Archive for March, 2009

No contest.

If you’ve been paying attention to general computer news, you may have read about the Conficker worm, and what may (or may not) happen to Windows PCs that are infected with Conficker on April 1. The worm has received a lot of attention, leading more than a few Mac users to ask about the worm’s impact on OS X. Mac security maker Intego received so many inquiries that the company added a Conficker entry to its blog.

So, as a Mac user, how worried should you be about Conficker? The short answer to the question is that, unless you’re running Windows inside a virtual machine or via Boot Camp, you really don’t have much to fear from Conficker. It’s a worm that takes advantage of Windows systems with unapplied security patches—a population that may be as high as 30 percent of the Windows machines out there. Conficker won’t work on OS X at all, so most Mac users have nothing to fear from the worm.

Interesting…

Microsoft dusted off one of its favorite Apple arguments this week, rolling out new television and Web ads which claim that PCs are cheaper than Macs and offer a broader range of configuration options.

Microsoft’s channel partners love the ads — and, as it turns out, so do many Apple partners, albeit for different reasons.

PCs are cheaper than Macs. Duh. Of course, PCs are crappier than Macs too. Maybe there is a correlation there? Nah… PCs are generally a (p)iece of (c)crap aren’t they?

Oh wonderful! Another share connection. Pretty soon I’ll be able to sneeze and my Facebook status will update, you’ll be able to Digg it, and you’ll be able to click the link to the video on YouTube because the second I sneezed it was sent to Twitter. Woohoo! Technology!

The ability to share Twitter feeds is among the latest batch of changes unveiled this week at YouTube, which Alexa ranks as the world’s third most popular Web property after Yahoo and Google.

Given that so many people are on Twitter these days, YouTube said it has added Twitter to the share options so users can easily send a video into their Twitter streams. Other YouTube video-sharing options include Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Hi5.

Firefox is busy patching holes again.

Mozilla published a critical security upgrade for Firefox Friday evening. Version 3.0.8 for Windows, Mac, and Linux fixes two security holes listed as “critical.”

One patched an arbitrary code execution hole through an XUL element, and the other corrected an XSL stylesheet exploit. Both fixes patch crash-based security holes in which remote codes could have been run.

Funny, I didn’t notice. Oh yeah, because I have been testing Safari 4.

Our local news ran a story that made April 1 sound more scary than Y2K in 1999.

Worries that the notorious Conficker worm will somehow rise up and devastate the Internet on April 1 are misplaced, security experts said Friday.

Conficker is thought to have infected more than 10 million PCs worldwide, and researchers estimate that several million of these machines remain infected. If the criminals who created the network wanted to, they could use this network to launch a very powerful distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against other computers on the Internet.

Read the rest at Yahoo! Tech.

Are you sharing files? Your ISP might be out to get you.

The Recording Industry Association of America’s plan to recruit Internet service providers in its battle against illegal file sharing is now underway. AT&T and Cox both confirmed to PC World that they have begun cooperating with the RIAA in some form. Comcast did not say it was working with the RIAA, but did say it was forwarding messages on the behalf of the recording industry to customers. Still a mystery is to what extent ISPs are cooperating with the RIAA and what it takes to get booted from your ISP for illegally swapping copyright protected content online.

Heads up people.

Microsoft will end official free support for Windows XP Home Edition and Microsoft Office 2003 on April 14th. That doesn’t mean the help center on your computer will stop working, but you won’t be able to get free answers to your questions from Microsoft anymore. You will be able to pay for extended support for both products through 2014.

This goes for people using desktop systems as well as a notebook computer. I am not sure that I have ever met anyone that actually uses the Help Center on Windows XP, but heck, I bet they’re upset now.

They released the MacHeist 3 Bundle tonight.

This year you can get almost $600 worth of software for $39. If you’re an Apple user, you best get your butt over there and grab your bundle. You only have 14 days and 25% of each sale goes to charity.

Hewlett Packard launched a free Web security scanning tool Monday specifically geared to help Flash developers protect their Web sites against malicious security threats and reduce the risk of hackers accessing sensitive data.

The new tool, known as HP SWFScan, is specifically aimed at helping Flash developers detect and monitor increasingly sophisticated security threats, such as cross site scripting and SQL injection attacks, that are often conducted via Flash applications.

It’s nice that the tools tests their applications for security threats. Known security threats anyway. I’ve never used HGH, but maybe if I had I might have a better outlook on this matter. Sorry if I sound pessimistic, but it seems a lot like locking your doors but leaving your windows wide open. What about the unknown security threats?

Another great link from the Download Squad:

10 GMail Labs features worth enabling