Calling all AOL employee bloggers!

November 23, 2005 By Leave a Comment

In the midst of the recent AOL Journals banner-ad debacle, Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs, Inc. fame, who is now a member of the AOL team) asks, “Where are all the AOL bloggers?” He’s compiling a list, hoping to uncover an AOL exec.’s blog in the process. He’s even offered to get an AOL exec. blogging with their own vanity domain and fancy design as incentive!

If you’re an AOL employee blogger, go and leave a comment and self-identify! Microsoft, Yahoo, Google … they’ve all got tons of bloggers. Where’s AOL’s bloggers? There have got to be a few dozen of us, at least, right? Right?

Filed Under: Blogging Leave a Comment

Remote arbitrary code execution vulnerability in MSIE. Anyone surprised?

November 22, 2005 By Leave a Comment

This article at eWEEK.com is the reason why I’ve switched to using the Mozilla Firefox web browser for everything except a few web applications at work which only work with MSIE.

Read the article, but the gist of it is that a fully up-to-date Windows system, if browsing a malicious site containing the exploit, can be made to execute arbitrary code that the attacker has intended on your system. Quoting from the article:

The proof-of-concept exploit, which is available from the FrSirt site, currently launched the Windows Calculator (calc.exe) but can be easily modified by malicious hackers.

What I’d really like to see is someone modifying the proof-of-concept exploit to instead fetch a copy of Firefox, perform an unattended install of it, then rename IEXPLORE.EXE (the MSIE executable) to something else and replacing it with a copy of FIREFOX.EXE. Of course, I’m sure anyone who did such a thing could go to jail because there’s no distinction made between “good hacking” and “bad hacking” in our lovely legal system. You know, the same legal system that lets killers walk free but makes hackers go to jail.

Filed Under: Geeking out Leave a Comment

What do you do with funds left in your HCFSA account?

November 21, 2005 By Leave a Comment

This year, I decided to take advantage of a benefit that work offers: the Health Care Flexible Spending Account (HCFSA). Basically, you set aside pre-tax dollars to pay for certain otherwise non-reimbursed medical costs which you pay for out of your HCFSA account instead of using after-tax dollars. Without going into detail about taxes, the short explanation is that it’s always better to spend pre-tax dollars than after-tax dollars, so the HCFSA is good, in general.

The trick with the HCFSA is that you have to decide, up front at the start of the year, how much money to put into the account. This isn’t so bad if you already know what your yearly medical costs are, because you know approximately how much you spend. When I enrolled, I didn’t really have a good feel for how much we would be spending this year, so I estimated as best I could. The snag about the HCFSA is that at the end of the year, whatever funds haven’t been spent are forfeited! Yes, it’s “use it or lose it” so it’s important to avoid over-estimating, but under-estimating means not taking full advantage of the tax benefit the HCFSA affords you.

Today, I called to get the remaining balance in the account and it’s just shy of $770. I do have some medical expenses that I can file reimbursements for through the HCFSA which should be around $700, but what do I do about the remaining balance? Should I go and buy a ton of over-the-counter medicines and file for reimbursement to flatten out the account?

Do you have a HCFSA? What do you do at the end of the year with funds that are left in it? Is it better to just under-estimate to ensure there’s never a surplus in the account which you might forfeit when you haven’t spent it?

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November 17, 2005 By Leave a Comment

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