Interesting Technology News
A lot of interesting stuff going on today, most of it I don’t have time to comment on, just read. 
Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.
Duke Nukem Forever Teaser Debuts on Shacknews Following yesterday’s screenshot release, Shacknews is pleased to premiere the first new Duke Nukem Forever teaser trailer in over six years. According to George Broussard of developer 3D Realms, the approximately minute-long video was originally created internally for the purpose of holiday festivities and marks the beginning of further media unveilings surrounding the notoriously long-in-development first- person shooter.
Or watch it on Youtube.
Posted to Video Tutorials by eubeenhadd on December 19, 2007
Antivirus firm: Google text ad Trojan detected Advertisements placed by Google in Web pages are being hijacked by so-called Trojan horse software that replaces the intended text with ads from a different provider, Romanian antivirus company BitDefender says.
The Trojan redirects queries meant to be sent to Google servers to a rogue server, which displays ads from a third party instead of ads from Google, BitDefender said in a statement.
The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results In 2003, Google introduced a “supplemental index” as a way of showing more documents to users. Most webmasters will probably snicker about that statement, since supplemental docs were famous for refreshing less often and showing up in search results less often. But the supplemental index served an important purpose: it stored unusual documents that we would search in more depth for harder or more esoteric queries.
Worm Hits Google’s Orkut Google’s Orkut social networking site appeared to have been hit by a relatively harmless worm, but one that demonstrated the continuing vulnerability of Web applications.
The People Inside Google’s Black Box After I wrote about Google’s search technology earlier this year, I got an e-mail from an engineer at another search engine telling me not to believe Google when it said its search results were simply the product of fancy formulas. Google, he said, has human beings helping to pick the best sites for many queries.
Intel to delay launch of three 45nm quad-core CPUs on poor AMD performance Intel has recently adjusted its product strategy and will postpone three 45nm quad-core CPUs that were originally scheduled to launch in January next year, according to sources at motherboard makers.
Intel has already notified its partners that it will push back the launch of the three CPUs to February or March next year, depending on AMD’s schedule for triple-core and the upcoming Phenom CPUs.
HUH?!?
Firefox 3 Beta 2 now available for download Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.
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Last Minute Holiday Deals
Here are some last minute computer and electronic deals.
These deals are from J&R.com.
Eye-Fi Wireless 2GB SD Memory Card – $99.99 and FREE Shipping
Sandisk 2GB SD Memory Card – $19.99
WDXMS1200BN Western Digital Passport Portable USB 120GB Hard Drive – $74.99
Braun 9595 Pulsonic Cordless Shaver – $199.99 and FREE Shipping
Nanda Clocky the Mobile Alarm Clock – $49.95 FREE Shipping
Apple iPod touch – 8GB – $279.99 FREE Shipping
Harman Kardon SOUNDSTICKS II 3-Piece Plug and Play Multimedia Speaker System – $119.99 FREE Shipping
Kodak SV-811 EasyShare 8-inch Digital Picture Frame – $149.95 and FREE Shipping
Apple iPod classic – 80GB – Black – $229.99 FREE Shipping
Here are some from HP Small and Medium Business.
Save $400 on Select ProLiant 300 Series & BL465c Get $400 instant savings on select ProLiant DL365, DL385 and BL465c servers. (valid until 1/31/08)
$400 Instant Savings on Select HP Servers Save up to $400 instantly on select ProLiant ML370, DL360 and DL380 servers. (valid until 1/31/08)
One Step Up with HP Purchase an HP workstation and step up to the next level of Processor, RAM, Disk, Graphics, Optical, or Monitor for free. (valid until 1/31/08)
Here are some from Office Depot.
Let Canon Help You With All
Refurbished Brother MFC
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Mac OS X Has More Vulnerabilities Than XP and Vista
Larry Dignan at ZDnet has posted a comparison of the numbers of vulnerabilities between Mac OS X and Windows, both XP and Vista, and while the numbers look like Microsoft has a big lead on security, it certainly does not mean that. It just says that Mac OS X has 5 times the flaws of XP and Vista every month in 2007.
Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X vulnerability stats for 2007 XP Vista XP + Vista Mac OS X Total extremely critical 3 1 4 0 Total highly critical 19 12 23 234 Total moderately critical 2 1 3 2 Total less critical 3 1 4 7 Total flaws 34 20 44 243 Average flaws per month 2.83 1.67 3.67 20.25
Now, before everyone does the Mac versus PC thing, this is just a comparison of the vulnerabilities and in no way does it say that Windows is more secure, now, if they did a comparison of the actual number of exploits taking advantage of the same vulnerabilities, I am sure the number would be severely tilted to Microsoft as they have the larger installed base. Plus, after reading some of the comments, it doesn’t take into account how many of these are actually from Apple for their software, as they distribute patches for the software that comes with their OS as well, lots of it being open source.
Categories: Apple, Microsoft News, Windows Vista, Windows XP Tags: Mac OS X, vulnerability, Windows Vista, Windows XP
Security News for December 12, 2007
Here are some Windows security news items, as well as some patch Tuesday information.
From: The Register Hey, HP laptop owners: click here to get hijacked If you use a Hewlett-Packard laptop, chances are a hacker can hijack your machine simply by luring you to a malicious website.
The pwnage comes courtesy of “HP Info Center”, which comes installed on most HP laptops, according to a post made Tuesday to Milw0rm.com.
From: Infoworld DNS attack could signal Phishing 2.0 Only recently have hackers lined up the technology and technique to reap open-recursive DNS servers’ weaknesses. Researchers at Google and the Georgia Institute of Technology are studying a virtually undetectable form of attack that quietly controls where victims go on the Internet.
From: TrendLabs Malware Blog Patch Tuesday, December Edition Just in time for the holidays, Microsoft has released seven (and hopefully last) security bulletins for this year.
From: Microsoft Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-064 – Critical Vulnerabilities in DirectX Could Allow Remote Code Execution (941568) This critical security update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in Microsoft DirectX. These vulnerabilities could allow code execution if a user opened a specially crafted file used for streaming media in DirectX. If a user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
From: WSJ A Spam-Filled Holiday Season If you’ve been getting a lot of emails offering a deal on a Rolex, here’s why: Spam emails accounted for 72% of all email traffic last month, the highest rate in years.
Categories: Security Tags:
Windows Vista and XP News
Here are some updates on the latest Windows XP service pack, Windows Vista updates to improve speed and reliability and a free copy of Windows Vista, if you dare.
From: Mary Jo Foley Microsoft starts rolling out public XP SP3 test build Microsoft has begun making a near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 3 available to anyone interested in trying out the new build — the same way that it is doing with Vista SP1.
Microsoft has begun posting XP SP3 RC documentation to its Microsoft Download site, which is open to the general public. And the XP SP3 RC bits are available from various file-download sites on the Web.
From: Akihabara News Toshiba T31, the first notebook with Both XP and Vista! Thank you Toshiba, yes THANK YOU !! I have to admit that on this one, you really made my day! While most of computers nowadays are shipped with Vista and its drawbacks, you can, after some very hard work and crying, get from manufacturers the possibility to downgrade to a proper and more efficient OS like XP.
From: Microsoft An update that improves the performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista is available This article contains an update that resolves issues that may affect some Windows Vista-based computers. These issues have been reported by customers who use the Error Reporting service or Microsoft Customer Support Services.
From: Betanews Office 2007 SP1 goes live, Windows XP SP3 RC1 follows along As anticipated and without much fanfare, Microsoft this morning made active links for downloads of Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 1, as well as the complete Office 2007 Service Pack 1.
From: Windows Vista Blog Improving reliability and performance: Update preview release available today Surely it’s no news to you that we use Windows Update to continually deliver ongoing improvements to our customers so that Windows is always up-to-date. Plus, doing so eliminates the need to wait for larger releases like service packs. Some updates are released to the community for general feedback prior to delivery via Windows Update, as is the case today.
From: Notebook Review Microsoft Offers Free Copy of Windows Vista Ultimate if you Surrender Privacy Need a free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate? Are you incredibly trusting of big corporations? Well I have the deal for you, with a new program through Microsoft called the Windows Feedback Program. For the small price of privacy and perhaps some dignity, you can let Microsoft watch your every move for 3 months, in return for some software of your choice.
But, it’s too late to get the free software as Microsoft says they are already out…
From: Computer World Microsoft yanks free Vista, Office offer Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday withdrew an offer of free copies of Windows Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 in exchange for consumers agreeing to install monitoring software, saying it had exhausted the supply of software.
Categories: Windows Vista, Windows XP Tags:
Technology News for December 6, 2007
Microsoft to Try Windows XP Out on OLPC in January Microsoft said it plans to conduct field trials in January of Windows XP running on the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop. The XO laptop ships with a Linux operating system and is meant to be a low-cost machine available to people who live in countries with developing economies.
December 2007 Advance Notification I wanted to let you know that we just posted our Advance Notification for next week’s bulletin release which will occur on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 at or around 10 a.m. Pacific Time.
It is important to remember that while the information posted below is intended to help with your planning, because it is preliminary information, it is subject to change.
Internet Explorer 8 Just as he was the first to talk about IE7, Bill Gates kept the tradition alive and discussed IE8 at the Mix ‘n Mash event here on campus yesterday. Bill was talking to some bloggers about IE.Next and called it IE8, the same way we do here in the IE team hallway. So, yes, the version after IE7 is IE8.
Dell to sell PCs at Best Buy Beginning in the next few weeks, Dell notebooks and desktops will be for sale at Best Buy, the companies announced Thursday.
Several models of XPS and Inspiron PCs will be available at 900 Best Buy locations, including the XPS M1330 in white, the Inspiron 1521 in blue and black, the Inspiron 1420 in black, and the all-in-one XPS One desktop.
Microsoft gears up for the biggest enterprise launch in its history Microsoft will be spending more than US$150 million worldwide to do a combined launch of its trio of enterprise products: Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, next year. The theme will be “Heroes Happen Here,” and the launch events will kick off in Los Angeles starting February 27, 2008.
IBM researchers build supercomputer-on-a-chip Supercomputers may soon be the same size as a laptop if IBM brings to market research detailed on Thursday, in which pulses of light replace electricity to make data transfer between processor cores on a chip up to one-hundred times faster.
Microsoft releases final version of HD Photo plug-in for Photoshop Microsoft has taken the beta tag off a plug-in to let Photoshop read and write files in the HD Photo format, which Microsoft is standardizing as JPEG XR. The free plug-in is available for download for Windows and Mac OS X systems.
Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop Microsoft is to begin field tests of Windows XP working on the so-called $100 laptop, or XO, early in 2008. It has not committed to offering XP on the XO laptop but hopes to release the operating system in the first half of 2008 if the trials succeed.
Categories: Tech News Tags: Dell, IE7, IE8, One Laptop Per Child, Photoshop, Windows XP, XO laptop
Vista SP1 & Windows Server 2008 Release Candidates Available
The final release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is getting closer all the time as Microsoft has released the release candidate to Microsoft Connect and it will be available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers tomorrow and it will be available to the public next week. They also made Windows Server 2008 RC available and everyone can grab it here.
Let me call out several changes made since the Beta release of Service Pack 1 — many of which came about as a result of direct feedback from our Beta-testing community (thank you!):
- The size of the standalone installers have decreased significantly. For example, the standalone installer packages consisting of all 36 languages (x86 and x64 chip architectures) are smaller by over 50%. The standalone installer packages consisting of just the 5 languages (again, x86 and x64) slated for initial release are more than 30% smaller in size.
- The required amount of disc space for SP1 installation has also decreased significantly. Furthermore, with the RC, if more space is required to install SP1, an error message will now display exactly how much space is needed to complete the installation.
- Previous SP1 versions left behind a directory of files that wasn’t needed after installation and occupied about 1GB of space; the RC includes automatic disk clean-up to remove this directory.
- Installation reliability has been improved based on bug reports and error codes reported from Windows Update (thanks, Beta testers!). Testing shows that these improvements have significantly increased the proportion of successful installations of the RC.
- We’ve improved the user experience of installing SP1 via Windows Update. During the Beta release, users installed without much guidance from Windows Update. The RC now contains a series of screens with detailed information on SP1.
We also have information to share with IT professionals and system administrators regarding final plans for SP1: we’re on track to complete and release SP1 in the first quarter of 2008. When SP1 is complete and we reach our release to manufacturing (RTM) milestone, then shortly after the standalone installer will be released to the Web in two waves. The first wave will consist of the standalone installer (x86 and x64) for the 5 initial languages — English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. These languages will be deployed shortly after the RTM milestone. The second wave will launch 8-12 weeks after the first and will consist of all remaining languages, for both chip architectures (x86 and x64). Source: Announcing Windows Vista SP1 Release Candidate (RC)
For those who don’t won’t to automatically upgrade to SP1, both of you , Microsoft will be making a blocker patch available tomorrow here. More information on service pack 1 is available here.
Categories: Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Connect, service pack, Windows 2008, Windows Vista
Great Deal on an HP Pavilion d4996t, m9000z or m9000t Desktop Computer
HP Pavilion d4996t, m9000z or m9000t Desktop PC.
$450 web-only coupon for an HP Pavilion d4996t, m9000z or m9000t Desktop PC at $999 or greater. Use Coupon Code: DT4996. Ends 12/15
$450 web-only coupon for the purchase of an HP Pavilion d4996t, m9000z or m9000t Desktop PC configured at $999 or greater from the HP Home & Home Office Store. Coupon code: DT4996. Limited supply. Coupon expires on 12/15/07. Not valid with other promotions. Restrictions apply. Not combinable with instant rebates. For complete conditions, see “Coupon Information” in the “Customer Service” section at www.hpshopping.com.
While supplies last, and not not valid with other promotions.
Categories: Computer Deals, HP Tags:
Technology News for December 3, 2007
In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones With all the talk about Amazon’s Kindle, there’s a bigger revolution taking place and those who studied classic literature will be horrified. In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.
Does ActiBlizsion Make Sense? Can A Merged Activision And Blizzard Really Work? The big news in the tech world this weekend, of course, is the slightly complicated merger between video game firms Blizzard and Activision to form the not-particularly-creatively-named Activision Blizzard. You can read the link above to figure out the complicated parts, including Vivendi’s role, as well as the various amounts of cash going into the deal from both sides.
The Most Anti-Tech Organizations in America Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country–those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.
.Gov Site Reinfested Due to Hosting Provider Sloppiness The Marin County Transportation Authority sites that appeared to be serving up pornography and malware yet again Nov. 29-30 were in fact a sloppy residue from the same Web site hosting company that the California government agency thought it heard the last of once it ceased using the provider in September.
Oops! Yahoo dumps Britney You’ve got to give Yahoo credit for trying drag the collective mentality out of the celebrity gossip gutter.
Every year, the company releases a top 10 list for Web searches. Last year, Britney Spears was the No. 1 most popular search term.
Shorter URLs help phishers hook more victims Internet Security Services, IBM’s online-security division, claims to have noticed a significant drop in the number of characters used by fraudsters in their phishing URLs.
Acer poised to overtake Dell in notebook market Sales of notebooks are rising worldwide, but Taiwan’s Acer, in particular, is continuing its skyrocketing growth.
Market research firm DisplaySearch released its quarterly report on the notebook market Monday, and found that the market grew 24 percent during the three months of the third quarter, and 42 percent in the last year.
Mozilla scoffs at vulnerability study rating IE superior to Firefox Jeffrey Jones, a researcher and the Security Strategy Director at Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, recently posted a report (PDF format) that was featured in the CSO online magazine. The report compared the security track records of both Internet Explorer and Firefox, including both older (IE 6 and Firefox 1.0) and newer (IE 7, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0) versions. Jones came to the conclusion that, contrary to popular belief, Internet Explorer has experienced fewer security vulnerabilities than Firefox over the same periods of time.
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Computer Deals from Toshiba and HP
Here is a deal from HP small and medium business.
Flex your spending dollars and bulk up on our newest deal: purchase five fully configured xw4550 workstations for the price of four. (valid until 1/15/08)
A couple computer deals from Toshiba.
Save $150 when you purchase a
Here is a refurbished HP computer from J&R.
HP DV6449US-RB Pavilion DV6449US Notebook PC – REFURBISHED Only $619.99!
Free Shipping from Alienware.
Free Shipping for the Holidays on the Area-51 7500 Desktop
Free Shipping on the m9750 Notebook
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