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Wednesday the 24th of February 2010

Welcome to the Helpforce Daily Briefing, on Wednesday the 24th 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

This is a free service provided by Helpforce.com, to unsubscribe please visit http://www.helpforce.com
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1. Latest Virus Alerts From Sophos
---------------------------------------
Mal/Renocide-B on 24 February 2010 12:00:40 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/malrenocideb.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/JSRedir-AU on 24 February 2010 12:00:40 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojjsredirau.html?_log_from=rss
W32/SillyFDC-EK on 24 February 2010 12:00:40 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32sillyfdcek.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Hosts-K on 24 February 2010 07:04:55 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojhostsk.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PWS-BHA on 24 February 2010 07:04:55 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpwsbha.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PWS-BHB on 24 February 2010 07:04:55 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpwsbhb.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PWS-BHC on 24 February 2010 07:04:55 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpwsbhc.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PWS-BHD on 24 February 2010 07:04:55 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpwsbhd.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Zbot-MH on 24 February 2010 07:04:55 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojzbotmh.html?_log_from=rss
Mal/EncPk-NW on 24 February 2010 04:57:50 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/malencpknw.html?_log_from=rss

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

-- Utah Considers Warrantless Internet Subpoenas
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/5uaiR6RwkSY/Utah-Considers-Warrantless-Internet-Subpoenas)
seneces writes "The Utah State Legislature is considering a bill granting the Attorney General's Office the ability to demand customer information from Internet or cell phone companies via an administrative subpoena, with no judicial review (text of the HB150). This represents an expansion of a law passed last year, which granted that ability when 'it is suspected that a child-sex crime has been committed.' Since becoming law, last year's bill has led to more than one non-judicial request per day for subscriber information. Pete Ashdown, owner of a local ISP and 2006 candidate for the US Senate, has discussed his position and the effects of this bill."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- The Future of OpenSolaris
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/fv-hN8htTKM/The-Future-of-OpenSolaris)
jjrff writes "Phoronix has a little piece about the future (or lack thereof) of OpenSolaris. It appears based on the current support lifecycle, OpenSolaris may be going away. There is a fun thread (read: mild flameage) on a ZFS list about it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/z_05cvgomaw/DirectX-11-Coming-To-Browser-Games)
arcticstoat writes "Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects. A new browser plug-in called WebVision will be available for Trinergy's new game engine, Vision Engine 8. This will enable game developers to port all the advanced effects from the game engine over to all the common browsers. Of course, any budding 3D-browser-game dev will face the problem that not every PC has a decent graphics card that can handle advanced graphics effects. Not only that, but limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game. Nevertheless, this is an interesting development that could result in some tight 3D programming, as well as some much more interesting browser games."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Second Life Tries To Backpedal On the GPL
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/NRvPXLse71I/Second-Life-Tries-To-Backpedal-On-the-GPL)
GigsVT writes "The Second Life viewer has been available under the GPL for three years. Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, recently released a 'third party viewer' policy that all but erases the freedoms granted under the GPL. It includes such draconian measures as 'You agree to update or delete at our request any data that you have received from Second Life or our servers and systems using a Third-Party Viewer,' 'You must not mask IP or MAC addresses' (reported to the server), 'you must have a published privacy policy explaining your practices regarding user data,' and 'You acknowledge and agree that we may require you to stop using or distributing a Third-Party Viewer for accessing Second Life if we determine that there is a violation.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- AU Internet Censorship Spells Bad News For Gamers
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qKOZYyToTEw/AU-Internet-Censorship-Spells-Bad-News-For-Gamers)
eldavojohn writes "Kotaku is running an investigative piece examining what internet censorship means for games in Australia. Australia has some of the most draconian video game attitudes in the world, and the phrase 'refused classification' should strike fear in game developers and publishers looking to market games there. Internet censorship may expand this phrase to mean that anybody hosting anything about the game may suffer censorship in AU. Kotaku notes, 'This means that if a game is refused classification (RC) in Australia — like, say, NFL Blitz, or Getting Up — content related to these games would be added to the ISP filter. [This would bring up] a range of questions, foremost of those being: what happens when an otherwise harmless website ... hosts material from those games (screenshots, trailers, etc) that is totally fine in the US or Japan or Europe, but that has been refused classification in Australia?' Kotaku received a comment from the Australian Department of Broadband Communication promising that the whole website won't be blocked, just the material related to the game (videos, images, etc). Imagine maintaining that blacklist!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Magicjack Loses Legal Attack Against Boing Boing
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/UBCpbrhuKzk/Magicjack-Loses-Legal-Attack-Against-Boing-Boing)
An anonymous reader sends word that USB VOIP company Magicjack lost a lawsuit against Boing Boing when the judge declared the legal action a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). Magicjack must pay more than $50,000 in legal costs. Boing Boing has posted a page linking and summarizing all the legal documents relating to the lawsuit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- The Grown-Up Video Game
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/60-TACySQII/The-Grown-Up-Video-Game)
Phaethon360 writes "Now, more than ever, we're seeing many Mature ratings (M+, 17+, 18) being distributed by various national media regulators. But that isn't the only indicator for a game's intended audience. It doesn't take a thousand swear words, scantily clad women or gratuitous violence to differentiate a ten-year-old's game from a twenty-year-old's. The spectrum of human emotions encompasses a wider palette than just revenge, fear, and loss, but the games that shy away from these are frequently mistaken as being for a younger audience. From the article: 'The human experience is one that is made up of great hardship, pain, loss, death, and a multitude of experiences seemingly designed to destroy a person. However, that same experience is also filled with joy, love, laughter, family and friends. ... These so-called “grown-up” games need not be relegated to the category of niche gaming. In fact, at times we find that these video games are capable of reaching mass popularity among the gaming community. It is here that we find one of our generation’s outlets for the expression of conflict.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Scaling Algorithm Bug In Gimp, Photoshop, Others
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/CnMcd4PjGmE/Scaling-Algorithm-Bug-In-Gimp-Photoshop-Others)
Wescotte writes "There is an important error in most photography scaling algorithms. All software tested has the problem: The Gimp, Adobe Photoshop, CinePaint, Nip2, ImageMagick, GQview, Eye of Gnome, Paint, and Krita. The problem exists across three different operating systems: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. (These exceptions have subsequently been reported — this software does not suffer from the problem: the Netpbm toolkit for graphic manipulations, the developing GEGL toolkit, 32-bit encoded images in Photoshop CS3, the latest version of Image Analyzer, the image exporters in Aperture 1.5.6, the latest version of Rendera, Adobe Lightroom 1.4.1, Pixelmator for Mac OS X, Paint Shop Pro X2, and the Preview app in Mac OS X starting from version 10.6.) Photographs scaled with the affected software are degraded, because of incorrect algorithmic accounting for monitor gamma. The degradation is often faint, but probably most pictures contain at least an array where the degradation is clearly visible. I believe this has happened since the first versions of these programs, maybe 20 years ago."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Criminals Hide Payment-Card Skimmers In Gas Pumps
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qm2mzmZJSrw/Criminals-Hide-Payment-Card-Skimmers-In-Gas-Pumps)
tugfoigel writes "Wave of recent bank-card skimming incidents demonstrate how sophisticated the scam has become. Criminals hid bank card-skimming devices inside gas pumps — in at least one case, even completely replacing the front panel of a pump — in a recent wave of attacks that demonstrate a more sophisticated, insidious method of stealing money from unsuspecting victims filling up their gas tanks. Some 180 gas stations in Utah, from Salt Lake City to Provo, were reportedly found with these skimming devices sitting inside the gas pumps. The scam was first discovered when a California bank's fraud department discovered that multiple bank card victims reporting problems had all used the same gas pump at a 7-Eleven store in Utah."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Avoiding a Digital Dark Age
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/d2fkqzd1qrE/Avoiding-a-Digital-Dark-Age)
al0ha writes to recommend a worthwhile piece up at American Scientist on the problems of archiving and data preservation in an age where all data are stored digitally. "It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the 'digital dark age.' This is the idea — or fear! — that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us. ... Unlike the many venerable institutions that have for centuries refined their techniques for preserving analog data on clay, stone, ceramic or paper, we have no corresponding reservoir of historical wisdom to teach us how to save our digital data. That does not mean there is nothing to learn from the past, only that we must work a little harder to find it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Federal Judge Orders Schools To Stop Laptop Spying
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/B8WUjn_Wq2Q/Federal-Judge-Orders-Schools-To-Stop-Laptop-Spying)
CWmike writes "A federal judge on Monday ordered the Pennsylvania school district accused of spying on its students to stop activating the cameras in school-issued MacBook laptops. According to the original complaint, Blake Robbins was accused by a Harriton High School assistant principal of 'improper behavior in his home' and shown a photograph taken by his laptop as evidence. In an appearance on network television last Saturday, Robbins said he was accused by the assistant principal of selling drugs and taking pills — but he claimed the pictures taken by his computer's camera showed him eating candy. Also on Monday, the company selling the software used by the school district to allegedly spy on its students blasted what it called laptop theft-recovery 'vigilantism.'" jamie found two posts from stryde.hax pointing out suggestive information about one school district network administrator, and coaching students how to determine if their school-issued laptops were infected with the LANRev software used to operate the cameras remotely and in secret.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Gates and MS Don't See Eye-To-Eye On CO2
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/IDKyg6edLZ8/Gates-and-MS-Dont-See-Eye-To-Eye-On-CO2)
Sam Machkovech writes "Bill Gates's speech at last week's TED Conference centered on 'moving to zero-carbon energy, and our need to reduce CO2 emissions 80% by 2050.' His choice of subject was an abrupt turn from The Gates Foundation's typical humanitarian topics, but he insisted that energy innovation is crucial to his Foundation's goals. A move by Microsoft today proves that Gates's old company has less interest in that carbon-neutral goal — Microsoft has begun campaigning against a bridge redesign that would result in more bus and transit options for commuters between Seattle and the company's homebase of Redmond, WA."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- NHTSA Has No Software Engineers To Analyze Toyota
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/CVl33FsucLA/NHTSA-Has-No-Software-Engineers-To-Analyze-Toyota)
thecarchik writes "An official from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told investigators that the agency doesn't employ any electrical engineers or software engineers, leaving them woefully unable to investigate correctly what caused the most recent Toyota recall. A modern luxury car has something close to 100 million lines of software code in it, running on 70 to 100 microprocessors. And according to consultant Frost & Sullivan, that number will rise to 200 to 300 million lines within a few years. And the software that controls the 'drive-by-wire' accelerators of Toyota and Lexus vehicles is one potential culprit in the tangled collection of issues, allegations, and recalls of many of those vehicles for so-called 'sudden acceleration' problems."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Simon Singh To Appeal In UK Court Today
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/M24Dsxff5j8/Simon-Singh-To-Appeal-In-UK-Court-Today)
TACD writes "Simon Singh, author, television presenter and known critic of pseudoscience, is in court today appealing the decision made against him last May over his use of the term 'bogus' to describe the methods used by the British Chiropractic Association. Today's decision could have far-reaching implications for the movement to reform Britain's horrifically outdated libel laws (that even America is making moves to protect its citizens against), and to begin taking steps to elevate Britain above the likes of China when it comes to open debate and freedom of speech."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Comcast Launches First Public US Trial of DNSSEC
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/EDYR8sfzd1k/Comcast-Launches-First-Public-US-Trial-of-DNSSEC)
cryan7755 and netbuzz both sent along a NetworkWorld story on Comcast's public test deployment of DNSSEC. Here is the company's blog post announcing the trial.
"Comcast this morning announced what is believed to be the first public test deployment of DNS Security Extensions. The company says it has deployed DNSSEC throughout its nationwide network and will immediately make validating servers available to customers. In addition, Comcast said it would digitally sign all of its own domain names using DNSSEC by early next year. 'There is often talk about a chicken-and-egg sort of problem with DNSSEC. People don’t want to sign their own domains with DNSSEC until people are validating signatures,' says Jason Livingood, Executive Director of Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast. 'We want to explain how we as an ISP have a roadmap for validating signatures with DNSSEC.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

-- Setting up security Policies for Windows 98 PC
(http://www.helpforce.com)

Question: Hi, we are setting a small LAN with about 15 Win 98 SE PCs.Is there any adm app or prog to avoid users from installing software in the PCs ? We want to install only the necessary software for the users and keep the computers "clean".BTW Windows 98 SE is a must, and we cannot consider another Operating System.Thanks

Answer: Dear Pablo,The only way to lock users out of vairious elements of Windows 95/98/ME is to use Policy Manager.Policy manger is a Windows NT tool that usually relies on you running it from a Windows NT server, but if you can't use Windows NT the tool is a little tricky to use.The Policy manager is just a simple .exe program, but you will need to go to every single PC to set the policy up as it's part of the registry and can't be coppied as a file from one machine to the next.Once you had the tool it would simply be a case of loading it, finding the option to lock out setups and installs then saving hte policy and moving on to the next.However, if you leave the tool on the PC there is nothing to prevent the user from unlocking the option again so it would need to be removed once you are done.For absolubt waterproof security you'd also need to lock out the registry to prevent users from opening up the setup options that way.If you would like a copy of the tool which is Microsoft Freeware (A part of the Windows NT options pack) It can be downloaded from: http://download.microsoft.com/download/win95upg/poledit/1/W95/EN-US/policy.exe(Related knowledge base article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q135315)(If you hadn't already told me you couldn't consider another operating system I would strongly recomend having a Windows NT or 2000 server on your network of 98 PC's as without a server a workgroup as large as this can very easily be a network management nightmare.)

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

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