Brett Glass

About

Brett Glass has more than 20 years of experience designing, building,writing about, and crash-testing computer hardware and software. (A born'power user,' he often stresses products beyond their limits simply bytrying to use them.) A consultant, author, and programmer based inLaramie, Wyoming, Brett obtained his Bachelor of Science degree inElectrical Engineering from the Case Institute of Technology and his MSEEfrom Stanford. He plans networks, builds and configures servers, outlinestechnical strategies, designs embedded systems, hacks UNIX, and writeshighly optimized assembly language.During his rather eclectic career, Brett has written portions of the codeand/or documentation for such widely varied products as Borland's Pascal'toolboxes' and compilers, Living Videotext's ThinkTank, Cisco Systemsrouters and terminal servers, Earthstation diskless workstations, andTexas Instruments' TMS380 Token Ring networking chipset. His articleshave appeared in nearly every major computer industry publication.When he's not writing, consulting, speaking, or cruising the Web insearch of adventure, he may be playing the Ashbory bass, teachingInternet courses for LARIAT (Laramie's community network and Internetusers' group), cooking up a storm, or enjoying 'extreme'-ly spicy ethnicfood.To mail Brett, visit his Web form.

Microsoft Blames Virus Spread on Failure to Patch

Microsoft has blamed the explosive spread of the SQL Slammer worm on system adminstrators failure to patch their systems. But do users and administrators have good reason to avoid applying patches? In a short but provocative piece, OReilly and Associates editor Andy Oram explains that patches — especially the “mega-patches” posted by Microsoft — often […]

Xupiter Xhibits Xtupidity

Users all over the Net (including a few members of ExtremeTechs own staff) are hopping mad about a nasty bit of spyware called Xupiter. Xupiter is not only spyware but also “foistware” — that is, it installs itself on many users machines without asking permission. Xupiter “infects” Microsoft Internet Exploder via the browsers automatic ActiveX […]

TurboTax Test Results Uncover Real Problems

Editors Note: Weve updated this story based on new information from Intuit clarifying their privacy policy, along with their comments and our observations regarding use of forms mode in a “non-activated” copy of TurboTax. Many taxpayers throughout the United States have been upset to discover that Intuit has added digital rights management (DRM) — AKA […]

Warning: Any User Can Root Win NT, 2000

A serious hole in Windows NT and Windows 2000 allows any user (even “guest”) to gain complete control of the machine. This bug — called a “privilege escalation” vulnerability — is particularly worrisome, because it does more than open the system to attacks from its own users. It also amplifies the dangers associated with other […]