Archive for December, 2005
Friday, December 30th, 2005
The ARIES Rootkit Remover developed by Lavasoft provides the means to locate and permanently remove the Sony rootkit from the system and disable the rootkit’s ability to run once more after reboot. This standalone tool is a reliable, trustworthy, and safe way of removing the rootkit–unlike Sony’s own rootkit remover that has been known to cause blue screens.
This primarily protects consumers and ensures privacy. The tool is developed by Lavasoft in line with our common goals to steer computing environment towards better standards.
Download: ARIES Rootkit Remover
Posted in Antivirus | No Comments »
Friday, December 30th, 2005
Dirty tricks done dirt cheap
Hackers have developed a Trojan horse program that produces fake Google ads posing as the real thing. The as-yet unnamed Trojan replaces legitimate ads served via Google AdSense with promos for penis pills, porn sites and the like. The ads are, of course, not contextualised and infection would be relatively easy to detect.
Read more: The Register
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Friday, December 30th, 2005
Well if you believe everything on the Net then you might want to cruise over to eBay to bid on Bill and Melinda Gates’ 1990 Lexus. I have no idea if this is the genuine article or not but the person selling it sounds like they have sold stuff on the late night shopping channel.
Read more: bink.nu
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Thursday, December 29th, 2005
Orca Browser is a gecko based browser.
Orca Browser, is similar to Avant Browser. Dr. Orca is not based on Internet Explorer like Avant, but on Gecko, like Mozilla Firefox.
Download: Orca Browser 1.0 RC 3
Posted in Browsers | No Comments »
Thursday, December 29th, 2005
Apple Insider says that Intel is designing motherboards for Apple, while other reports claim that the contracts to manufacture the first Intel-powered iBooks and PowerBooks have been awarded
Speculation is growing about Apple’s partnership with Intel, ahead of next month’s MacWorld show.
According to a report on Apple Insider, a Web site that often publishes details of upcoming Apple products, Intel is currently developing the motherboard for the next Power Mac. Until now, Apple has developed its motherboards inhouse.
This follows the surprise announcement earlier this summer that Apple is dropping IBM’s PowerPC processors in favour of Intel chips.
Apple is expected to launch its first Intel-powered products in January 2006 at MacWorld, and Apple Insider claims that outsourcing the Power Mac motherboard to Intel will help Apple’s engineers to develop Intel-based iMacs, iBooks and Mac minis.
Full article: ZDNet UK
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Thursday, December 29th, 2005
This program is designed to speed up the researching of items in a HijackThis log once it has been posted onto a forum or from a log file.
It will run in the system tray and when a hotkey/shortcut key is pressed, it will copy the word that has been selected and automatically search for that word in places like Google, sysinfo.org or one of the offline databases depending on the hotkey that is pressed.
Download: HJTHotkey 3.054
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Thursday, December 29th, 2005
A new Trojan horse program was infecting PCs on Wednesday, exploiting a hole in Windows systems to sneak onto computers, then dropping adware or spyware or turning them into zombies, according to several Internet security companies.
The Trojan, dubbed Exploit-WMF (Windows Meta File), was rated a category 2 level risk, meaning it had the potential to continue to spread, said Dave Cole, director of security response at Symantec.
The exploit “is misusing a function in the WMF library in Windows,” dropping onto the machine a downloader Trojan “that pulls down its big brother, a more sophisticated Trojan” from a server on the Internet, he said.
“Then it might try to pull down adware, spyware or a bot program,” that can turn the computer into a zombie to be used for attacking other machines or sending spam, or just leave a hole on the computer through which sensitive data could be stolen, Cole said.
Kaspersky Lab rated the vulnerability “highly critical” and predicted that “new modifications of these programs may well appear in the near future.”
Full story: ZDNet News
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Thursday, December 29th, 2005
IM2 is a cross-platform instant messaging application that allows users to chat across all major IM networks ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and IRC. All conversations with IM2 are secured end-to-end by default with encryption, ensuring that conversations will never inadvertently fall into the hands of anyone but the participants of a conversation.
System Requirements: IM2 is compatible with Microsoft Windows 98, Millenium, 2000 and XP.
Download: IM2 2.0.0 RC8 (Build 268) | Homepage
Posted in instant messaging | No Comments »
Thursday, December 29th, 2005
Google is promising to keep its home page uncluttered and banner-free and its search results and keyword ad auction unbiased, despite paying $1 billion for a 5 percent stake in Time Warner’s Internet unit last week.
Instead, people may see small graphical ads on Google’s home and search results pages and banner ads on video and image pages, more exposure to Google’s Web crawler for America Online sites, prominent links on Google Video to AOL video content and lots of chat between the popular AOL Instant Messenger program and the nascent Google Talk.
The change for users “will be very slight, especially from the core Google experience,” Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, said in an interview with CNET News.com.
“There is a lot of fear that there will be banner ads now on the Google home page. We are not considering that at all,” she said. “There is concern about biased search results and we are not doing that.”
Accompanying existing text ads on the Google home page and search results pages, there may eventually be “small graphical elements”–smaller than thumbnail images–from AOL or other advertisers, Mayer said in the interview. Meanwhile, banner or display ads could appear on Google’s video and image search sites, she said.
“There will be no banner ads on the Google home page or Web search results pages,” she wrote in a Dec. 22 posting on the Official Google Blog. “There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.”
Full article: News.com
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Wednesday, December 28th, 2005
Pioneer Electronics announced its first Blu-ray Disc drive Tuesday, the BDR-101A, which will store as much as 25GB of data when it goes on sale in the first quarter of 2006.
The drive isn’t expected to be for everyone, Pioneer said. One particular market the company does hope to reach is so-called content creation professionals, who need to make sure BD-ROM movies work properly before they’re mass-produced for mainstream consumers.
Blu-ray drives, backed by an alliance led by Sony, are set to compete with HD-DVD drives that are expected to arrive at roughly the same time. Both drive types employ a blue laser that can read and write smaller areas of information, allowing more data to be squeezed onto a single disk. That’s important as high-definition video arrives.
Full article: ZDNet
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Wednesday, December 28th, 2005
SoftFTP is a windows FTP Client designed to upload / download your files.
Features
Execute the file transfer process from Windows Explorer
Easy Interface to select files
This version allows single file and folder for uploading and downloading
Encrypted login passwords to secure your file transfer
Double click on Local file will show the file size
Create, rename and delete local and remote files and folder
Supported Operating Systems: Windows 95 and higher
Download: SoftFTP 1.0
Posted in Web/internet | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005
Members of the “Big Three” television networks continue to discover what Web-savvy netizens have long known: the Internet is a great place to display your product, as well as messages from advertisers.
Now add CBS to that mix as the Tiffany Network prepares to offer free streaming video of a pair of comedy programs in its line-up, “Two and a Half Men” and “How I Met Your Mother” this week on the Yahoo Web site.
The half-hour shows will be available without commercials beginning today through Jan. 2, according to both companies.
It is the first time that Yahoo is streaming episodes of a CBS television series in their entirety.
The announcement signals yet again that television is getting serious about the Internet. With the worldwide broadband video market consumers are increasingly demanding that content be delivered to where it is convenient for them, most notably on their home computers.
CBS’s News division announced last summer that it would expand its CBSNews.com operation, “bypassing cable television in favor of the nation’s fastest-growing distribution system — broadband.”
Full article: internetnews.com
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Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
A virus masquerading as a new beta version of Microsoft’s MSN Messenger has begun circulating, antivirus company F-Secure said on its blog Tuesday.
The virus, which F-Secure calls Virkel.F, comes as a file called BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE that can be downloaded from a Web site. Running the program installs not a new MSN Messenger beta, but rather a virus that sends download links to a computer user’s MSN Messenger buddies. The virus falsely labels the link as “MSN Messenger 8 Working BETA.”
Read more: CNET News.com
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Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
MusicCubeOne is an attempt to do a simple yet neat looking mediaplayer for the Windows operating system. Though simple it holds the most required functions for handling and playing music in an easy maner.
The playlist gives a good and intuitive overview of the loaded files with information on title, album, artist and playing length when available. Rearranging is easily done be dragging the items using the mouse.
Files can be added using a file browser dialog designed to show extended information from the listed music files. This is similar to the information shown later on in the playlist. Adding files can alternately be done using drag’n'drop from the Windows Explorer or folders.
Build arround the BASS Audio Library, MusicCubeOne plays the most common file formats currently available, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Windows Media Audio. Also supported through plugins for the BASS Sound System is Free Lossless Audio Codec, OptimFROG, Monkey’s Audio and more. Please note that playback of Windows Media Audio requries that the Window Media Format modules are installed.
The userinterface is constructed using a small skinning engine allowing a completely custom look. One standard skin is bundled to start with. More skins may come later depending on the available developer resources.
MusicCubeOne includes multilingual support, allowing it instantly to change all texts in the user interface to a different language. Only a few languages are available a the moment, additional languages can be added given some help for translating the texts.
Download: MusicCubeOne 1.31
Posted in Audio/Media/Video | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
Dell’s Australian operation has ruled out following the lead of its British counterpart in the near future and shipping the Mozilla Firefox Web browser on computers.
“There are currently no plans to ship Firefox on desktops or notebooks in Dell Asia Pacific at this time,” a spokesperson for the PC manufacturer told ZDNet Australia yesterday.
The spokesperson was responding to a Firefox developer’s confirmation of reports that Dell has started including Firefox with its desktop machines in the United Kingdom.
“It’s true that Firefox is bundled with Dell in the UK,” wrote Firefox co-creator Blake Ross on his blog this week.
Read more: ZDNet Australia
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Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
Year in review: A seemingly endless barrage of variants of the Bagle and MyTob worms surfaced this year, but what really pummeled e-mail servers around the globe were two Sober offshoots.
The first hit in May, and the second clogged e-mail in-boxes and servers in November. Microsoft’s Hotmail and MSN e-mail services had so much trouble dealing with the infected spam that messages sent to members faced an unspecified delay. Some antivirus companies predicted there will be another Sober onslaught on Jan. 5.
To the surprise of some experts, Sober’s tricks to get recipients to open the malicious e-mail and attachment worked. In May, the e-mail promised a prize of free tickets to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, while in November, the bait was a Paris Hilton video or a purported FBI e-mail.
There weren’t many headline-grabbing worm or virus outbreaks in 2005, but Zotob, which caused outages at CNN, The New York Times and ABC, got a lot of attention. Unlike Sober, which propagated via e-mail, Zotob spread via networks using a security flaw in Microsoft Windows.
Full article: ZDNet News
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Monday, December 26th, 2005
French Parliament approves proposal
France could become the first country to pass a law broadly permitting free downloads of copyright content from the internet for private use.
In a move that could thwart the entertainment industry’s attempts to seek legal sanctions for copyright violations, French Parliament members voted 30 to 28 on Wednesday night to accept an amendment proposing such a move.
Attached to a broader copyright law proposal, the amendment - roughly translated - reads: “Authors cannot forbid the reproductions of works that are made on any format from an online communication service when they are intended to be used privately and when they do not imply commercial means directly or indirectly.”
In short, that language could “open the way to the legalization of peer-to-peer” downloading of copyright music and movies in the nation of about 8 million internet users, Jean-Baptiste Soufron, a legal counsel with the Association of Audionauts told silicon.com sister site CNET News.com. The French advocacy organization has represented approximately 100 clients accused of sharing files illegally.
Full story: silicon.com
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Monday, December 26th, 2005
SpyDefense protects your computer against annoying, and harmful software such as Spyware, Adware, Trojan horses, etc. SpyDefense is anti-spyware software that prides itself on a very user friendly environment. SpyDefense utilizes our proprietary technologies to provide advanced spyware scanning, and removal quickly and precisely. Combining our unique scanning technology with user friendly controls and interface, provides a complete spyware software package for users of all skill levels.
Features
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Scan system memory, registry and file system
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Tracking cookies scan
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ IE hijacking protections
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Real Time Protection (system files, registry, IE)
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Immunize functionality (IE security, FW functionality..)
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Automatic updates
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Scheduler
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Quarantine
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ History
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Express / Advanced mode
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Community
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ Support
Download: SpyDefense 0.9.5.118 Beta
Posted in AntiSpyware | No Comments »
Monday, December 26th, 2005
Mozilla is searching for new film-making talent as it launches a competition to come up with the best adverts for Firefox
Get the cameras ready to roll. Firefox is heading for Tinseltown as Mozilla prepares to give its open source browser the star treatment and calls for budding, enlightened filmmakers to start working on a screen treatment.
After announcing last month that it was embarking on its biggest-ever marketing drive, aimed at getting “thousands or tens of thousands” of videos out promoting Firefox 1.5, the company said on Thursday that it was launching a campaign to get the best emerging filmmakers working on the open source trail.
The Firefox Flicks Ad Contest calls upon “professional, student and aspiring filmmakers” to create “innovative, broadcast-quality 30-second commercials” for Firefox.
Full article: ZDNet UK
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