Helpforce | Providing Free 24/7 Computing Technical Support on the Internet

Helpforce provides free technical support 24 hours a day, to the Internet. We support all problems, errors, crashes and aim to answer all questions.

View today's Daily Briefing

Helpforce » Back Issues of Daily Briefings

Send this page to a friend or colleague!

Technical Support

eHelp Support

eTalk Community

eLinks Database

Helpforce FAQ

Downloads

Bootdisks

Other Resources

UNIX Guides

About Helpforce

	Corporate Site
	Headlines
	Contact Us
	eHelp login

	Previous Daily Briefings
	Remote eHelp
	v:Book

Join Helpforce!

Recognize these logos?

Helpforce needs you!

Click Here to sign up and become a Helpforce member

Thursday the 18th of February 2010

Welcome to the Helpforce Daily Briefing, on Thursday the 18th 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
---------------------------------------
JS/ScrLd-B on 18 February 2010 12:17:15 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/jsscrldb.html?_log_from=rss
Mal/KeyGen-D on 18 February 2010 12:17:15 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/malkeygend.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Agent-MKZ on 18 February 2010 12:17:15 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmkz.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Bank-AD on 18 February 2010 12:17:15 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojbankad.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Buzus-CG on 18 February 2010 12:17:15 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojbuzuscg.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/JSRedir-AR on 18 February 2010 12:17:15 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojjsredirar.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Bckdr-RBA on 18 February 2010 04:28:59 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojbckdrrba.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/FakeAV-AWN on 18 February 2010 04:28:59 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavawn.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PDFJs-HQ on 18 February 2010 04:28:59 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpdfjshq.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PDFJs-HR on 18 February 2010 04:28:59 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpdfjshr.html?_log_from=rss

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

-- 86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/gctZ-s8yQoI/86-of-Windows-7-PCs-Maxing-Out-Memory)
CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Over R4 Mod Chip Piracy
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/VGYa6fVCdwU/Nintendo-Wins-Lawsuit-Over-R4-Mod-Chip-Piracy)
schliz writes "The Federal Court has ordered an Australian distributor to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling the R4 mod chip, which allows users to circumvent technology protection measures in Nintendo's DS consoles. The distributor, RSJ IT Solutions, has been ordered to cease selling the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controls, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Microsoft RickRolls WiFi Network Leechers
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/L3weS39UkeE/Microsoft-RickRolls-WiFi-Network-Leechers)
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has revealed that it RickRolled users that were killing its TechEd conference WiFi network last year by torrenting large files. Network administrators at the event quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local web server containing some RickRoll scripts. According to the admin: 'It killed me that I didn't see anyone getting done by this first hand, but there were hundreds of impressions in the server logs containing the the Rick Roll scripts so I did get a fair amount of satisfaction at least. It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too — worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past.' Fun and games aside, it looks like the leechers will force quotas and traffic shaping for the first time in the event's history."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/uzBUkOu1fNU/Ubisofts-Constant-Net-Connection-DRM-Confirmed)
A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting:
"If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Enlightenment Returns To Bring Ubuntu To ARM
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/NrDz5nfoMRQ/Enlightenment-Returns-To-Bring-Ubuntu-To-ARM)
mu22le writes "Enlightenment, the daring window manager that disappeared from our collective radar years ago, is back to bring Ubuntu to ARM. The bet that E developers made years ago to neglect 3D and compositing, and realize a fast and versatile 2.5d engine, may have finally payed off. The new market for ARM-based devices that everybody is so hot for right now could be a niche the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries can fill comfortably."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- White House Press Secretary's Tweets Archived
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Jp9h9eQHxfM/White-House-Press-Secretarys-Tweets-Archived)
RedTeflon writes "The White House spokesman, who has just started using Twitter, told reporters this afternoon that he met with government lawyers yesterday to determine whether his tweets would be archived along with emails and just about everything else produced at the White House. After deliberation, White House lawyers have decided that any and all tweets will be archived in keeping with the Presidential Records Act of 1978."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- The 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/wCqjkcKnY8Y/The-25-Most-Dangerous-Programming-Errors)
Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that experts from some 30 organizations worldwide have compiled 2010's list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors along with a novel way to prevent them: by drafting contracts that hold developers responsible when bugs creep into applications. The 25 flaws are the cause of almost every major cyber attack in recent history, including the ones that recently struck Google and 33 other large companies, as well as breaches suffered by military systems and millions of small business and home users. The top 25 entries are prioritized using inputs from over 20 different organizations, who evaluated each weakness based on prevalence and importance. Interestingly enough the classic buffer overflow ranked 3rd in the list while Cross-site Scripting and SQL Injection are considered the 1-2 punch of security weaknesses in 2010. Security experts say business customers have the means to foster safer products by demanding that vendors follow common-sense safety measures such as verifying that all team members successfully clear a background investigation and be trained in secure programming techniques. 'As a customer, you have the power to influence vendors to provide more secure products by letting them know that security is important to you,' the introduction to the list states and includes a draft contract with the terms customers should request to enable buyers of custom software to make code writers responsible for checking the code and for fixing security flaws before software is delivered."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- PageRank-Type Algorithm From the 1940s Discovered
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Sq2Q-uSqX5g/PageRank-Type-Algorithm-From-the-1940s-Discovered)
KentuckyFC writes "The PageRank algorithm (pdf) behind Google's success was developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998. It famously judges a page to be important if it is linked to by other important pages. This circular definition is the basis of an iterative mechanism for ranking pages. Now a paper tracing the history of iterative ranking algorithms describes a number of earlier examples. It discusses the famous HITS algorithm for ranking web pages as hubs and authorities developed by Jon Kleinberg a few years before PageRank. It also discusses various approaches from the 1960s and 70s for ranking individuals and journals based on the importance of those that endorse them. But the real surprise is the discovery of a PageRank-type algorithm for ranking sectors of an economy based on the importance of the sectors that supply them, a technique that was developed by the Harvard economist Wassily Leontief in 1941."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Open-Source 3D Nvidia Driver Is Ready For Fedora 13
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hIylsELaIto/Open-Source-3D-Nvidia-Driver-Is-Ready-For-Fedora-13)
An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has already been using the Nouveau X.Org driver in Fedora for providing display and 2D support, but with their next release (Fedora 13) they will be making open-source 3D acceleration readily available to those using Nvidia graphics cards. Red Hat has packaged the Nouveau 3D driver in Fedora 13 and what makes it more interesting than just being an open-source 3D driver that was written by the community with reverse engineering their closed-source driver is that it's one of the first drivers to use the Gallium3D driver interface. Phoronix has tested out this Gallium3D driver for Nvidia GPUs in a Fedora 13 daily build and found it to run with a variety of OpenGL games, with benchmarks being included that compare it to Nvidia's official driver. The performance is far from being on the same stage as Nvidia's official Unix driver."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/gd_C8otkNnM/Outlook-2010-Bug-Creates-Monster-Email-Files)
Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Mozilla Debates Whether To Trust Chinese CA
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9KFpU879j24/Mozilla-Debates-Whether-To-Trust-Chinese-CA)
At his Freedom to Tinker blog, Ed Felten has a thoughtful, accessible piece on the debate at Mozilla about whether Firefox, by default, should trust a Chinese certificate authority (as it has since October). Felten explains in clear language why this is significant, and therefore controversial. An excerpt: "To see why this is worrisome, let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that CNNIC were a puppet of the Chinese government. Then CNNIC's status as a trusted CA would give it the technical power to let the Chinese government spy on its citizens' 'secure' web connections. If a Chinese citizen tried to make a secure connection to Gmail, their connection could be directed to an impostor Gmail site run by the Chinese government, and CNNIC could give the impostor a cert saying that the government impostor was the real Gmail site."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- StarCraft II Closed Beta Begins
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qQb0xJIAAKk/emStarCraft-IIem-Closed-Beta-Begins)
Blizzard announced today that the multiplayer beta test for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is now underway. The client downloader is available through Battle.net for people who have received invites, and the system requirements have been posted as well. A list of known issues is up on the official forums. StarCraft II and the revamped Battle.net are planned for release "in the first half of 2010."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- No Glasses Needed For TI's New 3D Display
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/E2vqSGftFJw/No-Glasses-Needed-For-TIs-New-3D-Display)
adeelarshad82 writes "At the MWC, TI showed off a tablet-sized device with a 3D display that doesn't require glasses, running on an existing TI OMAP3 chipset. The 3D demo showed images and video in 3D by using a standard 120-Hz LCD with a special overlay film from 3M that can direct images either towards your left or right eye. By flickering two images very quickly, running at 60 frames per second rather than the usual 30, the display transmits a different picture to each eye, creating a simulated 3D image. The 3D picture can be created using a handheld with dual 3-megapixel cameras and an 800-MHz TI OMAP 3630 chipset."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Mock Cyber Attack Shows US Unpreparedness
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/aSZun1VZriw/Mock-Cyber-Attack-Shows-US-Unpreparedness)
An anonymous reader writes with word that the outcome of the large-scale cyberattack simulation promised a few days ago isn't too rosy. From the Help Net Security article: "During the simulated cyber attack that took place yesterday in Washington and was recorded by CNN, one thing became clear: the US are still not ready to deflect or mitigate such an attack to an extent that would not affect considerably the everyday life of its citizens. The ballroom of the Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel was for this event transformed into the White House Situation Room, complete with three video screens displaying maps of the country, simulated updates and broadcasts by 'GNN,' an imaginary television network 'covering'
the crisis."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- 20 Years of Photoshop
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/fZ3IwKBo9As/20-Years-of-Photoshop)
benwiggy writes "Photoshop turned 20 on 10th February 2010. Here's an excellent history, including how the Knoll family created one of the biggest apps of all time. The article also has screenshots of the workspace through the versions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

-- Im getting an error when I open explorer on Win ME
(http://www.helpforce.com)

Question: I'm getting an error every to i open explorerIexplorer has cause an error with user.exe restart windows if problem continuesanyone with an idea why this is happening?Thanks

Answer: Well dave, it seems a common problem for Win ME, however, it doesn't have a lot of solutions.First of all, I've found that installing new video cards under ME (Mostly GeForce) may cause some troubles with user.exe, if you have installed new video cards, or if you have a GeForce video card, uninstall their own drivers and let them run with the ME drivers, or download the latest drivers for them.the second option could be a USB modem, if you have one I'd recomend you to get the latest drivers.Also check all the drivers for all you hardware, and try to download the latest drivers or install the drivers that comewith Windows MEif nothing of this works, downgrade to IE 3.11 or use another web browser such as Netscape, it might work for you.My Last recomendation, Upgrade to winXP or installl Win2k pro, those are very stable O/S Reply Posted on 31/8/2002 Althought the above may work i dont belive that there is any need to downgrade your browser or change your operating system - windows ME is know for its problems however! on the windows cd that you should have got with your computer, if u do a search on it for filename user.exe - if you copy this file into the c:\windows folder this should solve the problem!

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

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

-- Vote: Your Favorite Tech Stuff(http://netforbeginners.about.com/b/a/258350.htm)

The race is on! The best hardware for PC's and Macs, the best apps for your iPhone, the best email and browser software, the best HTML editor, the best graphic...

Thank you for your continued support, please do not reply to this email address as emails will not be answered.

Content copyright by its' respective owners

Search Helpforce

From eTalk

There are a total of 1673 posts on eTalk (501 topics and 1172 replies)

There are 0 guests and 2 members making a total of 2 users on eTalk.

Click Here to enter the eTalk Community.

Advertise Here!

Your Link Here?
Give your website the exposure it deserves!

Click Here For Details

Technology News

Stay up to date with technology, with a free, short daily briefing on current happenings

Alternatively visit here for more information

To view our back issues, click here

Members - eHelp Login

Click here for technical details about Helpforce's site

Kindly Hosted by:

Please visit www.asis.com for more details on Internet Access, Web Hosting and Computer Repair.Skydive North East