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Showing posts from January, 2009

Conficker Virus in Millions of Windows Machines

Security experts around the world are sounding the alarm on the Conficker virus which has infected millions of windows-based PC's. The virus took advantage of a windows vulnerability, guessing passwords and through USB sticks was able to sneak inside windows machines. Security researchers point to Latin America and Asia as hotspots for the infection. Microsoft pointed out that most of the computers in these regions are unpatched or where piracy is most prolific. Most computer users wont notice if their machines are infected. For now, researchers are waiting for the second phase of the infection. The makers of the virus is poised to send the command to these infected machines. No damage yet but it isn't any different to having a spy inside your organization. You just never know when he will strike and how much damage it's going to cost you.

Handling Multi Media With Ubuntu 8.10

It is not immediately apparent when you download the new Ubuntu 8.10 Ibex that with regard to multi media content this particular iteration of the popular linux distribution leaves its previous siblings far far behind. I like it when they finally perfected the graphical user interface in rhythmbox and got the last.fm streaming well. Ubuntu asked me permission to download gstreamer codecs for mp3,video,mpeg for playing commercial content. No more mysterious messages and no more leaving users to search for codecs especially popular formats. BBC and YouTube options are included in the Movie Player application. I can save content in a playlist file. Additional visualizations are added and they are pretty. Good job!

Open Source is Here

I began my computing with a windows machine. I installed Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 and XP on my previous desktops. Finally, I switched to Ubuntu 6.10, the linux distro I chose as a linux newbie. There's nothing like installing your own operating system yourself and getting to know all the important hardware that goes into your pc. The age of proprietary software is gone and Open Source is here. iPhone, Facebook and Linux owes its success to Open Source. They have become the platform in which developers offer their applications according to the principles of Open Source. Then there's Cloud Computing that Google and IBM are developing into a major medium. What Cloud means to us consumers is that our data, settings and profiles, aah, even the operating system and its applications that we are going to use will not be residing in our local hard drives but in servers. IBM is building server farms that are energy efficient to handle storage and traffic. Google will be offeri

Yahoo Mail Doesn't Deliver

I have a Yahoo web mail account since the ancient times. I have configured Evolution email client to fetch mail from this account since December, 2007. A little help from Freepops, a software add-in to read ftp, and my mail is in the box. I understand that Yahoo performed some upgrades and all and now this plug-in is unable to deliver my yahoo mail. Hotmail is also performing upgrades to its services but I continue to receive my mail from them and I read all of them in my inbox using the same add-in. What's the difference? I don't know. When performing the task, I get this messages: "getting the POP summary" and "fetching message 2 of n messages". After that I get the terminal, "failed in getting message 2 of n messages". When I go to my browser to access my inbox, all the messages are gone and deleted. I checked the trash folder and sure enough they are all there. I checked all settings and compared them with my hotmail account which is do

Impress Unable To Show My Video

Anybody out there who can tell me why OpenOffice software Impress, the presentation application of Open Source, is unable to play video clips? I tested the slides before I sent it through my email application. It works, and I sent it up to its destination who emailed me back. She could not view the video but everything else is fine. I use the 3gp format as it is the format my cellphone used. Any help will be greatly appreciated.