Archive for category In The News

FoxPro ActiveX (FPOLE.OCX) Security Bug Fix

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft released several security updates yesterday — 11, to be exact. One of these patches updates a known issue with VFP regarding FPOLE.OCX. This is what was written in the Washington Post:

MS08-010 fixes a publicly disclosed ActiveX bug that affects Visual FoxPro users. Although hackers have already posted code showing how to exploit this vulnerability, the buggy ActiveX control is not included in Internet Explorer 7′s default list of controls, so the flaw should not affect most users.

You can read more information about this patch (and details about the vulnerability) here: ISS:

The Microsoft Visual FoxPro ActiveX control is vulnerable to a stack-based buffer overflow, caused by improper bounds checking by the FoxDoCmd function. By persuading a victim to visit a malicious Web page using Internet Explorer, a remote attacker could overflow a buffer and execute arbitrary code on the system with the privileges of the victim.

More info: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-010.mspx

Of course, MS recommends to get patched right away…

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VFP9 at Amazon.com for $99?

Anyone looking for a copy of VFP9 for a very good price?

I am seeing that there is at least one used copy selling for $99. So, here’s your chance!

(I’m not sure how long this will last, usually prices hover around $450 and $500 for used copies)

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Marketing for FoxPro

Who said Microsoft doesn’t care?

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W32.Ukuran.Worm attacks FoxPro DBFs

The W32.Ukuran.Worm, which is running wild currently in Vietnam, attacks FoxPro data files by truncating them and replacing them with spam data, according to the Bach Khoa Internet Security firm. The problem is estimated to be that 50,000 computers are infected or at risk.

What I find interesting about this article is that it appears there are quite a lot of FoxPro programs floating around in Vietnam! But why is there only 1 signature on MasFoxPro?

Anyway, the moral is (as it always is): make and keep reliable backups. I’ve got in the habit of dumping my tables to CSV (COPY TO filename TYPE CSV) as well as physically copying them as part of my backup routines (this is in additional to the normal backup software that runs on my client’s servers). The CSV file allows me to recover data that might otherwise be lost due to some extremely damaged file that can’t be recovered by other means. I’ve never needed to go back to the CSV, though.

The other moral is to keep your virus files up to date!

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FoxPro is sort of alive and well

In the article “Life After dBase“, authors Doug Barney and Thomas Caywood conduct a rather entertaining and informative interview with dBASE II creator C. Wayne Ratliff. If you get a chance, have a read. I found what he had to say about FoxPro most interesting:

Barney & Caywood: FoxPro is sort of alive and well. Microsoft isn’t promising anything beyond the next version, but that whole dBASE community is really loyal to the FoxPro product.
Ratliff: For good reason. … FoxPro is more rigorous in its data approach than dBASE II was. It’s — maybe user-friendly isn’t the right word — it’s just friendly. It’s easy to do stuff. It’s easy to make mistakes, and I think that’s what all the rigor is going toward, trying to protect people from themselves. You can just get down and dirty with the data in dBASE and to a slightly lesser degree with FoxPro. If you have to go in and write an access program, and I did a lot of Visual Basic access work three or four years ago, it’s another step harder. They just keep getting further and further away and more rigorous. There are things like data hiding and safe typing and object-orientation and all that stuff. It takes more programming effort to get something to happen than it did with dBASE.

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Fox Houses

I’d like a Fox house (heck, I’d settle for a den!).I love this article by Rob Paddock, “The House That Fox Built” featured in CoDe magazine. It’s a well-spirited, honest, and perhaps a bit on the sentimental side. Take a look!

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David Fulton

Some of you might know Dr. David Fulton as the guy who sold FP for Dos to Microsoft. (Imagine how different things would be today without that transaction!). Others might know him as having one of the worlld’s finest Stradivari and Guarneri violin collections!

More on Dr. Fulton.

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