Archive for October, 2006
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
Microsoft’s voluntary scheme for Office licensing checks is about to become mandatory
After first introducing a voluntary way for users to ensure that they only used licensed and legal copies of Microsoft Office products, the software giant announced on Monday that it is about to make scheme mandatory.
The move means that users who are caught using software that can’t be proved to be 100 percent legal won’t get access to add-ons and updates from Microsoft.
As of Friday, Office Online templates downloaded from within Microsoft Office System 2007 applications have to be validated. As of January 2007, Office Update also must be validated by Office Genuine Advantage (OGA). The OGA scheme was introduced in April as a pilot.
Users who are denied access to the applications because their versions of Office do not pass a validation test will need to prove that their software is valid before they can proceed.
Full story: ZDNet UK
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Friday, October 27th, 2006
Automatic updates to come next week
Microsoft has logged over three million downloads for its Internet Explorer 7 browser in the first four days after the application was launched, according to Tony Chor, a Microsoft group program manager.
Users currently have to manually download the applications. On 1 November Microsoft will start distributing the applications to all Windows XP users as a high priority update.
Read more: vnunet.com
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Friday, October 27th, 2006
Starting today, you don’t have to provide free internet access to everyone that wanders into your wireless zone. myWIFIzone is a fantastic new software application that blocks them - for free! myWIFIzone lets you decide who gets blocked and who doesn’t with a click of the mouse. You don’t need to wade through tedious router logs or set up complicated firewalls. myWIFIzone gives you real-time alerts, event logging and intruder blocking right from your PC or laptop.
myWIFIzone does not include any hidden software such as adware, malware or similar programs.
Download: myWIFIzone 3 Windows 2000 or XP
Posted in Web/internet | No Comments »
Friday, October 27th, 2006
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touch the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG).
- 100% Free for Home Users
Download: FastStone Image Viewer 2.8 Portable
Posted in Portable Apps | No Comments »
Friday, October 27th, 2006
First ‘nerd’ in space, he says
The man who led the development of Microsoft’s Word and Excel programs is about to be sent into space.
This is not, as you might surmise, a one way trip paid for by hacked-off accountants and people who looked like they “might be writing a letter”, but a voluntary trip he’s paying for himself.
In fact, Charles Simonyi, 58, is set to become the 450th person in space, and the fifth amateur cosmonaut to fly to the International Space Station (ISS). He also claims to be the first nerd heading for orbit.
He is slated to take off on 9 March, 2007, provided he completes his training and passes all the medical tests.
Simonyi told the BBC that he had three goals: “One of them is to advance civilian spaceflight, the second to assist space station research, and the third to involve kids in space sciences,” he said.
Full story: The Register
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Friday, October 27th, 2006
Browser Hijack Retaliator is a Real Time protection for your Internet Explorer default pages, Favorites etc. As soon as an application attempts to modify those settings, you will be alerted by a popup dialog and have the option to allow or block the change. Browser Restore operation allows you to reset your IE to default settings. Also you have the option to set automatic retaliation. So your intervention is not necessary. The program also provides access to cookie and cache deletion.
BHR 4.5 Supports Internet Explorer, Avant Browser and all other IE Flavours.
Download: Browser Hijack Retaliator 4.5.0 Build 471 Windows
Posted in Security | No Comments »
Friday, October 27th, 2006
CORE FORCE is the first community oriented security solution for personal computers. CORE FORCE is free and provides a comprehensive endpoint security solution for Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems.
The security framework provided by CORE FORCE is leveraged by a community of security experts that share their security configurations for a growing list of programs. These security profiles can be downloaded by any user of CORE FORCE from the community Web site and they’re also completely open so that they can be peer-reviewed to minimize security hazards. The community approach to endpoint security also allows end-users who are not security experts to work in a secure environment.
CORE FORCE can be used to:
• Protect your computer from compromises by worms, virus and email-borne malware
• Prevent your computer from being used as a staging point to amplify attacks and compromise others
• Prevent exploitation of known bugs in the operating system and applications running on your computer
• Prevent exploitation of unknown bugs (0-day) in the operating system and applications running on your computer
• Detect and prevent execution of adware, spyware, trojan horses and other malware on you computer
CORE FORCE provides inbound and outbound stateful packet filtering for TCP/IP protocols using a Windows port of OpenBSD’s PF firewall, granular file system and registry access control and programs’ integrity validation. These capabilities can be configured and enforced system-wide or on a per-application basis for specific programs such as email readers, Web browsers, media players, messaging software, etc.
Download. CORE FORCE R0.95 | Screenshots
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Friday, October 27th, 2006
FeedFusion is the next generation Rss Reader designed to take advantage of the newest technologies available to make your RSS reading experience more pleasant.
From its many features, the few that make it unique are:
?｢どｨｬ｢ Integrates in Windows Vista
?｢どｨｬ｢ Flexible Architecture
?｢どｨｬ｢ Extended Compatibility
?｢どｨｬ｢ Easy Interoperability
?｢どｨｬ｢ Increased Reliability
?｢どｨｬ｢ Lightning-fast search
Download: FeedFusion 0.92 | Screenshots
Posted in Web/internet | No Comments »
Friday, October 27th, 2006
For a child, one’s fifth birthday is an exciting time, full of precious moments and limitless promise. For an operating system, coming up to one’s fifth birthday is a different matter entirely. By the time they reach this milestone, most operating systems have long since been retired or replaced by the Next Big Thing, often an updated version of themselves. For Windows XP, which is celebrating its fifth birthday this week, the big question is this: why has it taken so long for Microsoft to come up with a successor?
Whole books could be written about Microsoft’s trials and tribulations in getting Windows Vista to market, and likely will be. The computer industry is full of stories of companies who fell victim to “second-system syndrome,” the tendency to try and include every feature that was left out of the first (successful) product. The result can be an overambitious mess that encounters numerous delays and sometimes never ships at all.
While Vista does appear to be on track for a January 2007 release, it has not been an easy journey to RTM. Key features such as WinFS, the advanced database-like file system that was to sit on top of NTFS, were first dropped from the initial release of the operating system and then quietly shuffled off to become part of SQL Server and other standalone Microsoft products. Development on the Vista kernel got so bogged down that project leader Jim Allchin was forced to perform the infamous “Vista reset” in 2004, where the team abandoned their existing work to start over from the baseline Windows Server 2003 kernel.
Full article: Ars Technica
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Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Software giant Microsoft has crowned the “zombie” PC the greatest threat to Windows users.
Of the many forms of attacks uncovered during the first half of 2006, the company said backdoor Trojans which take control of infected computers can be found in almost one out of every two Windows-based systems.
“Attackers, with financial gain in mind, are clearly concentrating a significant amount of development focus on this category of malware,” according to Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report, which covers January through June.
The results were gathered from use of the software maker’s Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT).
More than 43,000 new versions of the malicious software were found making Trojans that turn PCs into cash cows for hackers “the most active category of malware,” according to the report.
The news comes as a 32-year old Florida man was charged with using an army of bots to launch a distributed denial of service [DDOS] attack against Akamai Technologies.
Of the 4 million Windows machines that used the MSRT, nearly 2 million contained at least one backdoor Trojan.
Full article: internetnews.com
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Thursday, October 26th, 2006
“I would call it just noise”
A day after shipping Firefox 2.0, Mozilla largely rebutted two claims of security flaws in the latest version of the web browser.
Bug hunters appear to be in a race to uncover new security flaws in both Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7, which Microsoft released last week.
At least two bug reports that indicated they affected the new Firefox release crossed over popular security mailing lists this week.
But Window Snyder, Mozilla’s security chief, said: “I would call it just noise.” The two issues don’t present any real risk to Firefox users, she said.
One of the problems is related to a vulnerability that was patched in an earlier version of Firefox. A report on the Bugtraq mailing list suggested that the issue, labelled “critical” by Mozilla, resurfaced in Firefox 2.0.
The report is incorrect, Snyder said. “The vulnerabilities that were identified were actually fixed,” she said.
However, there is a related problem that can cause Firefox to crash. Snyder said: “The exploitable issues are fixed. There is a crash but it is a denial of service. We’re going to look at it and make sure there is really nothing there.”
Read more: silicon.com
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Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Tired of intrusive, bloated mp3 players? Download ccmp3, our .NET mp3 player! It’s only 81K (.NET 1.x or higher required). Utilize the power of .NET that is already installed on your Windows computer with this lightweight, ad-free mp3 player.
Download: ccmp3 1.0.3
Posted in Audio/Media/Video | No Comments »
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.
What does Sage do?
?｢どｨｬ｢ Reads RSS (2.0, 1.0, 0.9x) and Atom feeds
?｢どｨｬ｢ Newspaper feed rendering customizable via style sheets
?｢どｨｬ｢ Feed Discovery
?｢どｨｬ｢ Integrates with Firefox’s bookmark storage and Live Bookmarks
?｢どｨｬ｢ Imports and exports OPML feed lists
?｢どｨｬ｢ Technorati and RSS search engine integration
?｢どｨｬ｢ Support for a number of locales: Argentine Spanish, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, ?｢どｨｬ｢ Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish
?｢どｨｬ｢ Simple, one step install / uninstall
Install: Sage 1.3.8
Posted in Web/internet | No Comments »
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Security experts have found a weakness in Internet Explorer 7 that could help crooks mask phishing scams, the type of attack Microsoft designed the browser to thwart.
IE 7, released last week, allows a Web site to display a pop-up that can contain a spoofed Web address, security monitoring company Secunia said Wednesday. An attacker could exploit this weakness to trick people into believing they are on a trusted Web site when in fact they are viewing a malicious page, Secunia said in an alert.
“This makes it possible to only display a part of the address bar, which may trick users into performing certain unintended actions,” Secunia said. The company has created a demonstration that shows a Microsoft Web address in the pop up window, but displays content from Secunia.
The problem lies in the way Web addresses are displayed in the IE 7 address bar, a Microsoft representative said in an e-mailed statement. An attacker could exploit the issue by tricking a user to click on a specially formatted link, the representative said.
Full story: CNET News.com
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Thursday, October 26th, 2006
DVD Decrypter is a CSS decryption tool that has most, if not all, of the features of current ripper/ripper GUIs like CladDVD, Smart-Ripper or VOBDec GUI, including CSS authentication/detection, multi-angle processing, Macrovision and Region removal. Also includes option to use either VOBDec or DeCSS Plus to decrypt the DVD.
Download: DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0 Windows 9x/Me/2000/XP
Posted in CD/DVD Tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
Mac OS X 10.4.8 will now run on any generic x86-based PC. Well, almost. Kernel coder Semthex has posted what he claims is an entirely legal release of the Mac operating system’s foundation layer. The only snag: you can’t boot into the familiar GUI.
To date, the version of Mac OS X for x86 processors has relied on kernel add-ons to anchor the software to Apple’s own hardware through the machines’ Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Much of the core code is independent of it, however, and available for access to all and sundry via Apple’s own source code licence.
Read more: reghardware.co.uk
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Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
Windows Desktop Search 3.0 is the technology which enables instant search on your computer. It helps you to find, preview, and use your documents, e-mail, music, photos, and other items. The search engine in Windows Desktop Search 3.0 is a Windows service that is also used by applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007 to index application content and deliver instant results when searching within that application. Windows Desktop Search 3.0 provides fast indexing, improved performance, and improved file type support.
If you choose to install and use Windows Desktop Search, you can search for e-mail, documents and other files located on your computer. No information about the files on your computer will be sent to Microsoft as part of this process. Instead, Windows Desktop Search will index the content of your computer and store the index file on your computer. You can customize Windows Desktop Search to index only specified folders on your computer. Windows Desktop search will not store copies of e-mail or documents after they are deleted.
Download: Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows XP | Windows XP x64 Edition | Windows Server 2003 | Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition
Posted in Windows XP | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
Showcase provides a new way to manage your Firefox tabs and windows by showing them as thumbnails in a single window, tab or sidebar. Includes a find bar that will filter the thumbnails, and the capability to select the thumbnails in the same way you would select files in your system.
This software is and will be free and open source.
Download: Showcase 0.8.0.4
Posted in Firefox | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
XCALC is a Win32 (2000+, 98+) RPN calculator completely free to use.
Download: XCALC 2.7.2
Posted in Utilities | No Comments »
