Archive for February, 2006
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006
Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab have recovered from an error that caused significant e-mail troubles for some users of Microsoft’s Antigen e-mail security software.
Antigen users started receiving updates for their Kaspersky Lab antivirus engine again on Tuesday. Microsoft and Kaspersky had put those on hold after a flawed update caused trouble last week, representatives for Microsoft and Kaspersky said Tuesday.
“As far as both parties are concerned, the problems have been addressed and its business as usual,” said Steve Orenberg, president of Kaspersky’s North American operations.
The problems left some people without fully functional e-mail systems for as long as 10 hours. The culprit was a routine update to the Kaspersky antivirus engine, which was distributed early Thursday morning. Microsoft in the afternoon offered the previous version of the engine for download to solve the problem.
“As soon as we were aware that our customers were experiencing e-mail problems due to the Kaspersky update, we escalated through the appropriate channels across Kaspersky and Microsoft, and were able to define, test and provide a resolution,” the Microsoft representative said in a statement.
Full story: CNET News.com
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Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
A Web designer called Paul Dell says the American computer manufacturer is taking him to court because he created dellwebsites.com
Paul Dell, a Web site designer based in Minorca, claimed on Tuesday that he is being sued in France by US computer manufacturer Dell.
Mr Dell told ZDNet UK that Dell is suing him because he launched a Web design site in April 2001 called dellwebsites.com.
According to Mr Dell, the computer manufacturer accuses him of “trademark infringement, unfair competition and acts of parasitism, to the detriment of the American company Dell,” which itself used to run a site called Dellhost, a hosting services company aimed at SMEs.
However, Dell the computer manufacturer was unable to confirm whether it was taking Mr Dell to court.
Full story: ZDNet UK
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Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
The Core Pocket Media Player is an open-source media player for Palm OS and Windows CE/Windows Mobile based devices.
This open source media player project is discontinued.
Download: The Core Pocket Media Player 0.72 RC1
Posted in Audio/Media/Video, Pocket PC/PDA | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
An honest mistake or a glimpse of things to come?
Microsoft has hinted that Vista will debut in up to eight versions.
Microsoft revealed the names of the six core and two non-Media Player variants of the SKUs in a posting on its website but took down the information shortly after.
The website said the six versions will be Windows Starter 2007, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate.
Both Windows Vista Home Basic and Windows Vista Business will also be available in an ‘N’ version, which comes bundled with Media Player. The EU stipulated in late 2004 that Microsoft was to provide versions of its operating system without Media Player included, as part of the settlement to the long-running antitrust case.
Microsoft, however, denied the list of eight stock keeping units was definitive.
Full article: silicon.com
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Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
Heise online is reporting that a new critical vulnerability for Mac OS X has been discovered and it appears to have ramifications beyond the Safari brows (thanks to SANS and SunbeltBLOG for the link). The problem is severe because a user simply needs to visit a malicious website and shell scripts with launch with zero user interaction!
The cause for this problem is that OS X will automatically launch shell scripts (even inside a ZIP file) when it’s missing certain syntax at the beginning of the script.
Full article: blogs.zdnet.com
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Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
Take the full control of your SendTo right-click menu and customize it by organizing better its shortcuts.
Features
You can add new programs’ or folders’ shortcuts in it and then you can run, copy, move or delete them.
You have the ability to create subfolders, which gives you a less confused future SendTo right-click navigation.
An included Backup Option makes your experiments in this System’s Folder, more secure.
With Drops Collector finally (SendTo Commander’s Drag+Drop support), you can collect programs or folders from everywhere in your computer, and send them as shortcuts directly to your SendTo right-click menu.
Popups and Alerts guides you whenever it’s necessary.
System Requirements : Win98/Me/2000/XP
Download: SendTo Commander 1.2 | Homepage
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Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
Commerce Server 2006 Beta 1 ready for download
Microsoft has announced plans to deliver the beta version of its Commerce Server 2006 .Net-based e-commerce offering.
The software giant said that Commerce Server 2006 will allow customers to link e-commerce systems to existing line-of-business applications and trading partners through integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006.
The application also supports integration with back-end systems from SAP and Oracle.
In addition, Commerce Server 2006 will offer a new production-ready starter site to help customers build e-commerce systems based on web services and service-oriented architectures.
Full article: vnunet.com
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Monday, February 20th, 2006
The Cloud cuts the wires in the Square Mile
The City of London has signed an agreement to blanket the square mile with wi-fi access.
The network, installed and managed by The Cloud, will go live shortly and cover the entire City in the next six months. The blanket wi-fi will provide city workers with wireless internet access for laptops outside of traditional venues such as coffee shops, as well as on the move connectivity for PDAs and mobiles.
The City is intending to hide the masts in existing street furniture, such as lampposts and street signs. The network will be open to any service provider.
Read more: silicon.com
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Monday, February 20th, 2006
Monkey’s Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music. Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or lqt that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music. That means it always sounds perfect exactly the same as the original. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. (think of it as a beefed-up Winzip for your music) The other great thing is that you can always decompress your Monkey’s Audio files back to the exact, original files. That way, you’ll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you’ll always be able to recreate the original music CD if something ever happens to yours.
Features:
?• Efficient (fast and great compression) - Monkey’s Audio is highly optimized and highly efficient
• Perfect sound - absolutely no quality loss, meaning it sounds perfect and decompresses perfect (it’s lossless!)
• Media Center, Winamp, and more support - supported by many popular players and rippers
• Easy - the Windows environment interface is both powerful and easy to use
• Free - Monkey’s Audio is completely free!
• Error detection - Monkey’s Audio incorporates redundant CRC’s to ensure proper decompression of data (errors never go unnoticed)
• Tagging support - Monkey’s Audio uses its own extremely flexible APE Tags so you can easily manage and catalogue your Monkey’s Audio collection.
• External coder support - you can use Monkey’s Audio as a front-end for all of your encoding needs
• Freely available source code, simple SDK and non-restrictive licensing - other developers can easily use Monkey’s Audio in their own programs — and there are no evil restrictive licensing agreements
Download: Monkey’s Audio 4.01 Beta 2 (Windows 9x/2000/NT/XP)
Posted in Audio/Media/Video | No Comments »
Monday, February 20th, 2006
Silly Mare
Internet ne’er do wells have created a Linux worm which uses a recently discovered vulnerability in XML-RPC for PHP, a popular open source component used in many applications, to attack vulnerable systems. The Mare-D worm also tries to take advantage of a security flaw in Mambo to spread. If successful, the worm installs an IRC-controlled backdoor on compromised systems.
Read more: The Register
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Monday, February 20th, 2006
Bart’s PE Builder helps you build a “BartPE” (Bart Preinstalled Environment) bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation/setup CD, very suitable for PC maintenance tasks.
It will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800×600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.
This will replace any Dos bootdisk in no time!
PE Builder is not a Microsoft product and does not create Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Environment (”Windows PE”). Using PE Builder does not grant you a license to Microsoft Windows PE or to use the Windows XP or Server 2003 binaries in a manner other than stated in the End-User License Agreement included in your version of Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. Microsoft has not reviewed or tested PE Builder and does not endorse its use.
The PE Builder program (pebuilder.exe) runs on Windows 2000/XP/2003/BartPE. It does not run on Windows NT4/ME/9x.
Download: Bart’s PE Builder 3.1.10a
Posted in Windows | No Comments »
Monday, February 20th, 2006
Google Desktop 3 Beta contains a security risk for businesses, says Gartner, and Google agrees
Businesses have been warned by research company Gartner that the latest Google Desktop Beta has an “unacceptable security risk”.
Google Desktop allows indexing and searching of PCs’ hard drives, and sharing of information through a feature called Search Across Computers. This enables users to search for information within a network such as an intranet.
The risk to enterprises, according to Gartner, lies in how this shared information is pooled by Google. The data is transferred to a remote server, where it is stored and can then be shared between users for up to 30 days.
Gartner said in a report on Thursday that the “mere transport [of data] outside the enterprise will represent an unacceptable security risk to many enterprises”, as intellectual property could be transported out of the business.
Google told ZDNet UK on Monday that it recognised the risk, and recommended that companies take action. “We recognise that this is a big issue for enterprise. Yes, it’s a risk, and we understand that businesses may be concerned,” said Andy Ku, European marketing manager for Google.
Full article: ZDNet UK
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Sunday, February 19th, 2006
ACE Mega Codec Pack is a free collection of codecs, filters and tools.
Download: ACE Mega Codec Pack 6.03
Posted in Audio/Media/Video | No Comments »
Saturday, February 18th, 2006
MS caught not evildoing again…
Who’d be a Microsoft? There you are, strolling along minding your own business and the next thing you know you’re in a top level conspiracy with the UK security forces to put a back door into Windows Vista. Or so, anyway, the web bush telegraph would have us believe. But disorientating as we find it to be leaping to Microsoft’s defence twice in one day, we at The Register feel compelled to point out that the story is somewhat exaggerated, going on entirely untrue.
The Vista back door story originated at (tut) the BBC, with a report claiming that Professor Ross Anderson was urging the government “to look at establishing ‘back door’ ways of getting around encryptions”, and quoting a Home Office spokesman as saying: “The Home Office has already been in touch with Microsoft concerning this matter and is working closely with them.” Which we do accept sounds a bit suspicious - particularly if you haven’t checked what it was that Prof Anderson originally said, and why.
Full story: The Register
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Saturday, February 18th, 2006
Accessibility advocates have accused Google and Yahoo of shutting out the blind.
The door is still closed.
Now, an Internet petition is asking Google to provide an accessible alternative to the visual verification scheme that currently locks the blind and visually impaired out of participation in all the company’s services.
“Google’s implementation of word verification currently denies us access to such important features as the ability to create accounts and blogs, change our passwords, and post comments to most blogs that use the Blogger service,” the petition says.
Darrell Shandrow, editor of the Blind Access Journal, which is built on Google’s Blogger platform, calls his effort “open source advocacy.” More than 3,500 people have signed it; the goal is 10,000. Shandrow plans to print a copy and send it via certified mail to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Many Web sites use “captchas,” those squiggly letters that users must decipher and type into a box before they register for a service. They’re designed to block automated bots that sign up for e-mail addresses and then use them to send spam.
The problem is they put a barrier in front of blind people, too. Many vision-impaired computer users employ screen readers that convert text and image tags into audio. The speech simulator can read menus and the names or descriptions of navigational elements such as buttons and links. But screen readers are stymied by captchas.
Full article: internetnews.com
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Friday, February 17th, 2006
Two examples of computer code that exploit a flaw in Windows Media Player have become available only days after Microsoft released a patch to fix the bug.
The “proof-of-concept” exploits that take advantage of a flaw in the media player were posted on the Web over the past couple of days. The flaw, rated “critical” by Microsoft, could enable an attacker to seize control of a vulnerable computer system.
The appearance of proof-of concept code is usually a sign that actual attacks are not far off. Microsoft, when it released its patch Tuesday, urged users to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.
Read more: ZDNet News
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Friday, February 17th, 2006
Here’s two IT pros who certainly think so…
Google Desktop’s new search-across-computers feature could put sensitive data at risk and violate US federal data-privacy regulations, according to IT administrators at a public university and a large manufacturing company.
Both are banning it from their networks.
Last week, Google unveiled Google Desktop 3, a free, downloadable program that includes an option to let users search across multiple computers for files. To do that, the application automatically stores copies of files, for up to a month, on Google servers. From there, copies are transferred to the user’s other computers for archiving. The data is encrypted in transmission and while stored on Google servers.
The Electronic Privacy Foundation urged consumers to boycott the software, warning that Google could be forced to turn over the data to the government if subpoenaed, even if the data is stored on Google servers only temporarily.
Full story: silicon.com
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Thursday, February 16th, 2006
Users of the Mac OS X system are for the first time the target of a malicious code, security experts warn.
The virus, named OSX/Leap-A, spreads via the instant messaging iChat program as a file called latestpics.tgz and attempts to spread to contacts on an infected user’s buddy list.
According to Sophos, when the latestpics.tgz file is opened it disguises itself with a JPEG graphic icon to fool people into thinking it is harmless.
Experts said that they are still analysing the virus and its effect as there have been viruses for earlier versions of Macintosh but this is the first one ever for Mac OS X.
Sophos claims that the recent increase in popularity of Mac computers might be the reason for this attack.
Full article: Web User
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Thursday, February 16th, 2006
602PC SUITE is an alternative Office Suite that uses the same document formats (.DOC & .XLS) as Microsoft?Ç¬Æ Office and has the same look and feel.
Export to Adobe Acrobat?Ç¬Æ PDF (Portable Document Format) directly from any 602PC SUITE application. Convert documents, spreadsheets and digital photos to this widely accepted format for quick and easy online distribution.
This integrated solution for creating, editing and viewing documents & spreadsheets is compatible with Microsoft?Ç¬Æ Word (9x/2000/XP/2003) and Microsoft?Ç¬Æ Excel. You will be surprised that many features work in EXACTLY the same way as Microsoft?Ç¬Æ Office.
602PC SUITE provides a complete solution for any digital photo enthusiast. Easily edit, restore, enhance, print, present and share your photos. Organize your photos into virtual albums and simply publish these albums to the web, a photo CD or e-mail.
Affordable multi-user licensing starts at only three (3) users. Each multi-user license purchased for an organization allows installation on an employee’s home computer! A simple, one-time software registration is required for the entire organization.
Download: 602PC SUITE 4.2.06.0213
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