WASHINGTON – Multiple congressional computers have been hacked by people working from inside China, lawmakers said Wednesday, suggesting the Chinese were seeking lists of dissidents.

Two congressmen, both longtime critics of Beijing’s record on human rights, said the compromised computers contained information about political dissidents from around the world. One of the lawmakers said he’d been discouraged from disclosing the computer attacks by other U.S. officials.

Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., said four of his computers were compromised beginning in 2006. New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said two of the computers at his global human rights subcommittee were attacked in December 2006 and March 2007.

Wolf said that following one of the attacks, a car with license plates belonging to Chinese officials went to the home of a dissident in Fairfax County, Va., outside Washington and photographed it.

These kinds of security breaches are not only preventable, they are inexcusable.

It’s easy to blame the attacker, but real problem lies at home. Congressional computers should be some of the best-secured PCs on the Internet. The fact that they apparently aren’t indicates a problem with Congress, not with China. I don’t know whether the blame lies with lax or crappy admins, or with ignorant congresscritters who inevitably will get their way when they whine, “but this anti-virus thingy makes it too hard!”. If action on the floor of the House and Senate to address the latter is necessary, then the more technically-sophisticated members of Congress need to get busy.

Slashdot post here.

I’m not sure if this is a bug or a hardware issue, but I’m suspecting the latter, as I’m the only one I know of (so far) that is seeing this. My first step is to monitor the temperature of the video card with ATITool while playing. (I’m not overclocking the card, just monitoring the temperature.) The next time it glitches, I want to know if the card is overheating.

Also funny is what happens to Steam after quitting a session of TF2 that’s been glitching. As you can see, Steam’s glitching too!

Hopefully I’ll turn something up on this. In the meantime, I’ll post more screen captures as I manage to get them.

Update: Followup post here.

As it turns out, I received an email from Symantec recently, advertising that the latest and greatest Norton Internet Security 2008 was available as a free upgrade. So, apparently, once Norton 2008 was released, Symantec stopped supporting 2007! Downloading and installing the free upgrade solved the subscription problem, and all is once again happy in Norton-land.

Now, this rather annoys me. Free upgrades are well and good, but forcing the user to upgrade to receive continued support is, to put it lightly, quite rude. Perhaps I wouldn’t have minded so much if the original error message said something like, “Subscription Problem: Please upgrade to Norton 2008 (it’s free).” But no, all it said was “subscription problem”, which left me scratching my head quite unnecessarily.

The user manual — a 410 page PDF file, yuck — contains this nugget of wisdom on page 228:

When you have finished reviewing performace data you can save the session file.

1. Close the session file window in Visual Studio. DevPartner prompts you to save the session file.
2. Click OK to accept the default file name and location.

DevPartner saves session files as part of the active solution. They appear in the DevPartner Studio virtual folder in Solution Explorer.

Telling the user to close an unsaved file in order to save it is very bad advice! Closing an unsaved file is a destructive operation, i.e. it will blow away your unsaved data. Just because most well-behaved programs will prompt the user to save first is no excuse for telling the user to close a file in order to save it.

So, what happened when I closed my profiling session without saving it? Mind you, this was done as an experiment, purely in the interests of science, or something. BLAM! Visual Studio and DevPartner dutifully vaporized an hour’s worth of work without a single hint of a save dialog.

Way to go, Compuware.

The latest patch introduced the “Infantry Only” option. This loads a map without vehicles. This can be fun if everyone on the server squads up. However, it’s really only appropriate for smaller city maps. Large maps like Wake Island are just too big to traverse on foot, as I discovered last night.

Many servers are running Infantry Only these days. Almost every server running Karkand (at least servers with players logged in) is in Infantry Only mode. In fact, last night I decided I wanted to play with vehicles for a while, but I simply couldn’t find a server that had players logged in, and was not infantry only. This was quite a bummer.

Since the introduction of Battlefield 2142, it seems that most players have abandoned Battlefield 2. This is probably a good thing overall, since the people left playing Battlefield 2 regularly tend to be better and more polite players. There also tends to be less rude namecalling, teamkilling, and other shenanigans since most of the asshole kids are, presumably, playing 2142.

However, this smaller cadre of players seem to prefer Infantry Only. And, the smaller number of players overall leads to a lot of empty servers. (You’d think that with the smaller number of players, the account servers would run faster. Nope, they take FOREVER.)

With Team Fortress 2 and Quakewars on the horizon, I suspect that our little clan will move on from Battlefield 2 pretty soon.

This problem happens whether the Firewall Processing is set to “Automatically decide what to do” or “Ask me what to do”. Neither setting works in a Standard user account:

• “Automatically decide” doesn’t have write access to the Program Control list, so Norton can’t unblock a program even if it wants to;
• “Ask me” doesn’t ask.

The upshot is that a “Standard user” account eventually becomes unusable (for Internet access) because Norton’s firewall won’t change its settings to “re-allow” an updated Firefox or IE to access the Internet.

To fix a blocked program in a Standard user account, one must access Norton’s Program Control settings (Start -> All Programs -> Norton Internet Security -> Norton Internet Security -> Settings -> Personal Firewall -> Configure -> Program Control). Note that this requires an administrator account password after clicking Configure. Click the program you wish to allow access to (Firefox, IE, etc). Yes, it is probably listed with an Access level of Auto or Allow, but Norton is lying to you — it’s actually blocked, and will remain blocked even if you fiddle with the Access setting. Note the path to the program’s .exe file (i.e. C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe). Click Remove, then click Yes to confirm. Now, click Add, navigate to the program’s .exe file (you just noted that path earlier), and double-click the executable file (note that Vista might hide the “.exe” part of the filename). Choose “Allow”, then click OK. Finally, click OK (or Apply) to dismiss the main Options window.

The other potential fix is to run an Administrator account rather than a Standard user account. In an Administrator account, both “Automatically decide” and “Ask me” will work correctly. Note the irony: a security program forcing the user to use an Administrator account, which is less secure than a Standard user account! This might be even worse than McAfee using ActiveX controls in its interface. But at least you won’t have to “fix” the Program Control every every time your browser updates itself.

MySpace is an example of what happens when you release a half-assed, hacked together demo to the world instead of a fully-designed and tested product (i.e. something you actually thought through beforehand). You have to keep fixing it, and yet it never works quite right all the time.

I recently discovered that middle-clicking was broken in Firefox 2 on the our Windows Vista box. We use a Logitech bluetooth mouse with this machine. It turns out that the problem is with Logitech’s SetPoint mouse software. Fortunately, it is a simple misconfiguration that is easy to fix.

First, you need to get to Logitech’s SetPoint control panel. This should be accessible through your Mouse control panel. (In the Control Panel, make sure you’re in Classic View.)

Click the SetPoint Settings tab. This will close the Mouse control panel, and open the SetPoint software. Under Select Button, click on the entry labeled 3. It will probably be set to “AutoScroll”. That’s the problem.

Now, under Select Task, click Other. In the Select Task dialog that appears, choose Middle Button. Then, OK to dismiss the dialog. Back in the SetPoint program, click Apply to apply the settings change, then OK to close SetPoint.

Clicking with the scroll wheel should now behave properly.

Hopefully these won’t be common.

Of course, it would have been cooler if Firefox hadn’t crashed…