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CyberArtisans Web Developers Newsletter )
Keeping you up to date on the web July 2008 Special Issue
In this issue
  • Be Ready for Windows XP SP3, Coming This Week
  • Important Windows Patch Chokes ZoneAlarm

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    Welcome to a special July 2008 issue of the CyberArtisans newsletter!

    Each month we try to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.


    		Be Ready for Windows XP SP3, Coming This Week

    According to Microsoft, Windows XP Service Pack 3 becomes part of Microsoft's automatic updates this week. We believe it is safe to install this Service Pack as long as you prepare properly.

    There are two things you should do to prepare for this:

    1. Back up your system (this is something you should be doing daily anyway).
    2. If your system uses an AMD processor, you should download and install KB 953356 from Microsoft support before you install SP3.

    		Important Windows Patch Chokes ZoneAlarm

    You may have read in the newspapers about an important security patch that was recently made to many components of the Internet. That patch addressed a security hole in the Domain Name Service, or DNS. The DNS allows you to type in a URL that's easy for you to remember (like http://www.cyberartisans.com) and converts it to something that's easy for the Internet to use (like http://208.249.127.126).

    As part of that patching process, Microsoft recently issued a patch for Windows. Unfortunately, some systems running ZoneAlarm firewalls (which includes their Security Suite) suddenly found they could not access the Internet.

    If you encounter that problem, the short-term fix is to lower the ZoneAlarm firewall slider to Medium. The long-term fix is to download the latest version of ZoneAlarm. This is all documented by the ZoneAlarm folks here.

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