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Tuesday the 9th of February 2010

Welcome to the Helpforce Daily Briefing, on Tuesday the 9th of February 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
---------------------------------------
Mal/EncPk-NR on 9 February 2010 10:19:07 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/malencpknr.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Iframe-DW on 9 February 2010 10:19:07 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojiframedw.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Mdrop-CKL on 9 February 2010 10:19:07 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojmdropckl.html?_log_from=rss
W32/Tiotua-CA on 9 February 2010 10:19:07 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32tiotuaca.html?_log_from=rss
W32/VBForm-A on 9 February 2010 10:19:07 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32vbforma.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PWS-BGW on 9 February 2010 05:21:56 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpwsbgw.html?_log_from=rss
W32/AutoRun-AZL on 9 February 2010 05:21:56 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32autorunazl.html?_log_from=rss
W32/Autorun-AZM on 9 February 2010 05:21:56 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32autorunazm.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Agent-MLD on 9 February 2010 03:00:38 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmld.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Bckdr-RAT on 9 February 2010 03:00:38 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojbckdrrat.html?_log_from=rss

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

-- GIMP 2.8 Will Sport a Redesigned UI
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Zwe4BqqgSyc/GIMP-28-Will-Sport-a-Redesigned-UI)
ceswiedler writes "Ars Technica's Ryan Paul previews the upcoming release of the GIMP. It will include a single-window mode where the user can dock toolbar windows and switch between images via tabs. There are other improvements as well, including docking support in multi-window mode and improvements to the text tool." To get this early preview, Paul compiled version 2.7.1 from the active development branch, along with its dependencies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Man Fined $1.5 Million For Leaked Mario Game
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/T1ll2NV8Png/Man-Fined-15-Million-For-Leaked-Mario-Game)
An anonymous reader writes "A Queensland man will have to pay Nintendo $1.5 million in damages after illegally copying and uploading one of its recent games to the internet ahead of its release, the gaming giant says. Nintendo said the loss was caused when James Burt made New Super Mario Bros Wii available for illegal download a week ahead of its official Australian release in November of last year. Nintendo applied for and was granted a search order by the Federal Court, forcing Burt to disclose the whereabouts of all his computers, disks and electronic storage devices in November. He was also ordered to allow access, including passwords, to his social networking sites, email accounts and websites."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- The iPad Questions Apple Won't Answer
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/rHOqQ887_e0/The-iPad-Questions-Apple-Wont-Answer)
snydeq writes "Apple's reticence to reveal details prior to a product's launch is legendary. But when Apple extends this silence beyond a product's unveiling, historically this has meant that the product cannot deliver the functionality that analysts and journalists are asking about. InfoWorld's Galen Gruman lists eight key questions for the iPad, about all of which Apple has kept silent. Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad? Does the iPad support Microsoft Exchange email? Does the iPad support VPN? Configuration management? 'I have no doubt the iPad will be compelling to some users. But I now have major concerns that it will fulfill the potential beyond being an iTunes delivery screen that I and other industry observers saw,' Gruman writes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Improving Education Through Social Gaming
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/rQ6uY59NFfA/Improving-Education-Through-Social-Gaming)
A piece up at Mashable explores how some schools and universities are finding success at integrating social gaming into their education curriculum. Various game-related programs are getting assistance these days from sources like the government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
"For the less well-to-do educator, the Federation of American Scientists has developed a first-person shooter-inspired cellular biology curriculum. Gamers explore the fully-interactive 3D world of an ill patient and assist the immune system in fighting back a bacterial infection. Dr. Melanie Ann Stegman has been evaluating the educational impacts of the game and is optimistic about her preliminary findings. 'The amount of detail about proteins, chemical signals and gene regulation that these 15-year-olds were devouring was amazing. Their questions were insightful. I felt like I was having a discussion with scientist colleagues,' said Stegman. Perhaps more importantly, the video game excites students about science. Motivating more youngsters to adopt a science-related career track has became a major education initiative of the Obama administration. So desperate to find a solution that motivates students to become scientists, the government has even enlisted Darpa, the Department of Defense’s 'mad scientist' research organization, to figure out a solution."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Google Reduces Its Nexus One Termination Fee
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/1jdHZlJGol4/Google-Reduces-Its-Nexus-One-Termination-Fee)
CWmike writes "The only smartphone Linus Torvalds doesn't hate is that much less unlikable now that Google has quietly chopped $200 off its early termination fee on the Nexus One. Customers who cancel the service had been on the hook for $550, including a $350 Google cancellation charge. Google has reduced their fee to $150 — but users are still liable for a $200 ETF from T-Mobile. Users have a 14-day grace period during which they do not have to pay either charge, although they may be hit with a restocking fee. The $350 total fee matches one of the highest in the industry, charged by Verizon. Google did not announce the change but simply altered its online terms-of-service document." The price cut could add momentum to a phone that, by one reckoning, costs only $49 unlocked.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Game Development In a Post-Agile World
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/O2qGCDXFV88/Game-Development-In-a-Post-Agile-World)
An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- IBM Releases Power7 Processor
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qoh9OHfRlGQ/IBM-Releases-Power7-Processor)
Dan Jones writes "As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux." And reader shmG notes Intel's release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Oracle Drops Sun's Commitment To Accessibility
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/MgG6JZv0tyc/Oracle-Drops-Suns-Commitment-To-Accessibility)
An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Virtualizing a Supercomputer
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/7W8z_vquLMs/Virtualizing-a-Supercomputer)
bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Study Says OOXML Unsuitable For Norwegian Government
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Sem3qaZvCSk/Study-Says-OOXML-Unsuitable-For-Norwegian-Government)
angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML.)"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Virus-Detecting "Lab On a Chip" Developed At BYU
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/z6Aa1X1JCUo/Virus-Detecting-Lab-On-a-Chip-Developed-At-BYU)
natharward writes "A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip's traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won't escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, 'If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Google Shooting For Smartphone Universal Translator
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/OqhV-iTYwSM/Google-Shooting-For-Smartphone-Universal-Translator)
nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. "The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- New Material Transforms Car Bodies Into Batteries
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/yLawwSYf9Yg/New-Material-Transforms-Car-Bodies-Into-Batteries)
MikeChino writes "As battery manufacturers race to produce more efficient lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, some scientists are looking to make the cars themselves a power source. Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery. Once perfected, scientists hope the substance will replace standard car bodies, making vehicles up to 15 percent lighter and significantly extending the range of electric vehicles."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Verizon Blocking 4chan
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/nn9LeXR6iBE/Verizon-Blocking-4chan)
An anonymous reader writes "According to 4chan's owner and administrator 'moot,' Verizon has explicitly blocked all traffic on their network from boards.4chan.org, where all of 4chan's boards are located. Moot explains that only traffic to and from port 80 is being dropped and they were able to confirm that it was intentional. 4chan's downtime for Verizon users has been in effect for at least 72 hours since Saturday, February 7."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- A Reflection On Sun Executive Payouts For Failure
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/VcPcp2zZuvQ/A-Reflection-On-Sun-Executive-Payouts-For-Failure)
With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. "I think it's fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it's equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun's executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word 'deserve.' But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. [...] And here's a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it's the employees who will suffer for it, and he'll be doing just fine."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

-- My drives are running in MSDOS mode, how can I change this?
(http://www.helpforce.com)

Question: My C: drive and D: drive are running in dos mode and making my computer slow, how do I change it?

Answer: Check for any "Dos-Mode" Cd-Rom drivers being loaded in the Autoexec.bat or config sys.If they are there, REM them out you wont need them.---------------------------------------------Have you formatted your hdd lately? Did you perhaps format with a Dos diskette? (dos 6.22 under?)----------------------------------------------

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

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

-- Just How Big Is the Internet? Is It Possible to Know?(http://netforbeginners.about.com/b/a/072197.htm)

Although no one can be precisely sure, it is possible to roughly estimate the millions of people who will use the Internet this 2010. Here is the boggling estimate...
...

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