Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon
Join Dr. Bill as he examines the wild and wacky world of the web, computers, and all things geeky! Hot Tech Tips, Tech News, and Geek Culture are examined… with plenty of good humor as well!
Dr. Bill pontificates on all things technical!
It is out and get this… “New in NetBSD 3: native support for the Xen virtual machine monitor! With native Xen support on Intel platforms, NetBSD provides seamless support for execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation.” Cool!
I am a Linux kinda guy myself… but NetBSD has come a LONG way, and I may have to check this one out!
Here’s a guide to some projects that you can do with a USB thumbdrive! If you have one, or get one for Christmas, you can play!
They include a bootable Linux distro, USB travel kits, take your media player with you, etc.
Well, it looks like the rumor that Dell has been installing Firefox on U.K. systems it sells is TRUE!
All right! (I reported this last week in the Blog, and talked about it on the last Podcast.)
More computer makers need to stand up to Microsoft and protect their customers! Way to go, Dell!
An Instant Messaging (IM) worm is attacking AOL, MSN, Windows Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo instant messaging networks. The worm installs a rootkit as it’s “payload.”
“The worm, identified as IM.GiftCom.All, was discovered by researchers at IMLogic Inc.’s Threat Center spreading via IM and attempting to trick users into clicking on a malicious URL.
The link lures the target into visiting a harmless Santa Claus Web site, but actually installs a rootkit payload to the victim’s machine, IMLogic said in an advisory.
‘The rootkit payload is often named gift.com and when executed hides itself on the user’s system, attempts to shutdown desktop anti-virus software and starts collecting the infected user’s information for broadcast over the Internet,’ the company explained.”
The Spyware evilness is getting worse! There is a new spike in Spyware activity, especially among infections that lead to pop-ups that say, “You are infected with Spyware… click here to have your system cleaned!” DON’T DO IT! You will then receive a boatload of additional Spyware! These guys should be shot!
May the Great Bird of the Galaxy come to nest in their nose!
First, a disclaimer, I have never cared for Norton Anti-Virus. In fact, it stinks! We use it where I work, but I don’t trust it. I have seen it fail too many times, I have seen it compromised too many times, in short, it is just slightly better than nothing at all. That said, it is now worse! A flaw has been found in Symantec Norton Anti-Virus that allows it to be compromised.
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus Flaw
What would the Doctor do? Switch to AVG or Avast! FREE anti-virus immediately! They are both excellent and free! Gotta love that! Links below:
Wow! Talk about your big purchases at Christmas! Seagate is buying competitor Maxtor!
Seagate is the biggest hard drive manufacturer followed by Western Digital, with Maxtor in third place. The market shrinks… let’s hope drive prices don’t go up!
OpenOffice 2.01 is out… bug fixes and updates:
Open Source, Free, and Safe… ya gotta love it!
Microsoft Corp. released to their beta testers Monday a build for both the Windows Vista client and for the Longhorn Server. Both the Longhorn Server and Vista client build number is 5270, testers said. Microsoft made the bits for both Windows builds available simultaneously for testers to download from the Microsoft Connect tester Web site.
Now, the question is, will the final resulting server operating system be more stable than in the past?
Security firm Ironport counted how long it took anti-virus firms to produce an antidote following the first appearance of a malicious program. It found that, on average, anti-virus firms took 17 hours to respond to new threats.
Ironport gathered its statistics from its monitoring system that looks at incoming and outgoing e-mail traffic for more than 100,000 organizations. Come on, guys… let’s get it together!