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Believe it or not, both Windows XP and Mozilla/Firebird have new "critical" security vulnerablities that should be rushing off to patch before you do encounter a hostile website in your travels.

As reported in the headlines section yesterday, Microsoft's Windows XP and therefore many of the applications that run on it, are at risk from a critical flaw in the way it handles JPEG images.

I can guarantee you that right now there are hoards of nasty crackers busy writing exploits that they will inject into the relentless stream of porn that constitutes a significant volume of the Net's total traffic.

What's more, such a worm, once created, would likely be astoundingly successful -- after all -- the JPEG image format and porn go hand-in-hand and I suspect that many of those accessing such material don't have a clue about downloading or applying security patches.

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But it's not just porn, after all, virtually *every* web-page on the Net contains a multitude of JPEG images, any of which could potentially contain a worm/virus package ready to install keyloggers, spam relays and goodness knows what else.

So, if you haven't updated your WinXP for a few days -- go do it now!

But Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird users can't be smug right now either, since several critical flaws were announced in this suite of software.

Once again -- if you're using one of these products, go update before you get caught.

And speaking of getting caught -- my 17-year-old daughter's PC began bouncing packets off the firewall here the other day so I took a look to see what it was doing.

Sure enough, she had picked up a virus that could only have come from opening an unsolicited email attachment.

Hell's bells -- I've told her dozens of times not to download and open such attachments but, despite the fact she's using a webmail service, she went ahead and did it. It's easy to see now why these email-borne worms still manage to spread like wildfire. Some people (even those like my daughter who have been threatened with death for doing so) just can't resist the temptation of opening what claims to be an interesting picture or file.

And finally today -- it seems as if Telecom's UBS service is off the menu again, albeit temporarily.

Call me a skeptic, but I wonder if this is because they're trying to squeeze that last gram of cream out of the DSL marketplace before opening it up to competition?

Sure, there are technical problems (or so we're told) -- but how do we know that the amount of time it takes to fix those problems isn't more by the marketing department than by any technical constraints?

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