*HOT* Tech News And Downloads, I Would Read This Thread And Post Any Good Info

Software: Mozilla FireFox 3 PreAlpha 5
=>Posted by: Regeneration.
=>Tuesday, May 01 @ 03:11:39 CEST
Warp2Search News Firefox 3 is focused on improved memory handling, performance, and stability, improved XUL, and new core components such as application data stored in SQLite. Firefox 3 could break a few existing extensions and applications built on top of Firefox, and it will definitely include new optimizations if you like to build on the popular browser. Firefox 3 should have additional JavaScript and SVG features if you're into that sort of thing.

download here,
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla....nk/firefox-3.0a5pre.en-US.win32.installer.exe

 

Software: Winamp 5.340 build 1278
=>Posted by: Edskes.
=>Monday, April 30 @ 22:48:36 CEST
Warp2Search News Nullsoft Winamp is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity media player for Windows. Winamp supports playback of many audio (MP3, OGG, AAC, WAV, MOD, XM, S3M, IT, MIDI, etc) and video (AVI, ASF, MPEG, NSV) types, custom appearances called skins (supporting both classic Winamp 1.x and 2.x skins and Winamp 3 freeform skins), audio visualization and audio effect plug-ins (including two industry dominating visualization plug-ins), an advanced media library, Internet radio and TV support, CD ripping and CD burning.
This version is available in three editions: Pro, Full and Lite.
This new version can be installed over a previous version.

What's New in Winamp 5.340 build 1278:


More information: www.winamp.com

Download: Winamp 5.340 build 1278 Pro
http://wa.edskes.com/winamp534_pro.exe
Download: Winamp 5.340 build 1278 Full
http://wa.edskes.com/winamp534_full_emusic-7plus.exe
Download: Winamp 5.340 build 1278 Lite
http://wa.edskes.com/winamp534_lite.exe

 

µTorrent 1.7 Build 1552 beta
Author: Ludvig Strigeus
Date: 2007-05-01
Size: 200 Kb
License: Freeware

µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little cpu, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.

Main Features:
- Multiple simultaneous downloads
- Smart bandwidth usage
- File level priorities
- Configurable bandwidth scheduling
- Global and per-torrent speed limiting
- Quickly resumes interrupted transfers
- UPnP support (WinXP only)
- Supports popular protocol extensions
- Localized to different languages
- Typical memory use less than 4 MB
- Incredibly small

download here[/b]
http://www.majorgeeks.com/%B5Torrent_d4818.html

 

Malware Removal Tool May 2007
Author: Joe Pestro
Date: 2007-05-01
Size: 289 Kb
License: Freeware


Malware removal information and instructions

For best results, run the Malware Removal Tool in safe mode. Double click the setup.exe icon to install, and click "Start Scan" to detect and remove the following malware:

WinTools (and variants)
SpecialGoods.info / NewGenLook.info
Nail.exe (Aurora)

download here
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Malware_Removal_Tool_d4632.html

 

Manually update your AVG Free Edition when the automatic update fails.


AVG Anti-Virus Updates May 1, 2007
Author: Grisoft, Inc.
Date: 2007-05-01
Size: 7.7 Mb
License: Freeware
Requires: Win All




Editors Note: Grisoft tends to silently update, so if you receive an error downloading, you can download the latest update directly from Grisoft here.

In order to provide the highest level of antivirus protection for users of AVG Anti-Virus, GRISOFT continuously develops information about new viruses. This information, as well as product improvements, is provided to the users of AVG Anti-Virus in the form of Updates. Timely virus database updates are the critical component for the effectiveness of any antivirus program. In order to ensure that your AVG is providing the maximum amount of antivirus protection, your AVG Anti-Virus System must be kept up-to-date.

Download the latest AVG Free from MajorGeeks.

download here
http://www.majorgeeks.com/AVG_Anti-Virus_Updates_d4478.html

 

Harvard and the RIAA

p2pnet.net news:- In their efforts to increase sales and turn students into fully compliant consumers, EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US) turned their RIAA loose in junior and senior schools across America, allowing it to run wild, disrupting classes, sucking up valuable staff time and interferring with campus life.

The Bush government seems not only content to allow this to happen, but is actively encouraging it.

Here, Wendy Seltzer and Charles Nesson point out the Harvard University's educational mission is broader than RIAA demands >>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Protect Harvard from the RIAA - The Harvard Crimson, May 1, 2007
By - Wendy M. Seltzer and Charles R. Nesson

Since its founding, Harvard has been an educational leader. Its 1650 charter broadly conceives its mission to include 'the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences, [and] the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences.' From John Harvard's library through today's my.harvard.edu, the University has worked to create and spread knowledge, educating citizens within and outside its walls.

Students and faculty use the Internet to gather and share knowledge now more than ever. Law professors at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, for example, have conducted mock trials in the online environment of Second Life; law students have worked with faculty to offer cybercourses to the public at large. Students can collaborate on 'wiki' websites, gather research materials from far-flung countries, and create multi-media projects to enhance their learning.

Yet 'new deterrence and education initiatives' from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) threaten access to this vibrant resource. The RIAA has already requested that universities serve as conduits for more than 1,200 'pre-litigation letters.' Seeking to outsource its enforcement costs, the RIAA asks universities to point fingers at their students, to filter their Internet access, and to pass along notices of claimed copyright infringement.

But these responses distort the University's educational mission. They impose financial and non-monetary costs, including compromised student privacy, limited access to genuine educational resources, and restricted opportunities for new creative expression.

One can easily understand why the RIAA wants help from universities in facilitating its enforcement actions against students who download copyrighted music without paying for it. It is easier to litigate against change than to change with it. If the RIAA saw a better way to protect its existing business, it would not be threatening our students, forcing our librarians and administrators to be copyright police, and flooding our courts with lawsuits against relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay. We can even understand the attraction of using lawsuits to shore up an aging business model rather than engaging with disruptive technologies and the risks that new business models entail.

But mere understanding is no reason for a university to voluntarily assist the RIAA with its threatening and abusive tactics. Instead, we should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students. We should be lobbying Congress for a roll back of the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us. Intellectual property can be efficient when its boundaries are relatively self-evident.

But when copyright protection starts requiring the cooperation of uninvolved parties, at the cost of both financial and mission harm, those external costs outweigh its benefits. We need not condone infringement to conclude that 19th- and 20th-century copyright law is poorly suited to promote 21st-century knowledge. The old copyright-business models are inefficient ways to give artists incentives in the new digital environment.

Both law and technology will continue to evolve. And as innovators develop new ways of sharing copyrighted material, the University should engage with both creators and the 'fair users' who follow and build upon their works. Finding the right balance will be challenging, but projects such as Noank Media, developed by faculty and fellows at the Berkman Center, provides one glimpse into what the future may hold. Just this year, Noank Media became a functioning international corporation with operations in both China and Canada.

With the goal of fostering 'limitless legal content flow' through innovative licensing deals, Noank makes shared music look 'free' to its listeners while reimbursing the copyright holders directly for downloads of their materials. Noank does this by serving as an aggregator, collecting payment through institutions such as libraries and schools, as well as Internet Service Providers. Forward-thinking copyright holders recognize that this system may offer them more rewards, not less control.

The University's educational mission is broader than the RIAA's demands. We don't have all the answers either, but rather than capitulating to special interests, we should continue to search for fair solutions that represent the University's mission, its students, and the law in a way that educates students to be leaders of the digital 21st century.

[Seltzer ’96 (HLS ’99), is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Nesson ’60 (HLS ’63) is William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Re-printed from The Harvard Crimson.]

Slashdot Slashdot it!
http://p2pnet.net/story/12087

 

Paying homage to Jack Valenti

p2pnet.net news:- Jack Valenti, until recently, Hollywood's principal mouthpiece and someone who uttered some of the movie industry's more glaringly outrageous (in the negative sense) proclamations, died at the age of 85.

His funeral was held at St Matthew's onb May 1 and he'll be buried at the famous Arlington National Cemetery.

The Hollywood Reporter says Honorary pallbearers were "in the dozens" and included California governor Arnold 'Terminator' Schwarzenegger, his creator, director Steven Spielberg, "News Corp honcho" Peter Chernin, Disney boss Robert Iger, and, "nearly a quorum call of lawmakers" including house speaker Nancy Pelosi, senators Ted 'The Net is a Pipe' Stevens, Joe Biden, Patrick Leahy and John Dingell, chairman of the house commerce committee.

Valenti's successor, the new boss of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), Dan Glickman, wasn't mentioned in the write-up.

Slashdot Slashdot it!

Also See:
principal mouthpiece - Jack Valenti dies, aged 85, April 27, 2007
Hollywood Reporter - Long list of names set for Valenti funeral, May 1, 2007
http://p2pnet.net/story/12089

 

NOTE I USE THIS ALL THE TIME...A GREAT PROGRAM.....

McAfee AVERT Stinger 3.4.9
Author: Network Associates
Date: 2007-05-01
Size: 1.8 Mb
License: Freeware
Requires: Win All


Stinger is a stand-alone utility used to detect and remove specific viruses. It is not a substitute for full anti-virus protection, but rather a tool to assist administrators and users when dealing with an infected system. Stinger utilizes next generation scan engine technology, including process scanning, digitally signed DAT files, and scan performance optimizations.

This version of Stinger includes specific detection and repair for W32/Polip only. At this time, because of the nature of the infection algorithm, repair of files infected with W32/Polip may not return the files to their pristine, pre-infected state, and can cause problems with self-checking applications.


download here

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4063.html


OR HERE

McAfee AVERT Stinger

Stinger is a stand-alone utility used to detect and remove specific viruses. It is not a substitute for full anti-virus protection, but rather a tool to assist administrators and users when dealing with an infected system. Stinger utilizes next generation scan engine technology, including process scanning, digitally signed DAT files, and scan performance optimizations.

How do I use Stinger?

1. Download Stinger.exe v2.5.2 [996,359 bytes] (5/1/2007)
* or Download ePOStg245.Zip EPO deployable version (for EPO administrators). Instructions for EPO 2.5X and EPO 3.X are available.

This version of Stinger includes detection for all known variants, as of MAY 1, 2007:

BackDoor-AQJ BackDoor-ALI BackDoor-CEB
BackDoor-JZ Bat/Mumu.worm Exploit-DcomRpc
Exploit-LSASS IPCScan IRC/Flood.ap
IRC/Flood.bi IRC/Flood.cd NTServiceLoader
PWS-Narod PWS-Sincom.dll W32/Anig.worm
W32/Bagle@MM W32/Blaster.worm (Lovsan) W32/Bropia.worm
W32/Bugbear@MM W32/Deborm.worm.gen W32/Doomjuice.worm
W32/Dumaru W32/Elkern.cav W32/Fizzer.gen@MM
W32/FunLove W32/Klez W32/Korgo.worm
W32/Lirva W32/Lovgate W32/Mimail
W32/MoFei.worm W32/Mumu.b.worm W32/MyDoom
W32/Nachi.worm W32/Netsky W32/Nimda
W32/Pate W32/Polybot W32/Sasser.worm
W32/SirCam@MM W32/Sober W32/Sobig
W32/SQLSlammer.worm W32/Swen@MM W32/Yaha@MM
W32/Zafi W32/Zindos.worm

2. When prompted, choose to save the file to a convenient location on your hard disk (such as your Desktop folder).

3. When the download is complete, navigate to the folder that contains the downloaded Stinger.exe file, and run it. WindowsME/XP users read this first.

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS FREE VIRUS SCAN PROGRAM

http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

 

bad news for us in the usa

FDA: Millions of Chickens Fed Contaminated Pet Food

May 1, 2007 03:55:48 PM PST
By E.J. Mundell and Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporters
Yahoo! Health: Bioterrorism News

TUESDAY, May 1 (HealthDay News) -- Up to 3 million broiler chickens were fed melamine-tainted pet food and then sold on the U.S. market beginning in early February, U.S. health officials said in a press conference held late Tuesday.

The contaminated pet product made its way into poultry feed at 38 Indiana farms, 30 of which produced broiler chickens destined for restaurants and supermarkets, said officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Approximately 2.5 million to 3 million chickens fed contaminated pet food have already been sold, Kenneth Peterson, assistant administrator for field operations at the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said during the teleconference. "That's out of a total of 9 billion broilers processed in the U.S. each year," he noted.

Experts from both agencies downplayed any potential threat to human health.

"We still have no evidence of harm to humans or to swine" from the use of the tainted pet product, said Dr. David Acheson, who began his tenure as the FDA's new assistant commissioner for food protection on Tuesday. Acheson said that the contaminated food constituted only about 5 percent of the total feed at the farms. "The risk to humans is small," he said.

Peterson added that some 100,000 breeder chickens are being held in quarantine at some of the Indiana farms. Those chickens have been quarantined and may be euthanized, the FDA and USDA said. The agencies also warned in a statement issued late Monday that "as the investigation continues, additional farms will likely be identified that received contaminated feed."

The announcement comes on the heels of similar discoveries at hog farms across the United States. The USDA first announced on Thursday that meat from 345 hogs suspected of eating the contaminated feed had entered the U.S. food supply. Some 6,000 hogs suspected of eating the contaminated product have since been quarantined and meat from these animals will be withheld from the food supply, both agencies said.

"As with exposure from hogs fed contaminated pet food and for similar reasons related to the dilution of the contamination, FDA and USDA believe the likelihood of illness after eating chicken fed the contaminated product is very low," the agencies said Monday night. "Because there is no evidence of harm to humans associated with consumption of chicken fed the contaminated product, no recall of poultry products processed from these animals is being issued."

In a similar vein, U.S. health officials have continued to reassure American consumers that pork products from hogs fed contaminated pet food were safe, even as reports surfaced that China has routinely added the contaminant melamine to its exported animal food supplements.

In a joint statement issued late Saturday, the FDA and USDA stressed that, "We are not aware of any human illness that has occurred from exposure to melamine or its byproducts." They added that they have also identified no illnesses in swine fed the salvage food tainted by melamine, which was imported from China as an additive to wheat gluten used in dog and cat food.

Melamine, a derivative of coal, is at the center of the United States' largest pet food recall, involving more than 60 million packages of 100 name-brand products. The chemical has been linked to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of animals.

In the Saturday statement, the FDA and the USDA said the possibility of human illness from eating swine exposed to melamine remains low for several reasons: "First, it is a partial ingredient in the pet food; second, it is only part of the total feed given to the hogs; third, it is not known to accumulate in the hogs, and the hogs excrete melamine in their urine; fourth, even if present in pork, pork is only a small part of the average American diet."

On April 25, the Pet Food Institute (PFI), which represents U.S. pet food manufacturers, asked the U. S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab and the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Andrew von Eschenbach for "swift action to answer questions about how melamine, a substance foreign to pet food, ended up in specific ingredients from China," according to a PFI statement.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that Chinese producers routinely add melamine to wheat gluten and rice protein in animal feed products to falsely inflate levels of protein.

In interviews with agricultural workers and managers in China, the newspaper reported that animal feed producers have secretly added melamine to their feed for years because, during tests, it appears to be a protein, even though it doesn't add any nutritional benefits.

"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine, told the Times. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."

"We don't know if this has been going on in China for a long time," Acheson said during a teleconference Monday. "But I have read reports that this is something that has not started recently," he said.

On Thursday, China banned melamine from its food products, but rejected the charge that the substance caused the U.S. pet deaths, the Associated Press reported.

It's not clear how -- or even if -- melamine became fatal in pet food, because it's not believed to be particularly toxic. But U.S. law bans its presence in any form of food, the newspaper said.

The rice protein was imported to the United States by Wilbur-Ellis, an agricultural product importer and distributor. The FDA said it is continuing its investigation of the source of the adulterated pet food, including "tracing products distributed since August 2006 by Wilbur-Ellis throughout the distribution chain."

In their latest statement, the FDA and the USDA said that, as of April 26, they had identified sites in six states where contaminated pet food was received and used in feed given to hogs: California, Kansas, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina and Utah.

On Friday, FDA officials searched the facilities of a pet food manufacturer and one of its suppliers in the continuing probe of the contamination, the Associated Press reported.

The officials searched an Emporia, Kan., pet food plant operated by Menu Foods and the Las Vegas offices of ChemNutra Inc., the news service said, citing information supplied by the companies.

Menu Foods made many of the major brands of dog and cat foods that were recalled because of the melamine-contaminated wheat gluten. ChemNutra supplied Menu Foods with the wheat gluten, which was also imported from China but reportedly from a different supplier than the rice protein.

Both companies said they were cooperating with the investigation, the AP said.

 

Software: QuickTime 7.1.6.200

Warp2Search News QuickTime 7 is Apple's cutting-edge digital media software for both Mac and Windows-based computers delivers unparalleled quality for creating, playing and streaming audio and video content over the Internet. Besides playing MPEG-4 and MP3 content, it supports timecode tracks as well as MIDI standards such as the Roland Sound Canvas and GS format extensions.

LINK
http://content.info.apple.com/QuickTime/061-3155.20070501.qbBt4/QuickTimeInstaller.exe

 

iTunes 7.1.1.5
Author: Apple Computer
Date: 2007-05-02
Size: 36.1 Mb
License: Freeware

Download iTunes 7 and make yourself at home. Buy music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks, or download free podcasts from the iTunes Store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Play everything on your Mac or PC. Then sync it to your iPod and bring it along. Anywhere.

LINK
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download5285.html#146;s on your iPod? [License:%20Freeware|%20Requires:%20Win%20All%20|%20Size:%2036.1%20Mb]

 

CPU-Z 1.40
Author: Frank Delattre
Date: 2007-05-02
Size: 432 Kb
License: Freeware

CPU-Z is a freeware utility that provides some information on your CPU :

# Processor name and vendor
# Core stepping and process
# Processor package
# Processor current core voltage
# Internal and external clocks, clock multiplier
# Partial overclock detection
# Processor features, including supported instructions sets.
# L1 and L2 cache informations : location, size, speed, technology.
# Motherboard informations : BIOS, chipset, memory, AGP.

LINK
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download425.html

 

ClamWin Free Antivirus 0.90.2
Author: ClamWin Free Antivirus
Date: 2007-05-02
Size: 15.2 Mb
License: Freeware
Requires: 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/2003

ClamWin is a Free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and 2003.

ClamWin Free Antivirus comes with an easy installer and open source code. You may download and use it absolutely free of charge. It features:

- High detection rates for viruses and spyware;
Scanning Scheduler;
- Automatic downloads of regularly updated Virus Database.
- Standalone virus scanner and right-click menu integration to Microsoft Windows Explorer;
- Addin to Microsoft Outlook to remove virus-infected attachments automatically.

The latest version of Clamwin Free Antivirus is 0.90
Please note that ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner. You need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus or spyware.

LINK
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download5544.html

 

Coffee can be good for you, experts say

By Anne Harding Tue May 1, 12:41 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Drinking coffee can help ward off type 2 diabetes and may even help prevent certain cancers, according to panelists discussing the benefits -- and risks -- of the beverage at a scientific meeting.
ADVERTISEMENT

"We're coming from a situation where coffee had a very negative health image," Dr. Rob van Dam of the Harvard School of Public Health, who has conducted studies on coffee consumption and diabetes, told Reuters Health. Nevertheless, he added, "it's not like we're promoting coffee as the new health food and asking people who don't like coffee to drink coffee for their health."

Van Dam participated in a "controversy session" on coffee at the Experimental Biology 2007 meeting underway in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Lenore Arab of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA also took part, presenting results of a review of nearly 400 studies investigating coffee consumption and cancer risk.

There's evidence, Arab noted, that the beverage may protect against certain types of colon cancer, as well as rectal and liver cancer, possibly by reducing the amount of cholesterol, bile acid and natural sterol secretion in the colon, speeding up the passage of stool through the colon (and thus cutting exposure of the lining of the intestine to potential carcinogens in food), and via other mechanisms as well.

However, Arab did find evidence that coffee may increase the risk of leukemia and stomach cancer, with the case for leukemia being strongest.

The findings suggest that people who may be vulnerable to these risks -- for example pregnant women and children -- should limit coffee consumption, van Dam noted in an interview.

He and his colleagues are now conducting a clinical trial to get a clearer picture of the diabetes-preventing effects of coffee, which were first reported in 2002. Since then, he noted, there have been more than 20 studies on the topic.

Van Dam and his team are also looking for which of the "hundreds to thousands" of components of coffee might be responsible for these effects. It's probably not caffeine, he noted, given that decaf and caffeinated coffee have similar effects on reducing diabetes risk.

His top candidate, van Dam says, is chlorogenic acid, an antioxidant that slows the absorption of glucose in the intestines.

 

Multiple IRC Vulnerabilities in Trillian

Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Trillian versions 3.1 and lower IRC module.
Remote exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) module of Cerulean Studios’ Trillian could allow for the interception of private conversations or execution of code as the currently logged on user.

When handling long CTCP PING messages containing UTF-8 characters, it is possible to cause the Trillian IRC client to return a malformed response to the server. This malformed response is truncated and is missing the terminating newline character. This could allow the next line sent to the server to be improperly sent to an attacker.

When a user highlights a URL in an IRC message window Trillian copies the data to an internal buffer. If the URL contains a long string of UTF-8 characters, it is possible to overflow a heap based buffer corrupting memory in a way that could allow for code execution.

A heap overflow can be triggered remotely when the Trillian IRC module receives a message that contains a font face HTML tag with the face attribute set to a long UTF-8 string.”

All Trillian users that use it to connect to any IRC server or IRC network are urged to immediately upgrade to Trillian 3.1.5.0 or better or use a (safe and full featured) IRC client.

http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/usrbingeek/2007/04/30/multiple-irc-vulnerabilities-in-trillian/

 

Apple fixes QuickTime hack

p2pnet.net news:- Apple says it's fixed the QuickTime security hole which recently caused serious alarm and deep despondency within the corporate Apple community.

A hacker hacked a Mac for a large cash prize at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada..

It turned out to be a QuickTime vulnerability described as "very serious" and soon after, it was erroneously reported to be loose in the wild.

Now, Apple has released an update [read 'fix'].

It states:

An implementation issue exists in QuickTime for Java, which may allow reading or writing out of the bounds of the allocated heap. By enticing a user to visit a web page containing a maliciously-crafted Java applet, an attacker can trigger the issue which may lead to arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue by performing additional bounds checking when creating QTPointerRef objects. Credit to Dino Dai Zovi working with TippingPoint and the Zero Day Initiative for reporting this issue.

Dino dug the hole in the first place, netting him a cool $10K by way of a reward.

Slashdot Slashdot it!

Also See:
large cash prize - QuickTime hole could be 'real bad', April 27, 2007
http://p2pnet.net/story/12110

 

CD sales in decline: report

p2pnet.net news:- Expect to soon see renewed cries of outrage from EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US), the members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel, aimed at "those @#$%^& p2p file sharers!" who are "devastating us!"

The outrage is, of course, feigned. The labels know quite well they're the authors of their own misfortune, such as it is, created by:

* Their continuing refusal to treat their customers as honest people, preferring to accuse them of being thieves and criminals who need to be shackled by DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control; and,
* Their insistence on seeing p2p sharing and distribution technology as a scourge rather than the answer to their problems in the 21st digital century.

"Amidst continued declines in the global music industry that amount to a nearly 25% reduction since 2000, recent research from Ipsos' TEMPO: Keeping Pace with Digital Music Behavior reveal for the first time that the proportion of Americans who have purchased CDs in the past six months has dropped approximately 15% since 2002," says Ipsos.

And you know who'll be accused of being responsible for that.

Meanwhile a, "majority of American Music Downloaders continue to purchase CDs by their favorite artists, and instead frequently rely on music downloading for sampling new and unfamiliar music," says the study.

Translated, this means more and more people are relying on the free p2pnetworks for try-before-you-buy sessions; and, are checking out new independent artists on non-corporate download sites, or on musicians' own web pages, untrammelled by DRM.

"Half (51%) of U.S. consumers aged 12 and older purchased a physical CD in the past six months," says Ipsos. "This represents a decline of roughly 15% since 2002, when approximately 60% of consumers reported doing so.

"Although overall CD purchasing has declined in recent years, the proportion of Americans purchasing physical CDs off of the Internet has increased, perhaps reflecting both the gradual reduction of retail music outlets in America coupled with increased consumer comfortability with e-commerce.

"The average number of CDs purchased in the past six months is just fewer than three (2.8), and the average total number owned is 78. Teens own the fewest CDs (average of 32), while those consumers aged 18 to 54 own considerably more (upwards of 100)."

Data suggest the answer, "lies in what could be referred to as the 'impulse gap'," namely, "the increase in the number of digital music acquisition options, including on-demand downloading and easy unfettered copying, have slowly eaten away at consumer impulse music purchases, thus creating a gap in revenue," says the report's author, Matt Kleinschmit., adding:

"Where in the past someone may have purchased a CD from a new or unfamiliar artist on a whim, they are increasingly more likely to digitally sample the music before deciding to make a full http://p2pnet.net/story/12111physical CD purchase."

 

eDonkey spy servers

p2pnet.net news:- Connecting to a bad ed2k server can have some nasty consequences. They monitor your activities and report to anti-p2p outfits. They direct you to non-existent files, corrupted fakes and hide files which others genuinely want to share. Learn how to protect yourself.

Millions of file-sharers use the eDonkey (ed2k) network daily with every conceivable file and media type available for download. However, for millions of users on the ed2k network there is a threat hidden below the surface - fake eDonkey servers, estimated to be as many as 60% of all the ed2k servers currently online.

These bad servers can spy on you, track your activities and report your behavior to anti-p2p companies. Others are concerned in engineering a situation to put malware on your machine. For the incomplete downloads in progress, the user’s ed2k client asks all the servers configured in its server list to find additional sources but of course, if you connected to a bad server it now knows everything that has been happening in your client - a major privacy breach.

Fake servers are also there to misdirect, to cheat, to confuse. 'Simply put, those servers lie. And they do a lot of it.' explained qm2003 from eMule-Project. 'When a client is searching for something, fake servers will return files and sources to files that are actually non-existent, empty or garbage.'

Furthermore, files being offered for share by users connected to a fake server will not show up in search results of queries made by other users, effectively starving the network of millions of files. 'Some fake servers deliberately return results with supposedly thousands of sources to prematurely end searches' explains qm2003, 'And to make matters worse, those search results contain malware that will infect the system of any client downloading and executing those files.'

The problem of connecting to fake servers is actually something built into the standard eMule installation as the default settings result in the adding of fake servers to the server list. Probably due to legal considerations, this situation is not seriously dealt with by the developers but there are steps which can be taken now to improve the situation;

1. In eMule go to Options/Server
2. Set number of errors allowed before removing the server to 9
3. Click Edit button that appears next to the option Auto update
4. In Notepad, that is opened, add the following lines in the beginning:

http://www.gruk.org/server.met.gz
http://peerates.net/peerates/certifiedservers.met
http://peerates.net/peerates/trueservers.met

5. Save changes in notepad
6. Unmark the two following options Update list of servers
7. Click on Accept
8. Go to servers window
9. Remove all servers from static list
10. Remove all servers from list
11. In Update Server.met from URL, write any of the URL in point 4 above.
12. Click on Update button
13. If you have selected Autoconnect only to servers on the static list, add the servers you want to the static list
14. Double click on any server

We reported on the value of Protocol Obfuscation (BitTorrent users will be more familiar with the term Protocol Encyption.) and it is of some use to this situation. To date, no spy/fake servers support obfuscated connections, so enabling it in the options of eMule 0.47C rules out the current possibility of connecting to a bad server.

However, as we pointed out in the earlier article, this method does carry the side effect of not being able to connect to non-eMule clients, versions of eMule before 0.47b (which do not support PO) and other clients with PO switched off.

Taking the above steps will drastically improve your chances of avoiding a bad server. Tune in next time when we cover the issues surrounding spy/fake/poisoning clients and current counter-measure techniques.
http://p2pnet.net/story/12112

 

The Best Gaming Video Cards For The Money

Detailed video card specifications and reviews are great - that is, if you have the time to do the research. But at the end of the day, what a gamer needs is the best video card within a certain budget. So if you don't have the time to research the benchmarks, or if you don't feel confident enough in your ability to make the right decision, fear not. We at Tom's Hardware Guide have come to your aid with a simple list of the best gaming cards offered for the money.

A few simple guidelines to keep in mind when reading this list include:

* This list is for gamers who want to get the most for their money. If you don't play games, the cards in this list are more expensive than you need;
* Prices and availability change on a daily basis. We can't offer up-to-the-minute accurate pricing info, but we can list some good cards that you probably won't regret buying at the price ranges we suggest;
* The list is based on some of the best U.S. prices from online retailers. In other countries or if shopping at retail, your mileage will most certainly vary;
* These are new card prices. No used or open box cards are in the list; they might be a good deal, but that's outside the scope of what we're trying to do.

April Review And March Updates

By far the biggest news in the graphics card industry this past month was the introduction of the DirectX 10 midrange cards from Nvidia, the Geforce 8500 and 8600 series. Let's take a quick look at each of these new cards and their places in the market, to see if they're good cards for the money.

Let's start with the Geforce 8600 GTS. This card is a decent performer, but it's still overpriced right now, in the $190 to $240 range. The X1950 PRO performs very closely to the 8600 GTS, often beating it out at higher resolutions or with antialiasing enabled, but can be found for as low as $155.

On the higher side of the scale, the X1950 XT will pretty much always beat the 8600 GTS, and can be bought for as little as $200 online! The 8600 GTS does have some unique features, like DirectX 10 compatibility and great HD video acceleration. Unfortunately, with no DirectX 10 games on the market, and no way to know how the 8600 GTS will perform relative to current DirectX 9 cards when they arrive, the 8600 GTS is a very tough sell. The bottom line here is that the Geforce 8600 GTS won't be a recommended buy until the price is lowered to be competitive with that of the X1950 PRO. The only time I'd recommend the 8600 GTS is perhaps for people who would like good video hardware acceleration for Blu-Ray and HD DVD disks, and who also game a bit.

Now let's examine the Geforce 8600 GT, which falls in the $150 to $170 price range. Like its GTS brother, it's a decent performer - and also like its GTS brother, it's priced too high to be recommended. With only slightly better performance than the 7600 GT and X1650 XT - both of which can be bought for about $100 online - the 8500 GT is a bit tough to justify. In addition, the X1950 PRO is priced similarly to the 8600 GT, and offers much greater gaming performance for the dollar.

Finally, let's look at the budget DirectX 10 card: the 8500 GT. At first glance, the price seems right at a low $100, but we must also look at performance. With a graphics processor about half as powerful as that in the 8600 GT, the 8500 GT performs on par with the age-old Geforce 6600 GT - not encouraging.

At $100, the 8500 GT's opponents are the X1650 XT and 7600 GT, both of which beat it by leaps and bounds. The 8500 GT is a bit of a disappointment when it comes to gaming, and it's so underpowered that I doubt it will be able to fare any better when DirectX 10 titles come along.

The world waits for the upcoming Radeon HD series and Geforce 8800 Ultra launches, but for today's gamers the best cards that can be bought for the money are the ones that have been available for some time now. Some of the prices have changed though, so pay attention as we go forward.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/05/01/the_best_gaming_video_cards_for_the_money/

 

The RFID Guardian: a firewall for your tags

By Nate Anderson | Published: May 01, 2007 - 11:53PM CT
Here, there, and everywhere
Don't carry RFID? You might be surprised; the short-range ID technology is currently found in everything from US passports to swipeless credit cards to public transit passes to World Cup tickets to car keys to the building access pass for your office building. A few of the digerati even elect to have RFID implants from VeriChip slipped beneath their skin in order to use them as cashless payment systems.

Much of the information on these chips can be read without exotic equipment, assuming an attacker can get within several feet with a concealed RFID reader. Unfortunately, most tags give users no control over when they respond to queries, and they offer no notification, which means that sensitive data could be at risk in public places.

Melanie Rieback

The solution, for those concerned about such things, has so far been low-tech: smashing the chip with a hammer appears to be the preferred method for passports, but it is technically illegal and could lead to unpleasantness at customs.

A new tool from a graduate student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam offers the first real-time cloak of protection to users concerned about security, and no hammer blows are required. The RFID Guardian is essentially a firewall that can prevent or allow RFID queries, and can do so on a per-tag basis. Melanie Rieback, the Guardian's designer, describes it as a portable, battery-powered device for personal RFID privacy—but even if you aren't concerned about men in dark sunglasses snatching your passport data, the selective jamming tech in this diminutive device is fascinating stuff.

I had a chance to sit down with Rieback during her recent trip to the United States, and she explained how the device works, what's coming in version 3.0, and why she has no plans to profit from the technology.

"I'm definitely not anti-RFID," she explains. "I think there's a lot of great things you can do with it, but I just think that like any other technology, they need to take security and privacy into consideration."

Here's how the RFID Guardian gives that power to the people.
And I need this... why?

RFID got its start as an antitheft tool that soon became important for inventory management. Using RFID chips, it was suddenly simple for shippers to know how many pallets were in a trailer, and retailers could see how many razors were on a store shelf without keeping employees all night to do inventory. RFID received a massive boost when Wal-Mart required RFID tags to be used by all of its suppliers.

Because such commercial deployments emphasize cost over security, most tags still have no access controls, so grabbing a tag's information is relatively simple. Some specialized tags do employ basic cryptography, but this is not always robust. When researchers looked into the encryption found in the ExxonMobil SpeedPass, for instance, the algorithm turned out to use a 40-bit key and was cracked easily by a brute force attack. Tags with stronger cryptography tend to be prohibitively expensive, and thus are not often used.

As the tags showed up in increasingly sensitive applications, security became more of a concern—at least to researchers and privacy advocates. Rieback was one of those people. As a graduate student searching for a Ph.D. dissertation topic, she spent eight months reading computer science research papers and discovered that the number of published works on RFID security could be counted on both hands. "It became painfully obvious that there was a deficiency in the area of RFID, and there is so much work to be done," she says.

So Rieback turned herself into one of the foremost academic authorities on RFID security and went on to develop the first RFID virus as a proof of concept. That got the industry's attention. As Rieback tactfully puts it, there was a "mixed reaction" that even included some personal attacks. But other companies approached her team for consulting assistance within days of publishing the paper.

After doing her part to publicize these security shortcomings of many RFID implementations, Rieback moved on to the RFID Guardian project, which would give people a measure of control over their tags. It became her Ph.D. project, and when she finalizes the next version in the next eight months or so, she should earn her doctorate. Even when that happens, though, she has no plans to drop the project. "I think this is important enough that we should finish it," she says. "We should get it out there."

Eventual plans call for the Guardian to be incorporated into cell phones and PDAs, but the current model is a pocket-sized device that runs on its own battery and provides a circular 1m field of control over RFID tags, jamming any tags that the user does not want read. It sounds simple, but the technology behind it is surprisingly complex—complex enough that the current model uses what Rieback refers to as a "beast" of a CPU, an Intel XScale PXA270. Here's what all that power is for.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/rfid-guardian.ars


link to The RFID Guardian Project
http://www.rfidguardian.org/