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Sunday the 7th of March 2010

Welcome to the Helpforce Daily Briefing, on Sunday the 7th 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
---------------------------------------
Troj/Agent-MQW on 7 March 2010 03:29:27 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmqw.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Agent-MQX on 7 March 2010 03:29:27 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmqx.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/FakeAV-AYX on 7 March 2010 03:29:27 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavayx.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/FakeAV-AYW on 6 March 2010 19:44:46 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavayw.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/FakeAV-AYZ on 6 March 2010 19:44:46 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavayz.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Skintri-A on 6 March 2010 14:56:01 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojskintria.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/DwnLdr-IBT on 6 March 2010 11:53:31 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojdwnldribt.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/FakeAV-AYU on 6 March 2010 11:53:31 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojfakeavayu.html?_log_from=rss
W32/Spybot-PA on 6 March 2010 08:26:29 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/w32spybotpa.html?_log_from=rss
Troj/Agent-MQV on 6 March 2010 04:46:21 Z
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/trojagentmqv.html?_log_from=rss

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

-- Ars Technica Inveighs Against Ad Blocking
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/nu1pOh5UftY/Ars-Technica-Inveighs-Against-Ad-Blocking)
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica recently conducted a 12-hour experiment in which story content was hidden from users of popular ad blocking tools. Explaining the experiment, Ken Fisher appealed to Ars's readership: 'My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin. As ad revenues go down, many sites are lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature. We've all seen it happen. I am very proud of the fact that we routinely talk to you guys in our feedback forum about the quality of our ads. I have proven over 12 years that we will fight on the behalf of readers whenever we can. Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads. But any of you reading this site for any significant period of time know that these are few and far between. We turn down offers every month for advertising like that out of respect for you guys. We simply ask that you return the favor and not block ads.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Sumo Wrestler Steals Cash Machine From Moscow Shop
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hYG7240zKdo/Sumo-Wrestler-Steals-Cash-Machine-From-Moscow-Shop)
timothy writes "Anyone skeevy and devious enough can buy online an ATM skimmer from some underhanded maker of same, but why not cut out the middleman, and just take the cash directly? (Also, if you're going to attempt to stop him, can I have your watch when you are dead?)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Lessons of a $618,616 Death
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/E7uI95SFaRU/Lessons-of-a-618616-Death)
theodp writes "Two years after her husband's death, Amanda Bennett examines the costs and complex questions of keeping one man alive. The bills for his seven-year battle with cancer totaled $618,616, almost two-thirds of which was for his final 24 months. No one can say for sure if the treatments helped extend his life, and she's left with a question she still can't answer: When is it time to quit?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- A Balanced Look At Cellphone Radiation
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/M4V7JN_jLzc/A-Balanced-Look-At-Cellphone-Radiation)
A month back we discussed an article in GQ on the alarmist side of the cellphone-radiation question. Now reader pgn674 passes along a PopSci feature article looking at the current state of cellphone radiation research. It profiles people who claim to be electro-hypersensitive, "who are reluctant to subject themselves to hours in an electronics-laden facility" for studies. The limited research on that condition is still showing that sufferers, in blind tests, are unable to detect radiation at levels better than chance. The article also touches on the relationship of non-ionizing radiation to cancer. The conclusion is that while it seems unlikely high-frequency fields in consumer devices directly cause cancer, they might promote it, and might also indirectly cause other health deficits beyond simply heating nearby tissue — though one skeptical researcher cautions, "The gap between a biological effect and an adverse health effect is a big one."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Whatever Happened To Programming?
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/db9hetWdnhM/Whatever-Happened-To-Programming)
Mirk writes "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges." This 3-day-old article has sparked lively discussions at Reddit and at Hacker News, and the author has responded with a followup and summation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Amateur Records the "Sound" of Mars Express
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/klvKQmROciY/Amateur-Records-the-Sound-of-Mars-Express)
gyrogeerloose writes "A French amateur radio operator who built his own ground station using equipment from an abandoned telecom uplink site has listened in on the ESA's Mars Express space probe. While his antenna is too small to allow him to download actual data, he was able to record and convert the signal of the probe's X-Band transmitter into an audio file."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Coping With 1 Million SSH Authentication Failures?
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/RX_imMdh0BA/Coping-With-1-Million-SSH-Authentication-Failures)
An anonymous reader writes "I own a small Web development studio that specializes in open source software, primarily Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla for small businesses. Our production servers, which host about 50 sites and generate ~20K hits/week, are managed by a 3rd party that I'm sure many on Slashdot would recognize. Earlier today I was researching some problems on one of our sites and found that there have been over 1 million SSH authentication failures from ~1200 IP addresses on one of our servers over the last year. I contacted the ISP, who had promised me that server security would be actively managed, and their recommendation was, 'change the SSH port!' Of course this makes sense and may help to an extent, but it still doesn't solve the problem I'm facing: how do you manage server security on a tight budget with literally no system admin (except for me and I know I'm a n00b)? User passwords are randomly generated, we use a non-standard SSH port, and do not use any unencrypted services such as FTP. Is there a server monitoring program you would recommend? Is there an ISP or Web-based service that specializes in this?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Some Newegg Customers Received Fake Intel Core i7s
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/sAVHKbhlqdg/Some-Newegg-Customers-Received-Fake-Intel-Core-i7s)
Several readers have mentioned the strange goods that some customers received from Newegg in place of the Intel Core i7 920 processor they ordered. Word on the problem first surfaced on TribalWar on Thursday evening. Newegg still hasn't commented on this. It's not known whether it happened as a result fraud by another Newegg customer, in shipping, or where. The "processors" are made of aluminum, and the "fans" are some kind of synthetic molded material. The "factory seal" was printed onto the box; the holographic stickers on the boxes were also faked. The first part of this video shows the bogus goods. At this writing Google News lists a handful of blogs mentioning the fakes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Popular Science Frees Its 137-Year Archives
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/nPmsfCijlu0/Popular-Science-Frees-Its-137-Year-Archives)
DesScorp writes "Popular Science magazine has scanned every issue they've ever produced, and posted the archives at their website, at no charge. 'We've partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It's an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology's incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.'" First search: the history of the flying car.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Why Wikipedia Articles Vary So Much In Quality
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/y19S9wuDMus/Why-Wikipedia-Articles-Vary-So-Much-In-Quality)
Hugh Pickens writes "A new study shows that the patterns of collaboration among Wikipedia contributors directly affect the quality of an article. 'These collaboration patterns either help increase quality or are detrimental to data quality,' says Sudha Ram at the University of Arizona. Wikipedia has an internal quality rating system for entries, with featured articles at the top, followed by A, B, and C-level entries. Ram and graduate student Jun Liu randomly collected 400 articles at each quality level. 'We used data mining techniques and identified various patterns of collaboration based on the provenance or, more specifically, who does what to Wikipedia articles,' says Ram. The researchers identified seven specific roles that Wikipedia contributors play (PDF starting on page 175): Casual Contributor, Starter, Cleaner, Copy Editor, Content Justifier, Watchdog, and All-round Editor. Starters, for example, create sentences but seldom engage in other actions. Content justifiers create sentences and justify them with resources and links. The all-round contributors perform many different functions. 'We then clustered the articles based on these roles and examined the collaboration patterns within each cluster to see what kind of quality resulted,' says Ram. 'We found that all-round contributors dominated the best-quality entries. In the entries with the lowest quality, starters and casual contributors dominated.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- PayPal Freezes Cryptome's Account
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/vOgJDlQiRrA/PayPal-Freezes-Cryptomes-Account)
grimwell sends in the news that after Cryptome's little run-in with Microsoft and NetSol, the activist site has now had its funds frozen by PayPal. Cryptome founder John Young notes, "Google lists thousands of instances of this asymmetrical high-handedness." "We have reviewed your PayPal Account, and due to the excessive risk involved, we would like to begin parting ways in a manner that is least disruptive to your business."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Xbox Live Now Allows Gender Expression
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/DImMoAWojJU/Xbox-Live-Now-Allows-Gender-Expression)
Last year we discussed news that an Xbox Live gamer was banned for identifying herself as a lesbian on her profile. Microsoft said at the time that nothing sexual in nature could appear in Gamertags or profiles. Now, they seem to have reconsidered their stance, and they've updated their Code of Conduct accordingly. Xbox Live General Manager Marc Whitten wrote:
"[The update] will allow our members to more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles. Under our previous policy, some of these expressions of self-identification were not allowed in Gamertags or profiles to prevent the use of these terms as insults or slurs. However we have since heard feedback from our customers that while the spirit of this approach was genuine, it inadvertently excluded a part of our Xbox LIVE community. This update also comes hand-in-hand with increased stringency and enforcement to prevent the misuse of these terms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Improving Education Through Better Teachers
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9EWMsQlNKOY/Improving-Education-Through-Better-Teachers)
theodp writes "The teaching profession gets schooled in cover stories from the big pubs this weekend, as Newsweek makes the case for Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers, and the NY Times offers the more hopeful Building a Better Teacher. For the past half-century, professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language — but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements. But what they ignored was the elephant in the room — if the teacher sucks, the students suck. Or, as the Times more eloquently puts it: 'William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge.' But what makes a good teacher? When Bill Gates announced his foundation was investing $335 million in a project to improve teaching quality, he added a rueful caveat. 'Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn't have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,' Gates said. 'I'm personally very curious.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- Wear Leveling, RAID Can Wipe Out SSD Advantage
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/e6y2gkGWtKI/Wear-Leveling-RAID-Can-Wipe-Out-SSD-Advantage)
storagedude writes "This article discusses using solid state disks in enterprise storage networks. A couple of problems noted by the author: wear leveling can eat up most of a drive's bandwidth and make write performance no faster than a hard drive, and using SSDs with RAID controllers brings up its own set of problems. 'Even the highest-performance RAID controllers today cannot support the IOPS of just three of the fastest SSDs. I am not talking about a disk tray; I am talking about the whole RAID controller. If you want full performance of expensive SSDs, you need to take your $50,000 or $100,000 RAID controller and not overpopulate it with too many drives. In fact, most vendors today have between 16 and 60 drives in a disk tray and you cannot even populate a whole tray. Add to this that some RAID vendor's disk trays are only designed for the performance of disk drives and you might find that you need a disk tray per SSD drive at a huge cost.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-- The Evolution of Reading In the Digital Age
(http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/6RrEijilfoY/The-Evolution-of-Reading-In-the-Digital-Age)
Doofus writes "'Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused.' is the subtitle of Craig Mod's thoughtful discussion aboutthe evolution of reading material from printed dead-tree to flowing digital content. I stumbled upon his blog post from a related NYTimes article, Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print. He breaks reading material down into two basic categories: 'Formless,' in which the content and meaning of the writing has no dependency on presentation, and 'Definite,' in which layout and presentation play a role in conveying meaning. Mod makes the point that as digital presentation improves, devices such as the iPad will bring authors newer and improved platforms upon which to display Definite content. Despite this, he says, some works will be better consumed in physical print because 'They're books that embrace their physicality or have stood the test of time. They're the kinds of books the iPad can't displace because they're complete objects.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

-- How do I turn off auto complete?
(http://www.helpforce.com)

Question: When i type things in say a google search, words that i have already typed come up for me to select. How do i or where do i go to make what i have already typed previously to not pop up?

Answer: right click internet explorer, go to properties,click on the content tab. under personal information, click on auto complete and remove the checks, also clear everything.

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

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