Gathering ‘Storm’ Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets

Paul

The Storm worm first appeared at the beginning of the year, hiding in e-mail attachments with the subject line: “230 dead as storm batters Europe.” Those who opened the attachment became infected, their computers joining an ever-growing botnet.

Although it’s most commonly called a worm, Storm is really more: a worm, a Trojan horse and a bot all rolled into one. It’s also the most successful example we have of a new breed of worm, and I’ve seen estimates that between 1 million and 50 million computers have been infected worldwide.

Now is it me or is something going on with Russia doing all of this? I know I get a lot spam from Russia, is this the new silent war?

Duracell’s Mobile Charger Juices Batteries, USB On The Go

Paul

Duracell’s Mobile Charger not only has a USB port so you can power your iPods and Zunes, but there’s even a slot to put AA/AAA batteries into so you can charge them via wall or car outlet. Those AA batteries work the same way in reverse as well—you use them to charge any USB gadgets you plug in. The charger comes for $24.99, which could be worth it as an emergency phone/music charger that you can use while you’re out or in the car. [Earth Times via Electronista]

Wow this might actually be useful for me!! I will have to go and find it!

Update Large Files with PatchOnClick

Paul

Windows only: Freeware application PatchOnClick updates large files by creating patches from the new file and applying those patches to old files with a dead simple interface. At first blush, this may seem like a tool that a normal user has very little use for, but FreewareGenius explains its usefulness perfectly:


I thought this program was a really nice touch to add. Go download it and play around and check out the full story at Life Hacker.

Four Graphical User Interfaces in Vista that just needs fixed:

Paul

The First and foremost is the User Access Control, UAC for short. The UAC is never been ready for Windows. Microsoft knew this and so did most of the Beta testers who were formerly known as LongHorn Project. The UAC has several shortcommings. The one that really burns my biscuit is after you disable the UAC. The way you disable the UAC is by Start, type msconfig.exe [ENTER]. Once Msconfig loads up you click on the tools tabs, Looking for [Disable UAC] hightlight it. Click Launch. That’s it no more UAC, btw You have to have ADMIN for all users to be able to disable UAC for all accounts. Now everytime I boot up it comes up with a Security alert saying, your system is not protected(A scare tactic that I do not like). So you have to google to find the other reg code needed to disable that little icon from showing up. Go google and find out how.

The second and most annoying is game play for Vista. Most if not all my games have some kind of trouble with vista. Wolfenstein:Enemy Terriroty, COD the Original, and some others the ones that I like the most do not work. Vista always says they stop responding and has to exit. I’ve tried everything from googling the games and vista and nothing. I’ve also had problems with programs like Trillian and other programs stop responding or have difficulty running due to Vista. Most of my games I have to load up Ubuntu and play it in Linux, if you think it is hard actually it is quite easy. This one the only work around that actually works.

The third one is DRM(Digital Rights Management). DRM has been a thorn in people sides ever since they first introduced it. It is designed to prevent people from illegally copying content, but the truth is If I have a copy of Harry Potter and I wanted to take it on the plane to watch but leave the CD home, that is not going to happen. The Vista DRM will not allow anyone to copy files to the hard drive to view later, althought there will always be tools to circumvent it. DRM just makes it harder on the end user and tries to control every aspect of Copy Protection.

The Forth is the System speed on Vista. I have a dual core 1.67ghz system and every time Vista runs and startups it takes from anywhere 2 mins to 5 mins for everything to be ready after logging into my account. I also think the system is sluggish and slow in whenever I try to use a large file. I admit I have 1gig of memory for the system. I know it might slow it down but XP only needs 128 megs of memory to run. I do not think it should slow down this much. If it wasn’t for ReadyBoost this system wouldn’t be running Vista, I’d have install Ubuntu and wipe the system clean.

With that said, I hope when SP1 Comes out for Vista it makes the system more stable, and secure and more useable.

Copyright 10-3-2007
May not use without authors permission

Digg exchange gang busted !

Paul

I was just surfing the DigitalPoint Forums today as usual when i saw something going on there. Some people starting frequent threads with titles similar to “Selling DiggBoss Points”, “DiggBoss Invites for free”. Find all of them here . I had a quick look at it what is this DiggBoss actually ? I took a invite from a guy there who sent me a link through PM to a site with URL http://www.diggboss.com. I was confused initially, but after I registered and logged in there, i was shocked to see whats happening. So many people, almost 100+ trading diggs and stumbles there. All they do is, look at the stories listed there and digg them. It works in this way – when a person diggs one story he gets one diggpoint. He can increase his diggPoints this way. When he has enough diggpoints, he can submit his own story and it will be listed there to be dugg by the other members. The system was working perfectly for both digg and stumbles. Not only this, i also find many people collecting diggpoints and selling them there for prices like 5$ for 30 DiggPoints. I thought of giving it a try to see whether it really works or not. I made a sample story and submitted it to digg. Find it by clicking here. purchased around 100 digg points from a guy there. I then added this story to the diggboss campaign, and the system showed they will trade me 50 diggs for 100 diggpoints. I submitted and waited for a few hours. WoW ! 50 diggs and it got the ball rolling. One after the other, it broke around 121 diggs and made to homepage for a few mins (the story was a bit funny, so it gots some natural diggs later). It made me around 1200 unique hits to my site.

But i was really shocked to see how these social networking sites are exploited. Not only this, i can also see people exchanging diggs openly on webmaster forums like DigitalPoint. See the following link –

Check this google search results

Its really disappointing to see exploitation of such social networks!. I guess digg must take serious action to stop this stuff.

Perhaps digg could easily see the above story and ban all those who dugg it, But the big problem is that, the gang was only used to get the ball rolling !.

I knew digg has it’s flaws but that shows you how many flaws they actually do have! : ( I wonder how many are actually done by those people!!