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Saturday the 27th of February 2010

Welcome to the Helpforce Daily Briefing, on Saturday the 27th 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
---------------------------------------
Troj/FakeAV-AXP on 27 February 2010 09:35:30 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavaxp.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/FakeAV-AXQ on 27 February 2010 09:35:30 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavaxq.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/JSRedir-AX on 27 February 2010 09:35:30 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojjsredirax.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Penepe-B on 27 February 2010 09:35:30 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpenepeb.html?_log_from=rss
W32/Autorun-BAB on 27 February 2010 09:35:30 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32autorunbab.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Agent-MPF on 26 February 2010 23:56:20 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmpf.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Bredo-BM on 26 February 2010 23:56:20 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojbredobm.html?_log_from=rss
JS/PDFLd-Gen on 26 February 2010 19:10:52 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/jspdfldgen.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Agent-MPE on 26 February 2010 19:10:52 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmpe.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Banker-EWM on 26 February 2010 19:10:52 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojbankerewm.html?_log_from=rss

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

-- FlightGear Reaches v2.0
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/c-H13hTM8eo/FlightGear-Reaches-v20)
distantbody writes "The flight sim project FlightGear has reached version 2.0. From the website: 'Highlights of this new version include: Dramatic new 3D clouds, dramatic lighting conditions, improved support for custom scenery, and many many new and detailed aircraft models.' Full list of improvements here. And of course the screenshots. The release coincides with the release of SimGear v2, the 'set of open-source libraries designed to be used as building blocks for quickly assembling 3d simulations, games, and visualization applications' on which FlightGear is based."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- New Zealand Legislature Mulls File-Sharing Bill
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/kV5ieBb3C5M/New-Zealand-Legislature-Mulls-File-Sharing-Bill)
bitserf writes from New Zealand: "Our overlords in government have decided to try and push through some file-sharing legislation. In the bill remains the controversial provisions for three-strikes removal of internet access, though interestingly, nothing prohibiting users from moving to other ISPs. Text of the bill can be found here. Interesting timing, considering ACTA negotiations due to be held in Wellington in April."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Gaming With GPS On Your Smartphone
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/X8760gb1ALs/Gaming-With-GPS-On-Your-Smartphone)
Barence writes "If your handset doesn't get you out and about, tramping through mud, climbing around and hunting for hidden treasure, then something needs an upgrade. The iPhone, Blackberry's Storm and Bold lines, and many Symbian and Android handsets now sport GPS, which makes your smartphone the ticket to join a global movement of outdoor games. These are outbound challenges that pit teams and solo players against themselves and each other in the search for hidden treasure, undiscovered landmarks and hidden spots all over the world. This article delves into several of the best smartphone-friendly real-world games, each of which is a bridge between the online and offline worlds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Project M Could Send Every Scientist To the Moon, By Proxy
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/_d7ILLvOmJ4/Project-M-Could-Send-Every-Scientist-To-the-Moon-By-Proxy)
An anonymous reader writes with this interesting bit of speculation: "NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface. If they can achieve this for real, the results for science research of our satellite could be amazing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Microsoft Wins Windows XP Downgrade Lawsuit
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/1JNNzRQYr4o/Microsoft-Wins-Windows-XP-Downgrade-Lawsuit)
CWmike writes "A federal judge has dismissed a year-old lawsuit against Microsoft over alleged antitrust violations for the 'downgrade' rules it set for Windows Vista and XP. The order put an end to the lawsuit filed by Emma Alvarado in February 2009. In her original complaint, she accused Microsoft of coercing computer makers into forcing consumers who wanted to run Windows XP to first buy Windows Vista, or later, Windows 7, before they were allowed to downgrade to XP. The judge rejected Alvarado's accusations, saying that the plaintiff had not proved Microsoft benefited from the downgrade practices that it created and that OEMs implemented."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- The 1-Second Linux Boot
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/VhuiDbIrVys/The-1-Second-Linux-Boot)
An anonymous reader writes "Less than one second Linux boot! This video shows an OMAP3530 capturing video data from a camera and rendering it to an LCD display — the video appears on the LCD display in less than a second from reset."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/DGdTRzlT1ws/Secret-Service-Runs-At-Six-Sixes-Availability)
PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- What Has Your Phone Survived?
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/AkY0CFQs3ew/What-Has-Your-Phone-Survived)
NotAnIndividual writes "On an ice fishing trip two months ago, I lost my iPhone somewhere in the snow. I searched and searched, but to no avail. But just this weekend when moving the ice hut, lo and behold there it was. I quickly threw it into a bag of rice and placed it under a lamp to defrost. Three hours later I plugged it in. I wasn't expecting much. I mean, really, it had been frozen in snow for the last two months! To my surprise, the Apple logo popped up. I put in the SIM card and voila, my iPhone was back. My apps, my contacts, my music and more importantly my life were back. And this is the same iPhone that I dropped in a cup of coffee a few months ago! This got me wondering how much damage a cell phone can actually take. How have other Slashdot users punished their phones without actually killing them completely?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- LG Launches Watch Phone In India
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qoXyMP4vk5w/LG-Launches-Watch-Phone-In-India)
roh2cool writes "If you are a watch freak and also happen to be a fan of ultra rare (and expensive) gadgets, this might just interest you. The LG GD910 watch phone looks like a normal watch – except for the fact that it can double up as your mobile phone when needed. 'It is quite thin at just 13.9mm and packs in 3G and Video Calling capabilities as well. The phone is quite stylish and the front fascia is covered by scratch-proof tempered glass. It comes with a Bluetooth headset so you don’t have to keep talking like David Hasselhoff talked to his super-car KITT in the “Knight Rider” series.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- What Is Time? One Researcher Shares His Exploration
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/rrcTxlyn73U/What-Is-Time-One-Researcher-Shares-His-Exploration)
Physicist Sean Carroll has built up a bit of a name for himself by tackling one of the age old questions that no one has been able to fully explain: What is time? Earlier this month he gave an interview with Wired where he tried to explain his theories in layman's terms. "I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Exploring Advanced Format Hard Drive Technology
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Tf5FXWre7pU/Exploring-Advanced-Format-Hard-Drive-Technology)
MojoKid writes "Hard drive capacities are sometimes broken down by the number of platters and the size of each. The first 1TB drives, for example, used five 200GB platters; current-generation 1TB drives use two 500GB platters. These values, however, only refer to the accessible storage capacity, not the total size of the platter itself. Invisible to the end-user, additional capacity is used to store positional information and for ECC. The latest Advanced Format hard drive technology changes a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes. This allows the ECC data to be stored more efficiently. Advanced Format drives emulate a 512 byte sector size, to keep backwards compatibility intact, by mapping eight logical 512 byte sectors to a single physical sector. Unfortunately, this creates a problem for Windows XP users. The good news is, Western Digital has already solved the problem and HotHardware offers some insight into the technology and how it performs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Facebook Patents the News Feed
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/B9KnICRnHoQ/Facebook-Patents-the-News-Feed)
daedae writes "It seems Facebook has been granted a patent for the news feed, as a method of monitoring activities, storing them in a database, and displaying an appropriate set of activities to an appropriate set of users. 'That sounds pretty broad, and the social-networking world was all atwitter at the possible ramifications. Writing for ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick proclaimed, "This could be very big. ... MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader, and even Google Buzz — do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook's?" The patent may not be that broad. Nick O'Neill at the All Facebook blog wrote that the patent doesn't appear to cover status updates as used by Twitter. "It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. ... Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user's friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial," O'Neill wrote.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Recommendation Algorithm Wants To Show You Something New
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/HSu-5_qQ2Zk/Recommendation-Algorithm-Wants-To-Show-You-Something-New)
Several sources are reporting on a new metric that computer scientists are going after with respect to recommender systems — recommendation diversity. "In a paper that will be released by PNAS, a group of scientists are pushing the limits of recommendation systems, creating new algorithms that will make more tangential recommendations to users, which can help expand their interests, which will increase the longevity and utility of the recommendation system itself. Accuracy has long been the most prized measurement in recommending content, like movies, links, or music. However, computer scientists note that this type of system can narrow the field of interest for each user the more it is used. Improved accuracy can result in a strong filtering based on a user's interests, until the system can only recommend a small subset of all the content it has to offer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- California Legislature Declares "Cuss-Free" Week
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/rzxyLEGbFjM/California-Legislature-Declares-Cuss-Free-Week)
shewfig writes "The California legislature, which previously tried to ban incandescent light bulbs, just added to the list of banned things ... swear words! Fortunately, the measure only applies for the first week of March, and compliance is voluntary — although, apparently, there will be a 'swear jar' in the Assembly and the Governor's mansion. No word yet on whether the Governator intends to comply."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Scientists Develop Financial Turing Test
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/GHrj8etVSDQ/Scientists-Develop-Financial-Turing-Test)
KentuckyFC writes writes to share a new online test that is being touted as the "financial Turing test." The web-based exercise asks users to distinguish between real and randomly generated financial data. "Various economists argue that the efficiency of a market ought to be clearly evident in the returns it produces. They say that the more efficient it is, the more random its returns will be and a perfect market should be completely random. That would appear to give the lie to the widespread belief that humans are unable to tell the difference between financial market returns and, say, a sequence of coin tosses. However, there is good evidence that financial markets are not random (although they do not appear to be predictable either). Now a group of scientists have developed a financial Turing test to find out whether humans can distinguish real financial data from the same data randomly rearranged. Anybody can take the test and the results indicate that humans are actually rather good at this kind of pattern recognition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

-- I can get only 16 colors and my screen area is only 640 X 480
(http://www.helpforce.com)

Question: I formatted my hard drive and reinstalled windows ME. When I open up display properties, settings, I get only 16 colors and my screen area is only 640 X 480. I went through the help troubleshooter and am still unable to get the right color. Is there something wrong in my BIOS? Or is there another solution?

Answer: Nothing wrong with your bios.If you know the make and mode of your video card, then....Right click on any clear area of your "desktop"Left click on the menu option "Properties"Left click on the "settings" option of the dialog box.Under the monitor in the newly displayed box will be the name of your monitor and video card.If the video card is incorrect, dig out the CD that came with your video card (or possibly your motherboard) and reinstall the video card drivers.If the video card model is correct, check the colors dropdown box. If there is an option for more colors then bump the colors to 16 bit or high 32 bit.***************************************If you can bump the number of colors up, but the video refuses to go any higher, then most likely the video drivers are damaged and just reinstall them.****************************************

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

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

-- The Top Internet Memes(http://netforbeginners.about.com/b/a/258223.htm)

Memes are viral bits of culture, spread around the world through email and instant messaging. Commonly, memes are jokes and urban legends. Sometimes, memes are also music and language...

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

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