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Thursday the 7th of January 2010

Welcome to the Helpforce Daily Briefing, on Thursday the 7th of January 2010

1. Virus Warnings
2. Daily Technology News
3. Latest Shareware and Freeware
4. FAQ for the day
5. Advice of the day
6. Internet Advice

This is a free service provided by Helpforce.com, to unsubscribe please visit http://www.helpforce.com
For free technical support, visit us at http://www.helpforce.com

1. Latest Virus Alerts From Sophos
---------------------------------------
Troj/Agent-MCQ on 7 January 2010 10:50:26 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmcq.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Bredolab-H on 7 January 2010 10:50:26 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojbredolabh.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Hiloti-O on 7 January 2010 10:50:26 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojhilotio.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/KillAV-GF on 7 January 2010 10:50:26 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojkillavgf.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PDFJs-GL on 7 January 2010 10:50:26 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpdfjsgl.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Swizzor-QK on 7 January 2010 10:50:26 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojswizzorqk.html?_log_from=rss
W32/AutoRun-AOA on 7 January 2010 10:50:26 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32autorunaoa.html?_log_from=rss
W32/AutoRun-AXT on 7 January 2010 10:50:26 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32autorunaxt.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Swizzor-QJ on 7 January 2010 05:16:03 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojswizzorqj.html?_log_from=rss
W32/Autorun-AXP on 7 January 2010 05:16:03 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32autorunaxp.html?_log_from=rss

2. Latest Technology News From Slashdot
-----------------------------------------------

-- 2010 Bug Plagues Germany
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/awljlu_dOXE/2010-Bug-Plagues-Germany)
krou writes "According the Guardian, some 30 million chip and pin cards in Germany have been effected by a programming failure, which saw the microchips in cards unable to recognise the year change. The bug has left millions of credit and debit card users unable to withdraw money or make purchases, and has stranded many on holiday. French card manufacturer Gemalto accepted responsibility for the fault, 'which it is estimated will cost €300m (£270m) to rectify.' They claim cards in other countries made by Gemalto are unaffected."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Nexus One Name Irks Philip K. Dick's Estate
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/na2Q1Q0foQU/Nexus-One-Name-Irks-Philip-K-Dicks-Estate)
RevWaldo writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, the estate of Philip K. Dick says the name of Google's new smartphone infringes on the famous character name from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Isa Dick Hackett, a daughter of Mr. Dick, states Google has its 'Android system, and now they are naming a phone "Nexus One." It's not lost on the people who are somewhat familiar with this novel... Our legal team is dealing head-on with this.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Microsoft Announces "Game Room," Confirms Natal For Late 2010
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/FxJxiPBHKMw/Microsoft-Announces-Game-Room-Confirms-Natal-For-Late-2010)
Microsoft has confirmed that their upcoming motion-control system, Natal, will be released during the 2010 holiday season. The announcement was made during CES, alongside news of "Game Room," a service that will act like a virtual arcade, bringing classic games to users of the Xbox 360 and Games for Windows Live. It's due out this spring with 30 games to start, and will gradually ramp up to over a thousand titles. According to Kotaku, "You can buy a game for between 240-400 Microsoft Points, or if you really want that old arcade feeling, you can pay 40 Microsoft Points and play the game once, like it was 1985 and you'd just dropped a quarter." Another interesting bit of news is that subscribers to AT&T's U-Verse will soon be able to use the Xbox 360 as their set-top box.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Aboriginal Folklore Leads To Meteorite Crater
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/DfRb37T5Sw0/Aboriginal-Folklore-Leads-To-Meteorite-Crater)
An anonymous reader writes "An Australian Aboriginal dreaming story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory. From the article: 'One story, from the folklore of the Arrernte people, is about a star falling to Earth at a site called Puka. This led to a search on Google Maps of Palm Valley, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs. Here Hamacher discovered what looked like a crater, which he confirmed with surveys in the field in September 2009.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- PlayStation Network Expanding To Involve Other Devices
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/4Z1QXOkRSno/PlayStation-Network-Expanding-To-Involve-Other-Devices)
At CES, Sony's Kaz Hirai confirmed that the company will build out its PlayStation Network for use with other devices, such as televisions, blu-ray players, and PCs. Quoting: "... the expansion starts next month with the availability of the PSN video store on these other devices, and Hirai explained they are constructing a mechanism to create a single user ID across the entire network (if you have a PSN account, it's good to go on any other applicable Sony device, and if you create one on another device, it'll work on PSN). And finally, Hirai also announced the formation of a new Sony division — called Sony Network Entertainment, Inc. — to drive this expansion of the PSN service into a Sony-wide network."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- IT Job Satisfaction Plummets to All-time Low
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/d_jn4EQxCkE/IT-Job-Satisfaction-Plummets-to-All-time-Low)
cweditor writes "IT job satisfaction has plummeted to a 10-year low, according to a recent survey. Another on general job satisfaction rated IT a paltry 45%. From the article: 'The CEB's latest survey found that the willingness of IT employees to "exert high levels of discretionary effort" -- put in extra hours to solve a problem, make suggestions for improving processes, and generally seek to play a key role in an organization -- has plummeted to its lowest levels since the survey was launched 10 years ago.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Is Getting Acquired Good For FOSS Projects?
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/cluj0HFsuzI/Is-Getting-Acquired-Good-For-FOSS-Projects)
ruphus13 writes "While open source companies are legion, their acquisitions by proprietary source companies may cause concern for the viability of projects. Can a FOSS project 'survive' an acquisition? According to the article posing that question: 'One has to ask, though, how healthy it is for increasingly important open-source platforms and applications to come under the wing of huge, proprietary software companies. Probably the best example to cite on that topic is the ongoing car crash that is Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems...Sun Micrososytems is one of only three big, US public companies focused almost entirely on open source. If it gets swallowed up, that will leave just Red Hat and Novell. Open-source pundits are predicting that small, promising open-source players will be snapped up by bigger fish this year. And Google's relationship to Android gets ever murkier as it sinks its commercial hooks deeper into the platform, billing its own offerings as superphones relative to other Android phones.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Ocean Crossing Dragonflies Discovered
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hk1GE-5jO2o/Ocean-Crossing-Dragonflies-Discovered)
grrlscientist writes "While living and working as a marine biologist in Maldives, Charles Anderson noticed sudden explosions of dragonflies at certain times of year. He explains how he carefully tracked the path of a plain, little dragonfly called the Globe Skimmer, Pantala flavescens, only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- FTC Worries About Consumers, Cloud Data, and Privacy
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/IYv01xmpQk4/FTC-Worries-About-Consumers-Cloud-Data-and-Privacy)
pcause writes "Ars Techina has a nice article about the FTC's concern that consumers don't understand the implications of storing their data in the cloud. From the article: 'Data is now sitting on servers outside of your control, where it can be accessed far more easily by Google itself, hackers, and law enforcement than it ever could if kept within the device. Once data passes over the network, it gets much easier to access in realtime; once it is stored on a remote server, it gets much easier to access at any time. And those are just the phone settings. Google also has access to search history data, anything stored in Google Docs or Spreadsheets, complete schedules stored in Google Calendar, and recent Maps searches. Combine them all, and companies like Google become one-stop shops for authorities looking for personal information.' Do you think the average consumer even has a clue about this issue?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Massive Solar Updraft Towers Planned For Arizona
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/wtJiNrv3-z4/Massive-Solar-Updraft-Towers-Planned-For-Arizona)
MikeChino writes "Australia-based EnviroMission Ltd recently announced plans to build two solar updraft towers that span hundreds of acres in La Paz County, Arizona. Solar updraft technology sounds promising enough: generate hot air with a giant greenhouse, channel the air into a chimney-like device, and let the warm wind turn a wind turbine to produce energy. The scale of the devices would be staggering — each plant would consist of a 2,400 foot chimney over a greenhouse measuring four square miles. The Southern California Public Power Authority has approved EnviroMission as a provider, although there’s still plenty of work to be done before the $750 million, 200 megawatt project can begin."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- More On enTourage's Dual-screen E-Book Reader
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/amlLhDXnBh0/More-On-enTourages-Dual-screen-E-Book-Reader)
Barence writes with some more information on a device mentioned in passing earlier today: "The enTourage eDGe eBook reader was the highlight of the CES Unveiled event, which gives journalists a sneak preview of what’s set to appear this year’s show. It has a 9.7in e-paper display on one side and a 10.1in LCD screen on the other, both of which are touchscreens, allowing you to annotate eBooks with handwritten notes or scan through web pages with the flick of a finger on the LCD screen. In a brief hands-on demonstration, the eDGe showed several clever touches, such as allowing you to perform a Google search on the term using the built-in web browser, and then link the search results to the eBook page, which is a great research tool for students reading academic texts. It's an Android device, too."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Fake "Bill Gates" Message Dupes Top Tools
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/NVGNoC7cpDk/Fake-Bill-Gates-Message-Dupes-Top-Tools)
yahoi writes with this excerpt from Dark Reading that might raise sysadmins' eyebrows about email security, in particular given the big names involved: "A researcher who conducted a successful spear-phishing experiment with a phony LinkedIn invitation from 'Bill Gates' is about to reveal the email products and services that failed to filter the spoofed message — and that list includes Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook Express, and Cisco IronPort. ... The experiment was aimed at measuring the effectiveness of email security controls in several major products and services. And the simplicity and success of the test demonstrated just how powerful social engineering can be and what little technology can actually do about it, security experts say."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Blu-ray Capacity Increase Via Firmware
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/06vPSiN8GGo/Blu-ray-Capacity-Increase-Via-Firmware)
LordofEntropy writes "Blu-ray.com reports that Sony and Panasonic have announced a new optical disc evaluation technology that increases capacity from 25GB to 33.4GB. The tech uses existing Blu-ray diodes and is accomplished via firmware upgrade. The article says it is not known if and when the upgrade will be adopted into the Blu-ray spec. However, given that Sony and Panasonic are behind it, 'it will likely happen later this year.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- 2010 Will Be the Year of Sandboxing Apps
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ei8OZVMIjcs/2010-Will-Be-the-Year-of-Sandboxing-Apps)
Trailrunner7 writes "In a guest editorial on Threatpost, Mac hacker and security researcher Dino Dai Zovi writes that 2010 will be the year that software vendors get religion about sandboxing untrusted data in desktop apps. 'Instead of the usual top ten lists that are all-too-common with predictions for the new year, I have just one: 2010 will be the year of desktop applications handling untrusted data in sandboxed processes, and it will be about time. The largest Internet security threats now arrive through malicious web pages or e-mail attachments. This is because attackers are opportunistic and these are the weakest links especially because they easily pass through every firewall. Security is not and never was about SYN packets, it is about data: the software attack surface that attacker-controlled data interacts with and what sensitive data the attacker can get a hold of if they can exploit vulnerabilities in that software.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Microsoft Wants To Participate In SVG Development
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/mPC5aQ9z5vg/Microsoft-Wants-To-Participate-In-SVG-Development)
rossendryv writes "After many years of fighting against the standard, Microsoft announced they are joining the WC3's SVG working group to help with the development of SVG. 'We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next-generation Web platform,' said Patrick Dengler, senior program manager on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team in a blog post."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

3. Latest Shareware from Planet-Shareware
-----------------------------------------------

4. FAQ of the day from Helpforce
-----------------------------------------------

-- I have fitted my CD Burner, what now?
(http://www.helpforce.com)

Question: I have my cd burner hook up but i dont know what to do

Answer: ok, well, it should have come with some drivers, you will need to install these to get it working. If you have not got any drivers, then go to the company's website (if you do not know this, then search in yahoo for it, or try our links page at http://www.helpforce.com/main/elinks.html. If you wish to copy CDs, then you will probably need another piece of software (available via the internet, try www.downloads.com)Please note though, burning data (either programs or audio) to CDs that doesnt belong to you and which you have not got permission for may be illegal

5. Advice of the Day from ask-leo
-----------------------------------------------

6. Internet Advice
-----------------------------------------------

-- How Apple Transformed Music and Our Lives(http://netforbeginners.about.com/b/a/258244.htm)

Internet-based jukeboxes were just a dream a few years ago. Record manufacturers clung desperately to the vinyl record concept of music, striving to keep people buying physical media. But people...

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