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

Monday the 1st of March 2010

Welcome to the Helpforce Daily Briefing, on Monday the 1st of March 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
For free technical support, visit us at http://www.helpforce.com

1. Latest Virus Alerts From Sophos
---------------------------------------
Mal/PerlBot-A on 1 March 2010 10:42:13 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/malperlbota.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Agent-MPG on 1 March 2010 10:42:13 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmpg.html?_log_from=rss
W32/AutoRun-BAE on 1 March 2010 10:42:13 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32autorunbae.html?_log_from=rss
W32/AutoRun-BAD on 1 March 2010 07:41:03 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32autorunbad.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Agent-MNQ on 1 March 2010 05:47:18 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmnq.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/FakeAV-AXV on 1 March 2010 05:47:18 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavaxv.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/FakeAV-AXW on 1 March 2010 05:47:18 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavaxw.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PDFJs-HZ on 1 March 2010 05:47:18 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpdfjshz.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/PDFJs-IA on 1 March 2010 05:47:18 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojpdfjsia.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/VB-ENG on 1 March 2010 05:47:18 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojvbeng.html?_log_from=rss

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

-- An Exercise To Model a "Solar Radiation Katrina"
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/jjZGw_uiB3c/An-Exercise-To-Model-a-Solar-Radiation-Katrina)
Hugh Pickens writes in with an update on the warnings we discussed a year back about the dangers of a "solar Katrina." Now NPR is reporting on a tabletop exercise mounted in Boulder, Colorado by government workers attempting to model the effects of a worst-case solar electromagnetic storm. "...an exercise held in Boulder, Colorado, has investigated what might happen if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859 — a sort of solar Katrina — and researchers found that the impact is likely to be far worse than in previous solar storms because of our growing dependence on satellites and other electronic devices that are vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation. 'In many ways, the impact of a major solar storm resembles that of a hurricane or an earthquake,' says FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, except that a solar Katrina would cause damage in a much larger area — power could be knocked out almost simultaneously in countries from Sweden to Canada and the US. In the exercise, the first sign of trouble came when radiation began disrupting radio signals and GPS devices, says Tom Bogdan, who directs the Space Weather Prediction Center. Ten or 20 minutes later electrically charged particles 'basically took out' most of the commercial satellites that transmit telephone conversations, TV shows, and huge amounts of data we depend on in our daily lives. But the worst damage came nearly a day later, when the solar storm began to induce electrical currents in high voltage power lines strong enough to destroy transformers around the globe, leaving millions of people in northern latitudes without power."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Killer Apartment Vs. Persistent Microwave Exposure?
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/_2P4_HsLIRg/Killer-Apartment-Vs-Persistent-Microwave-Exposure)
An anonymous reader writes "I am considering buying a penthouse apartment in Manhattan that happens to be about twenty feet away from a pair of panel antennas belonging to a major cellular carrier. The antennas are on roughly the same plane as the apartment and point in its direction. I have sifted through a lot of information online about cell towers, most of which suggest that the radiation they emit is low-level and benign. Most of this information, however, seems to concern ground-level exposure at non-regular intervals. My question to Slashdot is: should the prospect of persistent exposure to microwave radiation from this pair of antennas sitting twenty feet from where I rest my head worry me? Am I just being a jackass? Can I, perhaps, line the walls of the place with a tight metal mesh and thereby deflect the radiation? My background is in computer engineering — I am not particularly knowledgeable about the physics of devices such as these. Please help me make an enlightened decision."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Calendar Bug Disables Older PlayStation 3 Models
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/g2Yi79Rk9NI/Calendar-Bug-Disables-Older-PlayStation-3-Models)
JohnWilliams writes "The Sony PlayStation Network appears to be inaccessible to older ('phat') PS3 units. Players cannot play games that require a connection, even in single-player, offline mode, e.g. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Also, the system date resets to January 1, 2000. Sony is 'looking into it.' Speculation abounds that it is a bug related to 2010 being incorrectly flagged as a leap year. The newer PS3 Slim models seem to be working properly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Caltech Makes Flexible, 86% Efficient Solar Arrays
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/nsiY8bjkqNU/Caltech-Makes-Flexible-86-Efficient-Solar-Arrays)
strredwolf writes "Caltech has released a flexible solar array that converts 95% of single-wavelength incandescent light and 86% of all sunlight into electricity. Instead of being flat-panel, they stand thin silicon wires in a plastic substrate that scatters the light onto them. The total composition is 98% plastic, 2% wire — the amount of silicon used is 1/50th that of ordinary panels. So as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- 8-Year Fan-Made Game Project Shut Down By Activision
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/p3xuB6XJlZI/8-Year-Fan-Made-Game-Project-Shut-Down-By-Activision)
An anonymous reader writes "Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Banks Accept Dubai Assassins' Stolen IDs
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/3YNHZkBY8G4/Banks-Accept-Dubai-Assassins-Stolen-IDs)
schliz writes "Public scrutiny did more harm than good last week, after Australian police and the media released details of three stolen passports allegedly used in the assasination of a senior Hamas member in Dubai. As if having their identities stolen for an assassination wasn't enough, it turns out the victims' passports had not been cancelled by the government, so the details that were published by the media in fact could be used to open fraudulent bank accounts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- The LHC Is Back Online
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/bMQRYIoKWUk/The-LHC-Is-Back-Online)
medea and several other readers noted that the LHC came back online early this morning. Here is the tweet from CERN announcing the milestone. As we discussed a few weeks ago, CERN plans to run the LHC at half power or less through 2011.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Google Enhances Street View With User Photos
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/QIJIbADPlHM/Google-Enhances-Street-View-With-User-Photos)
Google has launched a competitor or counterpart to Microsoft's Photosynth, which employs user-contributed photos of much-photographed sites to supplement the street-level view in an immersive way. Google's offering is called simply Navigate through User Photos, and unlike Photosynth — which requires Sliverlight and therefore is not available on Linux — is implemented in Flash. This YouTube video (also embedded at the link above) offers a quick tour of the new feature, which can use photos uploaded to Panoramico, Flickr, and Picasa.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Court Rules Photo of Memorial Violates Copyright
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/WSzjgnM_vfk/Court-Rules-Photo-of-Memorial-Violates-Copyright)
WhatDoIKnow sends in a story about an appeals court ruling in a singular case that might have the effect of narrowing "fair use" rights for transformative uses of artworks. "The sculptor who designed the Korean War memorial [in Washington DC] brought suit against the Postal Service after a photograph of his work was used on a postage stamp. Though first ruled protected by 'fair use,' on appeal the court ruled in favor (PDF) of the sculptor, Frank Gaylord, now 85."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- New Wave of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/K8Ni1lpVOiU/New-Wave-of-Antibiotic-Resistant-Bacteria)
reporter writes "New strains of 'Gram-negative' bacteria have become resistant to all safe antibiotics. Though methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the best-known antibiotic-resistant germ, the new class of resistant bacteria could be more dangerous still. 'The bacteria, classified as Gram-negative because of their reaction to the so-called Gram stain test, can cause severe pneumonia and infections of the urinary tract, bloodstream, and other parts of the body. Their cell structure makes them more difficult to attack with antibiotics than Gram-positive organisms like MRSA.' The only antibiotics — colistin and polymyxin B — that still have efficacy against Gram-negative bacteria produce dangerous side effects: kidney damage and nerve damage. Patients who are infected with Gram-negative bacteria must make the unsavory choice between life with kidney damage or death with intact kidneys. Recently, some new strains of Gram-negative bacteria have shown resistance against even colistin and polymyxin B. Infection with these new strains typically means death for the patient."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/JSltWLbdolA/Developing-a-Vandalism-Detector-For-Wikipedia)
marpot writes "In an effort to assist Wikipedia's editors in their struggle to keep articles clean, we are conducting a public lab on vandalism detection. The goal is the development of a practical vandalism detector that is capable of telling apart ill-intentioned edits from well-intentioned edits. Such a tool, which will work somewhat like a spam detector, will release the crowd's workforce currently occupied with manual and semi-automatic edit filtering. The performance of submitted detectors will be evaluated based on a large collection of human-annotated edits, which has been crowdsourced using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Everyone is welcome to participate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Schooling Microsoft On Random Browser Selection
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/HNcmMLoaaGw/Schooling-Microsoft-On-Random-Browser-Selection)
Rob Weir got wind that a Slovakian tech site had been discussing the non-randomness of Microsoft's intended-to-be-random browser choice screen, which went into effect on European Windows 7 systems last week. He did some testing and found that indeed the order in which the five browser choices appear on the selection screen is far from random — though probably not intentionally slanted. He then proceeds to give Microsoft a lesson in random-shuffle algorithms. "This computational problem has been known since the earliest days of computing. There are 5 well-known approaches: 3 good solutions, 1 acceptable solution that is slower than necessary and 1 bad approach that doesn’t really work. Microsoft appears to have picked the bad approach. But I do not believe there is some nefarious intent to this bug. It is more in the nature of a 'naive algorithm,' like the bubble sort, that inexperienced programmers inevitably will fall upon when solving a given problem. I bet if we gave this same problem to 100 freshmen computer science majors, at least 1 of them would make the same mistake. But with education and experience, one learns about these things. And one of the things one learns early on is to reach for Knuth. ... The lesson here is that getting randomness on a computer cannot be left to chance. You cannot just throw Math.random() at a problem and stir the pot and expect good results."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Hackers Target Tsunami Search Results
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/wpcqw3sCI70/Hackers-Target-Tsunami-Search-Results)
xsee writes "Only hours after the earthquake and resulting tsunami from Chile, hackers began manipulating search results to direct people seeking information on the event to infected webpages. Exercise caution as to where you get information on this tragedy. Chester Wisniewski describes what happened after he saw a suspicious site listed second on a Google search: 'It appears to be a normal website with information and videos about different Asian tsunamis over the past few years. It is difficult to tell whether this particular page was SEO-optimized, or was an innocent victim of a malicious script. SophosLabs got back to me that this page contains some obfuscated malicious JavaScript that we detect as MAL/ObfJS-R. This script was appended after the normal code on the page'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- TI-Nspire Hack Enables User Programming
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/6FPAnEGBHcM/TI-Nspire-Hack-Enables-User-Programming)
An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments' most recent, ARM-based series of graphing calculators, the TI-Nspire line, has long resisted users' efforts to run their own software. (Unlike other TI calculator models, which can be programmed either in BASIC, C, or assembly language, the Nspire only supports an extremely limited form of BASIC.) A bug in the Nspire's OS was recently discovered, however, which can be exploited to execute arbitrary machine code. Now the first version of a tool called Ndless has been released, enabling users, for the first time, to write and run their own C and assembly programs on the device. This opens up exciting new possibilities for these devices, which are extremely powerful compared to TI's other calculator offerings, but (thanks to the built-in software's limitations) have hitherto been largely ignored by the calculator programming community."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Open Gov Tracker Reveals Best US Open Government Ideas
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/X8cSF6orzmQ/Open-Gov-Tracker-Reveals-Best-US-Open-Government-Ideas)
jonverve writes "In May of 2009, the White House launched an Ideascale site to gather ideas from citizens to identify ways to 'strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.' The digital letdown was when many of the top ideas generated by the process were to legalize marijuana, solve tax issues and to reinvestigate Obama's birth origins. Fast forward to February 6 and the same process has been repeated with individual federal agencies as the subject. This time the idea generation has been much more productive, with ideas such as establishing clear benchmarks on humanitarian progress in Sudan to the State Department, funding for open source text books and materials to the Department of Education, making it easier to access previously FOIAed documents to the Department of Justice, and creating a Wiki for NASA to share its data and to engage the public. Hackers from NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform have created a site that aggregates 23 of these idea sites to give a quick peek into the best rated contributions in each category. Programmed in Python and using the MongoDB and Tornado web server, the Open Gov Tracker was highlighted by the open government blog Govfresh this past week as well. Jessy Cowan-Sharp, one of the creators, explained their motivation: 'We thought that a single access point would give a sense of the participation on all the different sites, a window into the discussions happening, build some excitement, and inspire people to participate.' The process closes on March 19th, so go and visit the site to contribute your ideas and vote!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

-- I cant install the software for my card reader - help!
(http://www.helpforce.com)

Question: While trying to installsetup software for a card reader it gave a error message--- incompatable version of R P C stub does that mean my version of windows (98) is incompatable or do i have other problems yoursw keeble

Answer: Dear User,The error you are encountering does indeed mean that your version of Windows (98 in this case) is not compatible with your card reader.The only way to fix this problem would be to upgrade your version of Windows to a later version. Windows XP will definately support this type of card reader.Hope this helps and appologies for the delay in replying to you.If you require any further assistance, please feel free to reply to this message. Please include all previous emails so that we may more easily track your problem.

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

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