New virus disguised as IE 7 download ... Dell to delay filings, investigation finds misconduct

HIGHLIGHTS
News: New virus comes disguised as IE 7 download
News: EEye publishes fix for Windows zero-day vulnerability
News: Dell to delay filings, investigation finds misconduct
News: Red Hat says Yahoo relationship intact
Opinion: Identity management and virtual worlds
Geek comic of the week: Numaf
Podcast: Dell finds accounting irregularities, delays results ... Red Hat says Yahoo relationship is strong ... Microsoft shows prototype mobile browser


NEWS UPDATES

New virus comes disguised as IE 7 download
If you receive an e-mail offering a download of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, delete it. A new virus is making the rounds that comes disguised as a test version of Microsoft Corp.'s current Web browser.

EEye publishes fix for Windows zero-day vulnerability
With online criminals exploiting an unpatched flaw in Windows, security vendor eEye Digital Security Inc. has come forward with an unofficial patch that fixes a bug in the way Windows processes Animated Cursor files.

Dell to delay filings, investigation finds misconduct
An internal investigation at Dell Inc. has found evidence of misconduct and accounting errors, forcing the company to delay filing its annual earnings report with stock market regulators, it said Thursday after the U.S. stock market closed.

Red Hat says Yahoo relationship intact
Tough competition appears to be driving profits down for Red Hat Inc. but the company has hung on to one marquee customer, Yahoo Inc., despite recent reports to the contrary.

ICANN votes against '.xxx' top-level domain again
The overseer of the Internet's addressing system rejected for the second time the creation of a ".xxx" top-level domain, supported by some as a way to isolate adult content on the Internet.

Yahoo given go-ahead to buy Taiwanese blog site
A purchase of popular Taiwanese blog site Wretch.cc by Yahoo Taiwan Inc. will not adversely affect competition in the local Internet market, Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission ruled Thursday, paving the way for the completion of the deal.

Microsoft unveils 'Deepfish' mobile Web browser
Microsoft Corp. late Wednesday unveiled a mobile Web browser aimed at making surfing the Internet on wireless devices as convenient and feature-rich as browsing on a PC.


OPINION

Identity management and virtual worlds
By Sean McGrath

Virtual worlds are on the rise all over the world. The "new" thing
called the Web has met its first serious challenger in the form of
immersive, 3D environments that underlay Second Life, There, Habbo
Hotel, World of Warcraft etc. Use some of these for a while and the
Web can seem rather flat - physically and metaphorically - by
comparison.

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ITWHIRLED

Geek comic of the week: Numaf
A collaboration between an artist and a philosophy major that they call "the nerdiest project we’ve ever done," Numaf stars a robot named Axiom that travels through the moody and atmospheric metaphysical plane, challenging ideas made concrete. Be sure to start at the beginning, and check out the alt text for each cartoon.

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PODCAST

Daily IT News Audio Update
Dell finds accounting irregularities, delays results ... Red Hat says Yahoo relationship is strong ... Microsoft shows prototype mobile browser

More podcasts

Dell to offer Linux systems ... Sony planning 80GB PS3

HIGHLIGHTS
News: SAP executive changes may leave leadership gap
News: Sony planning 80GB version of PlayStation 3
News: Yahoo opens up Web mail APIs
News: Dell promises Linux on notebooks and desktops
Windows Tip: Using FR and RUP in mixed environments
ITwhirled: Video games can help the eyes
Podcast: Intel readies 3GHz Penryn chips ... STMicro to sell Chinese microprocessor ... Dell to offer Linux systems


NEWS UPDATES

SAP executive changes may leave leadership gap
SAP AG is losing one of its younger, vibrant executives who was slated to become co-CEO of the company in a change that one analyst says marks a return to the old guard.

Sony planning 80GB version of PlayStation 3
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. is planning a new version of the PlayStation 3 game console with a higher-capacity hard-disk drive, according to a U.S. regulatory filing made by the company.

Yahoo opens up Web mail APIs
Yahoo Inc. is opening up its Web mail platform to external developers, so that they can create plug-ins, utilities and applications for the popular Yahoo Mail service.

Dell promises Linux on notebooks and desktops
Based on customer feedback Dell began soliciting last month, Dell said that top of mind among customers was that the company should begin offering Linux as an alternative to Windows on its personal computers, according to a posting on a company blog. Dell said it "has heard" what customers said and will act accordingly.

U.K. lays down first rules for VOIP providers
VOIP providers in the U.K. will have to provide clearer information about the services they offer under new rules announced Thursday by the U.K. telecommunications regulator.

Silicon Valley VCs predict tech winners, losers
In what has become an annual Silicon Valley ritual, leading venture capitalists have made their predictions about which technologies will thrive and which will take a dive in the near future.

GPLv3 third draft: Linus likes it, ACT hates it
Initial reactions to the latest proposed draft of a popular license for free and open-source software (FOSS) have been wide-ranging, with the changes winning some kind words from the creator of Linux and a critical bashing from an industry association.

YouTube adds features, test site
New services available on YouTube could reflect growing influence of its parent company Google Inc. The popular video Web site now allows users to organize clips around designated categories and, in typical Google fashion, lets them test new services before their commercial launch, according to information posted on the YouTube Web site.

Intel promises fast Penryn chips in 2007
Intel Corp. will begin producing its next-generation "Penryn" processors by the end of 2007, using greater power efficiency to push improved Core 2 and Xeon chips to speeds over 3GHz, the company said Wednesday.

HP targets SMB markets with new hardware
Hewlett-Packard Co. is adding new entry-level hardware to a product line aimed at buyers in emerging global markets as well as small-to-medium sized businesses.


WINDOWS TIP

Using FR and RUP in mixed environments
By Mitch Tulloch,MTIT Enterprises

Folder Redirection (FR) and Roaming User Profiles (RUP) are two
separate but complementary methods for enabling users to roam between
different computers on your network and access their desktop
environments together with their personal data and settings. Here's a
tip that provides recommendations on how to implement FR and/or RUP in
mixed Vista/XP environments.

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ITWHIRLED

Video games can help the eyes
If your parents always told you that playing video games would ruin your eyesight, rejoice! Researchers at the University of Rochester have determined that playing for about an hour a day can actual improve your visual acuity.

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PODCAST

Daily IT News Audio Update
Intel readies 3GHz Penryn chips ... STMicro to sell Chinese microprocessor ... Dell to offer Linux systems

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HP sues Acer for patent infringement ... Microsoft to launch higher-spec Xbox 360

HIGHLIGHTS
News: HP sues Acer for patent infringement
News: Microsoft to launch higher-spec Xbox 360
News: Report names Microsoft among DoubleClick suitors
News: Arrest deals blow to Siemens' IT services division
Unix Tip: The language of power
ITwhirled: Bad idea of the week: $38 billion gone in a keystroke
Podcast: HP sues Acer for patent infringement ... GPL license draft due today ... Yahoo offer unlimted e-mail capacity


NEWS UPDATES

HP sues Acer for patent infringement
Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's largest PC vendor, filed suit against its fastest growing rival on Tuesday, alleging the infringement of five patents.

Microsoft to launch higher-spec Xbox 360
Microsoft Corp. will begin selling in April an upgraded version of its Xbox 360 console that packs a higher capacity disk drive and high-definition video interface not present on current models and is still cheaper than the rival PlayStation 3.

Report names Microsoft among DoubleClick suitors
Online advertising sales and hosting company DoubleClick Inc. is up for sale, and Microsoft Corp. could be a buyer, according to a report Wednesday.

Arrest deals blow to Siemens' IT services division
The arrest of a top-ranking Siemens AG official responsible for its IT services business will not affect daily operations at the unit, according to a company spokesman, but the publicity could hardly have come at a worse time.

Nortel, Microsoft lay ground for hosted services
Microsoft Corp. and Nortel Networks Corp. are extending their unified communications partnership to carrier networks, laying the groundwork for hosted services.

Cisco to acquire network processor company
Cisco Systems Inc. has agreed to buy SpansLogic Inc., a privately held designer of network processing chips based in Mountain View, California, for an undisclosed sum.

TSMC making WiMax chips for Intel
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., the world's largest contract chip maker, is producing wireless and WiMax-related chips for Intel Corp., the companies said on Wednesday.

Google Apps' Gmail faces downtime problems
For at least the third time this month, Google Inc. is grappling with performance and availability problems in the Gmail service of Google Apps, the suite of hosted services that many consider a potential threat to Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite of desktop software.

Metasploit hacking tool now Windows friendly
Metasploit 3.0, released early Tuesday morning, has been rewritten in the Ruby programming language to make the software faster and less buggy for Windows users, who make up the great majority of the software's users.

VMware enters the Linux kernel
The next revision of the Linux kernel is to include a virtualization feature developed by VMware, called VMI. The stable update, version 2.6.21, will then allow para-virtualized operating systems -- Linux itself -- to run inside virtual machines on top of, and to some extent sharing, the Linux kernel.


UNIX TIP

The language of power
By Sandra Henry Stocker

If you have any role in dealing with the power provided to the systems you manage, it's useful to be familiar with the terminology used to describe power and power devices such as UPS systems. Let's examine some of the terminology that you are likely to hear when people are talking about power provided to computer systems.

Subscribe to Unix in the Enterprise - Tips and tricks for managing your Unix systems.


ITWHIRLED

Bad idea of the week: $38 billion gone in a keystroke
Imagine you're a computer tech working for the government of Alaska and you accidentally formatted a hard drive where information was kept about the $38 billion Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays out shares of the state oil revenues to residents, is kept. No problem: you can always restore from the backup drive! Well, except that you formatted that too. OK, so there are always the tapes! Um, but those are unreadable. Now the real fun starts.

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PODCAST

Daily IT News Audio Update
HP sues Acer for patent infringement ... GPL license draft due today ... Yahoo offer unlimted e-mail capacity

More podcasts

Delayed GPLv3 draft to debut Wednesday ... PayPal asks e-mail services to block messages

HIGHLIGHTS
News: Delayed GPLv3 third draft to debut Wednesday
News: PayPal asking e-mail services to block messages
News: Yahoo launches mobile ad network
News: Static starts to clear on mobile TV
Tip: Create a security awareness program in three steps
Podcast: Early Vista sales outpace XP ... Samsung plans larger solid-state drives ... ICANN to vote on .xxx domains
ITwhirled: Mathematicians claim to solve problem nobody can explain


NEWS UPDATES

Delayed GPLv3 third draft to debut Wednesday
Months later than had been expected, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) intends to release the third draft of its GNU general public license version 3 (GPLv3) on Wednesday. The organization now also plans a final "last-call" draft following feedback on the third draft.

PayPal asking e-mail services to block messages
PayPal, the Internet-based money transfer system owned by eBay Inc., is trying to persuade e-mail providers to block messages that lack digital signatures, which are aimed at cutting down on phishing scams, a company attorney said Tuesday.

Yahoo launches mobile ad network
Yahoo Inc. launched new services on Tuesday to help publishers put their content on mobile phones and take advantage of an emerging medium for advertising.

Static starts to clear on mobile TV
As a mobile TV service from one major U.S. carrier gets rolling, vendors at the CTIA Wireless show this week in Orlando, Florida, will be highlighting video as a key emerging technology to make the mobile experience -- and service providers -- richer.

Samsung to ship higher capacity solid state disk drive
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. plans to begin shipping a solid-state disk drive in the second quarter that will have double the capacity of its current highest-capacity drive, it said Tuesday.

Optimus keyboard faces another delay
The much-talked-about Optimus Maximus keyboard project is facing another problem. The manufacturer of the OLED displays that are intended to be fitted inside each key is having "serious financial troubles and is not able to deliver displays at all," designer Artemy Lebedev wrote on the Optimus project's blog. But the keyboard should still be available this year.

Cisco adds 3G to branch router
3G (third-generation) wireless will grow up at the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando this week, finding its place in Cisco Systems Inc. business routers.

Adobe overhauls suite for design professionals
Adobe Systems Inc. on Tuesday said it had completely revamped its tools suite for high-end graphics and Web designers by combining, for the first time, products from the former Macromedia and its own portfolio.

Code posted for IE attack
New software has been published on the Internet that could be used to exploit a recently patched flaw in Internet Explorer.

Microsoft: Vista intro outsold XP
Sales of Vista during the first month that the newest Windows operating system was available to consumers were more than double the sales that Windows XP racked up in twice the time, Microsoft Corp. said.


TIP

Create a security awareness program in three steps
By Brent Huston, MicroSolved, Inc.

Security awareness programs may seem like they should be easy to implement, but in reality, they require skills that most security teams don't regularly practice. To help you on your way towards a brighter security future, we've identified three steps required to create an effective awareness program.

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PODCAST

Daily IT News Audio Update
Early Vista sales outpace XP ... Samsung plans larger solid-state drives ... ICANN to vote on .xxx domains

More podcasts


ITWHIRLED

Mathematicians claim to solve problem nobody can explain
A group of mathematicians have mapped an incredibly complex theoretical object called the "Lie group E8." The solution is so complex that if hand-written it would cover the island of Manhattan, and the project leader admits that "to say what precisely [the problem] is something even many mathematicians can't understand." Now, we're not saying that this is some colossal put-on, but if we were to try to pull a hoax like this, this is how we'd do it.

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Microsoft details network hack in Windows ... Symbian adds support for TV, cameras, databases

HIGHLIGHTS
News: Microsoft details network hack in Windows
News: Symbian OS v9.5 adds support for TV, cameras, databases
News: SANS to test programmers' security sense
News: Intel to build $2.5 billion chip plant in China
Windows Tip: Determine bandwidth using WMI script
Podcast: Intel to build $2.5B fab in China ... MIcrosoft puts brakes on Soapbox ... IBM shows optical chipset
ITwhirled: The top 10 funniest tech videos on YouTube


NEWS UPDATES

Microsoft details network hack in Windows
Microsoft Corp. is warning of an attack that could be used to divert someone's Web traffic through a malicious proxy server by placing a malicious WPAD.dat file in the Domain Name System (DNS) or the Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS).

Symbian OS v9.5 adds support for TV, cameras, databases
Symbian Ltd. has updated its operating system for mobile phones, improving support for digital TV, cameras, database applications, location-based services and roaming between Wi-Fi and 3G (third-generation) networks.

SANS to test programmers' security sense
Amid growing Internet crime enabled in part by faulty programming, the SANS Institute will introduce a series of four exams for developers to test how well they can write secure code.

Intel to build $2.5 billion chip plant in China
Intel Corp. President and CEO Paul Otellini Monday confirmed the company plans to build a $2.5 billion chip plant in China. The plant, to be built in Dalian, on China's northeastern coast, will enter production during the first half of 2010.

TSMC extends lead over IBM, other chip rivals: Gartner
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) took the top spot in the contract chip manufacturing business again in 2006, and extended its lead over some rivals, such as IBM Corp.

Virtual Iron joins HP partner program
Virtual Iron Inc., the open source underdog to virtualization industry leader VMware Inc., has been chosen to join a Hewlett-Packard Co. partnership program and has landed the travel Web site Priceline.com Inc. as a customer.

Iona adds repository tool for SOAs
Iona Technologies Inc. is broadening its suite of Artix infrastructure software with a new tool announced Monday for managing software services in an SOA environment.

Rackable Systems offers data center in a box
Server maker Rackable Systems Inc. is introducing a data center-in-a-box product that bears a resemblance to the Project Blackbox portable data center coming from Sun Microsystems Inc.

Study: Online advertising fraught with malicious code
An analysis of more than 10 million unique URLs, based on live web traffic recorded in the U.K., by security firm Finjan found that online advertising hosts 80 percent of all instances of malicious code.


WINDOWS TIP

Determine bandwidth using WMI script
By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

Did you know that you can use WMI to measure your machine's network bandwidth using a script? To use this script, copy the text provided in this article into Notepad (with Word Wrap turned off) and save it as ReportBandwidth.vbs. To run this script on a Windows Vista machine, open an elevated command prompt and type cscript reportbandwidth.vbs /? to view a list of different arguments you can
use with this script.

Subscribe to Windows in the Enterprise - Tips for how to maximize Windows safely and securely.


PODCAST

Daily IT News Audio Update
Intel to build $2.5B fab in China ... MIcrosoft puts brakes on Soapbox ... IBM shows optical chipset

More podcasts


ITWHIRLED

The top 10 funniest tech videos on YouTube
Spring has sprung, and with it, you may be experiencing a bout of spring fever. Here's a cure, or at least a temporary remedy: "The top 10 funniest tech videos on YouTube" links to some "hilarious parodies, spoofs and jokes related to IT and computers." But if you're in tech support, get ready to be skewered; a lot of the jokes come at your expense, like the Norwegian television show excerpt depicting a medevial help desk.

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