I have been seeing this ‘video’ posted on different scrapbooks for some time now but never gave it too much attention until one of my friend brought it to my notice that its a virus and not a funny video.

The video in the scrapbook appears something like this:

Beware that its not a YouTube video, its simply an image hosted at Orkut. Its also accompanied by “Olha so que encontrei arios flagras no BBB8 vc vai pira” in Portugese which when translated to English means something like “Look so I found arios flagras no BBB8 vc vai pira Several flagras in BBB8 cn will pyre “.

So how does this virus affect you?

This virus is very similar to this one.  The only difference is that instead of using .exe files its using VB Script to cause damage. Once you click on the link, you are taken to either of the two sites: http://one.xthost.info or http://two.xthost.info. Once there it downloads a virus called VBS:Encrypted-gen into your computer. This virus has two known aliases as well: ASP/Ace.AY and Backdoor.ASP.Ace.dg. These viruse attacks ASP backdoor and replicates itself by sending scraps to all your friends.

How can I protect myself from it?

As far as I believe, the following steps should help you get rid of it:

• Download an Antivirus (Avast is recommended since it has been known to detect this virus)  and an AntiSpyware . Scan your whole computer in safe mode.
• Download  Mozilla Firefox  and  get  the  Adblock and Flashblock plugins for Firefox.
  
• Log into Orkut and change your password and delete all scraps from your scrapbook that you think are malicious.

cheers

Hackers that use their skills for good are classified as "white hat." These white hats often work as certified "Ethical Hackers," hired by companies to test the integrity of their systems. Others, operate without company permission by bending but not breaking laws and in the process have created some really cool stuff. In this section we profile five white hat hackers and the technologies they have developed.

1. Stephen Wozniak: "Woz" is famous for being the "other Steve" of Apple. Wozniak, along with current Apple CEO Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple Computer. He has been awarded with the National Medal of Technology as well as honorary doctorates from Kettering University and Nova Southeastern University. Additionally, Woz was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in September 2000.

Woz got his start in hacking making blue boxes, devices that bypass telephone-switching mechanisms to make free long-distance calls. After reading an article about phone phreaking in Esquire, Wozniak called up his buddy Jobs. The pair did research on frequencies, then built and sold blue boxes to their classmates in college. Wozniak even used a blue box to call the Pope while pretending to be Henry Kissinger.

2. Tim Berners-Lee: Berners-Lee is famed as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the system that we use to access sites, documents and files on the Internet. He has received numerous recognitions, most notably the Millennium Technology Prize.

While a student at Oxford University, Berners-Lee was caught hacking access with a friend and subsequently banned from University computers. w3.org reports, "Whilst [at Oxford], he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television." Technological innovation seems to have run in his genes, as Berners-Lee's parents were mathematicians who worked on the Manchester Mark1, one of the earliest electronic computers.

3. Linus Torvalds: Torvalds fathered Linux, the very popular Unix-based operating system. He calls himself "an engineer," and has said that his aspirations are simple, "I just want to have fun making the best damn operating system I can."

Torvalds got his start in computers with a Commodore VIC-20, an 8-bit home computer. He then moved on to a Sinclair QL. Wikipedia reports that he modified the Sinclair "extensively, especially its operating system." Specifically, Torvalds hacks included "an assembler and a text editor…as well as a few games."

4. Richard Stallman: Stallman's fame derives from the GNU Project, which he founded to develop a free operating system. For this, he's known as the father of free software. His "Serious Bio" asserts, "Non-free software keeps users divided and helpless, forbidden to share it and unable to change it. A free operating system is essential for people to be able to use computers in freedom."

Stallman, who prefers to be called rms, got his start hacking at MIT. He worked as a "staff hacker" on the Emacs project and others. He was a critic of restricted computer access in the lab. When a password system was installed, Stallman broke it down, resetting passwords to null strings, then sent users messages informing them of the removal of the password system.

5. Tsutomu Shimomura: Shimomura reached fame in an unfortunate manner: he was hacked by Kevin Mitnick. Following this personal attack, he made it his cause to help the FBI capture him.

Shimomura's work to catch Mitnick is commendable, but he is not without his own dark side. Author Bruce Sterling recalls: "He pulls out this AT&T cellphone, pulls it out of the shrinkwrap, finger-hacks it, and starts monitoring phone calls going up and down Capitol Hill while an FBI agent is standing at his shoulder, listening to him."

For more information about White Hat Hackers click here

The Internet abounds with hackers, known as crackers or "black hats," who work to exploit computer systems. They are the ones you've seen on the news being hauled away for cybercrimes. Some of them do it for fun and curiosity, while others are looking for personal gain. In this section we profile five of the most famous and interesting "black hat" hackers.

1. Jonathan James: James gained notoriety when he became the first juvenile to be sent to prison for hacking. He was sentenced at 16 years old. In an anonymous PBS interview, he professes, "I was just looking around, playing around. What was fun for me was a challenge to see what I could pull off."

James' major intrusions targeted high-profile organizations. He installed a backdoor into a Defense Threat Reduction Agency server. The DTRA is an agency of the Department of Defense charged with reducing the threat to the U.S. and its allies from nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons. The backdoor he created enabled him to view sensitive e-mails and capture employee usernames and passwords.

2. Adrian Lamo: Lamo's claim to fame is his break-ins at major organizations like The New York Times and Microsoft. Dubbed the "homeless hacker," he used Internet connections at Kinko's, coffee shops and libraries to do his intrusions. In a profile article, "He Hacks by Day, Squats by Night," Lamo reflects, "I have a laptop in Pittsburgh, a change of clothes in D.C. It kind of redefines the term multi-jurisdictional."

Lamo's intrusions consisted mainly of penetration testing, in which he found flaws in security, exploited them and then informed companies of their shortcomings. His hits include Yahoo!, Bank of America, Citigroup and Cingular. When white hat hackers are hired by companies to do penetration testing, it's legal. What Lamo did is not.

3. Kevin Mitnick: A self-proclaimed "hacker poster boy," Mitnick went through a highly publicized pursuit by authorities. His mischief was hyped by the media but his actual offenses may be less notable than his notoriety suggests. The Department of Justice describes him as "the most wanted computer criminal in United States history." His exploits were detailed in two movies: Freedom Downtime and Takedown.

Mitnick had a bit of hacking experience before committing the offenses that made him famous. He started out exploiting the Los Angeles bus punch card system to get free rides. Then, like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, dabbled in phone phreaking. Although there were numerous offenses, Mitnick was ultimately convicted for breaking into the Digital Equipment Corporation's computer network and stealing software.

4. Kevin Poulsen: Also known as Dark Dante, Poulsen gained recognition for his hack of LA radio's KIIS-FM phone lines, which earned him a brand new Porsche, among other items. Law enforcement dubbed him "the Hannibal Lecter of computer crime."

Authorities began to pursue Poulsen after he hacked into a federal investigation database. During this pursuit, he further drew the ire of the FBI by hacking into federal computers for wiretap information.

5. Robert Tappan Morris: Morris, son of former National Security Agency scientist Robert Morris, is known as the creator of the Morris Worm, the first computer worm to be unleashed on the Internet. As a result of this crime, he was the first person prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.


for more information about Black Hat Crackers click here

hi,

One of the toughest problems in desktop management is letting offline users work just as if they were working online. The need is greater than you might think—users are a lot more mobile than they were even five years ago. Though there are a number of cases where you might need to work

offline, the three most common are when you disconnect your laptop from the office network and go on the road, when you connect over a slow or intermittent link, and when your branch office loses connectivity to the main office.

In these circumstances, how do you maintain a copy of a file on the offline computer while the original is on the main server? More importantly, how do you handle a conflict if someone in the home office changes the file on the server while someone else changes it on the road? Fortunately, these issues are handled by the Offline Files engine, which is built into Windows^® 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista^®.
Caching Is the Answer

The Offline Files engine is really a giant caching machine. Indeed, underneath the hood (and inside Microsoft) it's referred to as client-side caching (CSC). The Offline Files engine is configurable and flexible enough to let users decide what they want to cache as well as help you get the system to cache what you want. It allows you to access the same files offline as online—and the namespace doesn't change. That is, files are accessed using the same UNC path or drive letter whether you're working online or offline.

You can set up the files to be cached either manually or automatically. If you know you often use particular files or folders while on the road, you can simply designate a file or folder as one that will travel with you. To do this, a Windows XP user would right-click on a file that is stored locally or on a network share and select the option to make files available offline (see Figure 1). In Windows Vista the option is called Always available offline. Manually making a file available offline is sometimes called pinning a file.

Figure 1 Making a file available offline (Click the image for a smaller view)

The share you're using can be connected via UNC path or mapped with a drive letter. Indeed, the file doesn't even need to be one that's stored on a machine running Windows Server^®. It can reside on anything that serves up the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol, such as a Samba server or NAS device (with some rare exceptions), which also adhere to the SMB protocol.

The first time you choose to pin a file, Windows XP walks you through a series of wizard screens, asking when to synchronize. If you click Next on every screen and take the defaults, synchronization happens every time you log on or log off, and also in the background when idle. When the wizard completes, you'll see an icon change indicating that the file is now available offline.Once you disconnect from the network, all other files on the share become unavailable except those chosen for offline use. That's sometimes problematic: the icon shows which files are always available offline, but it's not immediately clear before you've disconnected that not all the other files will be available.

If you have used the Disk Cleanup Utility and utilized it to clear the hibernation file, you may be surprised to find that the Hibernate option is no longer available. You can restore the hibernate option by following these instructions:

1. Click the Start button.

2. Select All Programs.

3. Select Accessories.

4. Right-click on Command Prompt.

5. Select Run as Administrator.

6. When the UAC prompt appears, click Continue.

7. Type powercfg /hibernate on and press Enter on your keyboard.

8. Close the Command Prompt window.

9. Reboot your PC.

• %Windir%\PictureAlbum2007.zip (A zipped copy of the worm.)
• %System%\prodigys323.dll
  or
• %Windir%\myphotos2007.zip
• %System%\newsystem25.dll

� HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{448BAC42-AABD-42C5-A550-826BF4AF4BB3}\InProcServer32\”(Default)” = “prodigys323.dll”

� HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\ShellServiceObjectDelayLoad\”prodigy1″ = “{448BAC42-AABD-42C5-A550-826BF4AF4BB3}”

� HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\[RANDOM CLSID]\InProcServer32\”(Default)” = “newsystem25.dllThe MSN virus killer:

There is a way to kill that virus . A tool that automatically delete all the registry file but it is in the beta state You can download it from Here

 Its new name:



Second, the feedback and suggestions, and based directly on that feedback, the are  excited to bring there next release, featuring:

• An upgraded look and feel — new graphics to go along with your new features!
• "Also on SkyDrive" — easily get back to the SkyDrives you’ve recently visited
• Thumbnail images — we heard you loud and clear, and now you can see thumbnails of your image files
• Drag and drop your files — sick of our five-at-a-time upload limit? Drag and drop your files right onto your SkyDrive
• Embed your stuff anywhere — with just a few clicks, post your files and folders anywhere you can post html

Additionally, Microsoft announced a new utility, System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM), which provides a central reporting tool for desktop OS error reports; and it announced a new group policy management tool for managing changes, rollbacks, firewall, and other configuration settings via policies that can be role-based. On the server front, Microsoft announced that Internet Information Server 7 (IIS 7) would become part of the core installation option of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, previously code-named Longhorn. This option is designed as Microsoft's answer to bare-bones Linux web servers, in that it pares down the number of Windows components. And with IIS 7, Microsoft is claiming that its web server is finally industrial-strength, at least where it comes to security and scalability, areas which have not been traditionally thought of as IIS strong points

Going Offline

The first thing you need to run a web application offline is the ability to start it without an Internet connection. This is the purpose of the LocalServer module.

The LocalServer API and the manifest file are the key components that cache your application's resources and make it available offline.

Storing User's Data

Applications that are more than just static files have data that is typically stored on the server. For the application to be useful offline, this data must be accessible locally. The Database module provides a relational database for storing data.

When an offline application reconnects, you will need to synchronize any changes made in the local database with the server. There are many different approaches to synchronizing data, and there is no single perfect approach.

An additional feature of the Google Gears database is Full-Text Search, providing a fast way to search text within a database file.

Performance

When synchronizing large amounts of data, you may find that the database operations begin to affect the responsiveness of the browser. The WorkerPool allows you to move your database operations to the background to keep the browser responsive.

Google Gears Installation

Your web application needs to detect whether or not Google Gears is installed on a user's machine before calling the APIs, and also to determine when to display an installation prompt to the user.

Always initialize Google Gears using gears_init.js . If Gears is installed, then google.gears will be defined. If Gears isn't installed, you can direct the user to a customized installation page, as shown below.

Note: Always use gears_init.js to access Gears. Other uses may not be supported in the future.

<script src="gears_init.js"></script>
<script>
  if (!window.google || !google.gears) {
    location.href = "http://gears.google.com/?action=install&message=<your welcome message>" +
                    "&return=<your website url>";
  }
</script>

Use the URL in the code above to access the Google Gears installation page. Substitute your customized message and your URL in the parameters.

Parameters:

• action: Include the 'action' parameter with the value 'install' to cause the Google Gears installation page to use the messagereturn parameters. and
• message: Provide any text up to 150 characters. This message appears at the top of the installation page. For example: "Install Google Gears to enable MyGreatApp's offline features!"
• return: Provide your application's URL. The user will be directed back to this URL when installation is complete.

A Surface computer is able to recognize physical objects from a paintbrush to a cell phone and allows hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.

The new product is aimed directly at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues and should be commercially available towards the end of the year.

It’s an interesting product in that it’s completely out of left field. Microsoft gives examples of ordering a beverage during a meal with just the tap of a finger and quickly browsing through music and dragging favorite songs onto a personal playlist by moving a finger across the screen. Build this into a bar and you’d get one-touch beer service although I’m not sure if they’ve found a way to work out when your beer glass is empty so replenishment becomes automatic, maybe in a later version.

The practical uses for Surface at the point of sale are broad. This is touch screen point of sale technology at a new level.

Initial launch partners include Harrah’s Entertainment, Starwood Hotels and T-Mobile. Coverage at CrunchGear here.

Update: Channel 10 has a great first look video here.

 


For more details visit Surface Computing
It requires the scripting to be enable on the computer.

IE7Pro is a must have add-on for Internet Explorer, which includes a lot of features and tweaks to make your IE friendlier, more useful, secure and customizable.

IE7Pro Features
Enhance Internet Explorer's Tabbed Browsing Capabilities

1. Double click to close tab.
2. Open new tab from address bar.
3. Enable/disable tab browse history manager.
4. Enable/disable crash recovery
5. Move the IE menu bar above the address bar
6. Hide search bar.
7. Modify the maximum number of parallel connections to the web server.
8. Select the external program to view page source

Super Drag and Drop

With 'Super Drag and Drop' enabled, you can open new links by simply dragging and dropping the link on the page. You can also Drag and Drop to search selected words with the default search engine or save the selected photo when Shift is held down.

Mouse Gesture

Mouse Gesture allow the user to execute commonly performed tasks (open/close a tab, go back, go forward , print , scrolling page etc.) by drawing a simple symbol on the screen.

Crash Recovery

Crash Recovery automatically restores all opened pages after a crash happened.

Save Page to Image

Flexible and easy-to-use tool that converts html page from any URL to image. It captures the whole web page's content into JPG, BMP , GIF , PNG or TIFF on the fly.

Quick Proxy Switcher

Different internet connections do often require completely different proxy server settings and it's a real pain to change them manually.

AD Blocker

Blocks all forms of advertising, including Flash ads, Img ads, Iframe ads, Inline text and pic ads and etc.

Greasymonkey alike User Script

IE7Pro Script is to Internet Explorer7 as Greasemonkey is to Firefox. It lets you remix the Web via scripts.

Inline Search

Adds the inline search bar like firefox has, finds as you type, use the F3 and Enter Key to cycle between multiple results, highlight all results.

You can get Audio onto your space easily and in multiple ways.

• First upload the song you want to play on your space and get it's URL or do a Song Search and get the URL.

To play Music on your Space...

• Get the Windows Media Player onto your Space. Click here to learn how to. Further instructions are there in that tutorial that will enable you to play Music on your Space.

To play multiple songs (or) Playlist on your Space...

• Get the Flash Audio player. Click here to read the Flash Audio player with Playlist tutorial and you will have songs playing on your space in no time.

You can also create a playlist for the Windows Media Player mentioned earlier. But this is hard to do for an average user and also does not work properly on Windows Vista.

To Play Music or a playlist on your blog (i.e. in your blog entries)...

• Read the Flash Audio Player tutorial and get the code for the Flash Player
• Create a new blog entry.
• Press the button present in the blog editing tools.
• Paste the Flash Player code that you were given
• Press the button again and make any changes you want in the blog entry.
• Publish your blog entry and preview it. You will hear your song playing!

Done!

I recommend going for the Windows Media Player if you have only one song to play. If you have multiple songs, go for the Flash Audio Player and using a Sandbox place it anywhere on the front page of your Space. Disable the title of your sandbox so that the module does not look ugly.

Hey, why not use videos? (They all have audio) grab some YouTube videos and play it on your space. Learn how to do this, click here!