Two serious security holes in two weeks is a very bad thing, especially because the second one sounds a lot like crying wolf. Last week’s hole had security experts saying, “This is pretty bad, but it could be worse.” From the sound of things, this week’s is worse.

A flaw in how Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange handle enriched text can be used to hack computers simply by sending a malformed e-mail message. Apparently all you need to do is receive one of these messages and you’re hacked. The hole hasn’t been exploited yet and Microsoft already released a patch, so visit www.windowsupdate.com and install it ASAP.

Lots of people are quite happy with Outlook, but to me it’s a bloated, overly complicated and insecure piece of shit. I use Thunderbird. Eudora is also nice, but it won’t translate my spam mail into Swedish Chef English like Thunderbird.

The firmware upgrade that was released yesterday causes files encoded with Videora to stutter and lose the audio. You can restart the video to regain the audio, but after a few seconds it happens all over again, making the videos impossible to watch.

Dammit, over vacation I re-encoded all my videos with Videora. The “House Tour” video stutters, as do lot of the TV shows I’ve downloaded. The culprit is probably the x264 open source encoder, which is mush faster than Apple’s, probably because it doesn’t do as much error checking.

I haven’t been able to find a working link to the firmware updater from 11/2005, so your best bet is to dig up the CD-ROM that came with your iPod.