Some days ago I reviewed Smart UAC, a replacement for Vista’s UAC (User Account Control). Symantec is working on a similar tool, Norton Labs UAC (NUAC). The tool is currently in beta and I am not sure if this will be its final name. As with Smart UAC, the main feature of NUAC is its ability to suppress future prompts from the same action.

NUAC’s setup asks you if you want to submit UAC prompts. This means that NUAC will send metadata about your actions to Symantec. This metadata contains information such as the filenames and the hashes of the executables and the DLLs involved in the action. Symantec intends to build a white and a black list for UAC prompts. I think this is an interesting idea. This technique works very well for SPAM and I believe it could improve security significantly on Windows PCs. If people know that a UAC alert has never shown up somewhere else, they will be extra careful. Moreover, UAC will be less likely to get on our nerves. Note that the current beta doesn’t use these lists yet.

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Smart UAC is a free tool that replaces Vista’s UAC (User Account Control). It allows you to mark certain programs as safe, so you won’t be bothered with UAC prompts anymore in the future. You can also add applications to a deny list which will prevent them from being executed. Furthermore, Smart UAC has a built-in malware scanner.

One of the features that’s missing with Vista’s UAC is the ability to disable UAC prompts for particular applications. Sometimes you have to configure a Vista feature that requires admin privileges several times because you want to try out something. That’s when UAC can really get on your nerves. Even more annoying are auto-starting apps that initiate a UAC prompt whenever you boot up. Why should I need to confirm that a program is trustworthy more than once?

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CoreConfigurator was the first GUI-based management tool for Windows Server 2008 Server Core. It was still a free tool when I first blogged about it. Later, the publisher, SmartX, removed the tool. Now a new version is available that is only free for non-commercial use. I had a quick look at it today.

Installation of the tool is easy. Just copy coreconfigurator.msi to a local drive and launch it from the command line. The setup will copy CoreConfigurator by default to C:\Program Files\SmartX\Smart-X CoreConfigurator . To start the tool you have to navigate to this folder and launch “CoreConfigurator.”

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• Announcing December Cumulative Update for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Microsoft launches new forum: Microsoft Answers: http://answers.microsoft.com/ At the moment it is only about Vista.

As an IT pro, you probably know that deleting data from a hard drive doesn’t ensure that it can’t be recovered with an undelete utility even though you emptied the Windows Recycle Bin. Even if you format a hard disk data it can be recovered. Thus if you take old PCs out of service, you have to wipe all data from the hard disk with an erase tool such as Active@ Kill Disk to ensure that nobody is able to access sensitive data. In particular, PCs that have been used by admins can contain stored passwords or hash codes of passwords which might be in danger once a bad guy gets physical access to the hard drive.

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There are many great monitoring solutions that inform you whenever a server goes down. My favorite free monitoring tool is The Dude. The problem with these tools is that you have to run them on one of your corporate servers. Therefore, you won’t realize whether your website is unavailable on the Internet because of a faulty firewall configuration or external networking problems.

To make sure that your website is available not only on the intranet but also on the Internet, your monitoring solution has to be outside your organization’s network. This is where web monitoring services come in. They are not expensive, and some of them even have free plans. In this post I compare three free website monitoring services: SiteUptime, HostTracker, and BasicState.

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Windows Mobile 6.1 was released this year when Microsoft introduced Mobile Device Manager 2008 (MDM 2008). You might wonder why they didn’t just add more functionality to Configuration Manager. I think the reason is that mobile devices and PCs require different management features. Perhaps more functionality would have bloated Configuration Manager.

Microsoft just released MDM 2008 SP1. The main new features are:

• Multiple Instances: More than one instance of Mobile Device Manager
• PIN Reset
• Enrollment Auto Discovery: Matches the user with the correct MDM instance
• Scalability: MDM 2008 SP1 supports up to 40,000 users
• Windows Server 2008 support

You can download the evaluation edition here. There are also some downloads related to MDM SP1, for example, the Resource Kit tools. Marco Nielsen has all the links.

Microsoft acquired Whale Communications in 2006. Its SLL-based VPN appliance became Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG) 2007. Wikipedia gives a good overview of this product. Basically, it is a Web application firewall and endpoint security management solution offering more sophisticated features than the ISA Server. According to Microsoft, the new features of IAG 2007 SP2 are simplified deployment, interoperability for environments not running Windows, enhanced application support, improved user experience, and improved performance. You can download IAG 2007 SP2 or try it in a virtual machine.

SP1 for DPM 2007 has some interesting features. Most important is probably Hyper-V support. It is now available for download:

DPM 2007 SP1 (32bit)

DPM 2007 SP1 (64bit)

And here some more useful links:

What’s New in DPM 2007 Service Pack 1

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• Windows 7 6956 Preview - Nice video but a bit blurred.
• Firefox is most vulnerable Windows software in 2008 and most popular too.
• Microsoft sees ‘huge increase’ in IE attacks - Well, Firefox is not really better.
• Microsoft sends out Windows 7 Beta 1 invites - I am also a Windows 7 beta tester. I will have a look at it soon.
• Paul Thurrott thinks that Microsoft will release Windows Beta 1 today.
• KezNews.com has other information. They believe that Windows 7 Beta 1 will be available on Jan 5.
• Microsoft Windows 7 blog: Continuing our discussion on performance
• Google releases browser security handbook - quite comprehensive
• Working with Active Directory Snapshots in Windows Server 2008 - Comprehensive article by Daniel Petri.