracle. This happens in online forums, mailing lists, IRC, blogs, and more. Heck, I’d say that 70% of the questions posted to our internal Microsoft mailing lists could have been solved with a few minutes of research. Got an error message? Post something to the group. Computer looking at you funny? Post something to the group. Not sure what to have for lunch? Post something to the group.

For those of you that haven’t yet downloaded Monad through BetaPlace, you now have another option – Beta1 of the WinFX SDK!  This is not an NDA release, unlike BetaPlace.  Here’s a direct link to the download page.

“The WinFX SDK contains documentation, samples and tools designed to help you develop managed applications and libraries using WinFX, which is the set of next-generation managed APIs provided by Microsoft.”

If you decide to install only portions of the SDK, Monad is one of the products installed in the “Tools and Build Environment” part of the package.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day.  Wikipedia summarizes it as:

System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day or SAAD (as in Happy SAAD!), falls on the last Friday in July. It exists solely to show appreciation to sysadmins and people with other similar occupations.
[…]
Typical observances of this holiday are to present gifts to your Sysadmin. These gifts include chocolate, beer, wine, electronic toys, video games, and cake & ice cream.

So, reward your local SysAdmin!  Open your Monad prompt, type get-process a few times, then go buy yourself chocolate, beer, wine, electronic toys, video games, cake, and ice cream.