Some users are receiving the e-mail from “The Facebook Team,” according to the security firm. The sender’s e-mail address displays “service@facebook.com.” In reality, the address and sender were spoofed.

MX Labs found that the e-mail was accompanied by an attachment named, “Facebook_Password_4cf91.zip and includes the file Facebook_Password_4cf91.exe” that, the e-mail claims, contains the user’s new Facebook password. The security firm said that the element between the underscore and .zip are randomly chosen letters and numbers for each recipient.

When a user downloads the file, it could wreak havoc on their computer. MX Labs said in a blog post that the Trojan horse Bredolab “executes files from the Internet, such as rogue anti-spyware. To bypass firewalls, it injects its own code into legitimate processes svchost.exe and explorer.exe. Bredolab contains anti-sandbox code (the trojan might quit itself when an external program investigates its actions).” In other words, it’s nasty.

Once it makes its way to the user’s PC, Bredolab creates “%AppData%\wiaservg.log” and “%Programs%\Startup\isqsys32.exe” in the user’s system files. MX Labs said that it also creates two new processes, called “isqsys32.exe” and “svchost.exe.”

Another security watchdog, M86 Security, wrote that there’s more to the outbreak than Bredolab. After it sneaks its way onto the user’s computer, M86 said, Bredolab downloads a bot called Pushdo. The company found that Pushdo immediately starts “spamming out more of these Facebook password reset e-mails.”

For its part, Facebook was quick to point out that the e-mail containing the virus wasn’t coming from the social network.

“This virus is being distributed through email, not on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote. “The email is disguised as a Facebook password reset e-mail with an attachment that purportedly contains the new password, but is actually the virus. We’re educating users on how to detect this through the Facebook Security Page.”

Facebook said that users should be “suspicious of unexpected emails claiming to be from Facebook.” The company also said that it will never send users a new password as an attachment.

Those users that have downloaded the file should use anti-malware software to remove it. Click here for a list of security software available from CNET’s Download database.

Source – Cnet News

In 1991, Berners-Lee designed the world’s first web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor named Nexus that used both FTP and HTP protocols. However the turning point for WWW began with the introduction of multiplatform Mosaic in 1993 which was licensed by companies to create their commercial web browsers. Following stepped in Netscape Navigator as a major competitor in 1994 and even with Internet Explorer1.0 in 1995, the former continued to be the market leader until 1997. However the IE 4 integration into the Microsoft Windows shifted the tides of browser dominance. After 2001 IE 6 then led the browser marketplace pertaining to 90% market share of MS Windows and free web browser for its users.

The next in line came IE 7 in 2006 with major upgrades and enhancements like phishing filters and improved support for web standards and much more.

However amidst the whole war of ascendancy, the routed Netscape open sourced their browser code and Mozilla foundation worked significantly finally developing Mozilla Firefox 1.0 in 2004. In 2006 with phishing filters, session restore feature and spell checker for text field, Firefox 2.0 began to draw itself closer to the prolonged market leader IE6.  This had sparked the fall of IE monopoly. Also Apple too joined the browser league with its Safari for Mac platform and in 2007 released Safari 3 for MS Windows.

Typical market share analysis showed only a slow uptake of Internet Explorer 7, and after statistics in 2007 from showed Mozilla Firefox at 36.3% had taken over from Internet Explorer 6 at 33.6% as the most popular browser with Internet Explorer 7 lagging behind in third place at 20.8%.

Finally 2008 marked the release of Firefox 3.0 and open source Google Chrome too made its entry into the browser world few months later and gained 3.2% usage by September 2009. Also chasing its competitors,  Internet Explorer 8 made its way with added accelerators, improved privacy protection and so on but failed to regain its lost crown in the browser war. Here are few statistics for the evidence.

The chart above declares Firefox a clear winner, giving IE second place and Chrome being at third position. An appealing and edifying distinctions among the top three position holders,  TechRadar points out at 4 basic issues of usability, expandability, performance and security.

Firefox cited as the king of extensions grabs the expandability tiara while IE8 with its Accelerators manages to shoulder Firefox slightly. However Chrome sits back with its usual content plug-in- Flash etc. Performance wise the benchmarks declared Chrome a winner with very trivial differences between the browser trio. Few stats from SixRevisions highlight these variations.

Dealing the security issues Chrome and IE8 go hand in hand but Firefox’s private browsing via third party extension keeps it in the second row. However missing ad blocking feature in Chrome pushes it away from its triumph. As for the usability concerns the three give each other a sturdy fight.

So concluding one browser as the best is not an easy task and since the above results may only be confined to Windows these browsers may give all together a new experience on Mac platform. Also Safari and Opera too although not included in the comparisons but are speeding in and are much widely accepted and used. What probably went wrong for IE? Slow speed and RAM hogging may be significant issues behind the collapse but it is also true that that IE8 is vastly improved over IE 7 and 6, one of my favorite features being automatically organizing the tabs by color-coding. (However I am a regular Chrome user.) Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine gives it speed which many of us often ask for. But hundreds of extensions available and ability to create your own make Firefox much more than just a browser. Although not as fast as Opera, Firefox does have great built in functions and add-on options. It is also more stable.

Though Internet Explorer banished Netscape Communicator to oblivion in the browser war of the 90s, it has found a much tougher foe in Firefox. In fact, over the years, Firefox has steadily been eating into the share of the world’s most popular browser. Also Google now has two browsers in its kitty – Firefox and Chrome. It’s endorsed and promoted the former in the free Google software pack and via the Adsense program as a referral product. And considering Firefox as one of its product seeing how it has encouraged the browser in past, by bringing out Chrome is Google in the danger of self-cannibalization? I think ultimately this competition is good. The advances that Google Chrome and even Safari (as Apple doesn’t sit back against its rivals), will bring to the table are huge to the browser space. They are very fast apps – and that’s going to force the other browsers as well to focus on performance. We as users just yearn for the preeminent web experience.

Sources: History – Wikipedia.

Source – Global Thoughts Research

It’s part of a broader push to try to give Windows the kind of lift that Apple has gotten from its network of retail stores. Microsoft had said it would sell PCs at its brick-and-mortar stores, but it plans to open just two of those this year, including a Scottsdale, Ariz., location that opens later Thursday.

Early on Thursday, though, Microsoft revamped its online store, which had been an outlet only for Microsoft products. The remake of the online store comes just as Microsoft is launching Windows 7.

The revamped online store not only has Windows 7 for sale, but also a variety of machines running the new operating system, as well as other PC accessories and software from other vendors.

Clicking on laptops brings up a list of 10 models, organized by price, including two models below $750. The site also offers three Netbooks and a single desktop model, Lenovo’s $999 A600 all-in-one.

On the software front, Microsoft is selling Norton 360 and Adobe Photoshop, along with Windows, Office, and other Microsoft products. Accessories include a lot of Microsoft keyboards, mice, and Webcams, along with flash drives and blank DVDs from other companies.

Source – Cnet

Source – whoisd.c0m

Maybe you’ve tried out the beta or the RC for yourself. You know Windows 7 is worth getting – but which version of Windows 7 should you buy? Isn’t it crazy how many different versions there are?

Actually no; this time around, the different versions make sense because each new version contains all the features of the versions beneath them, so there are no irritating tradeoffs.

And the choice is really clear. Unless you need to join a network domain at work, use Remote Desktop to connect a work server, take files offline from a server, have some folders automatically encrypted or you want to automatically print to a different printer at two physical locations, buy Windows Home Premium.

• Windows 7 upgrade: your options explained

Apart from this handful of extra features, plus an advanced backup that only works when it’s controlled from a server, Windows 7 Professional only has one really useful tool – and you only need it if you give a lot of presentations. You can plug multiple monitors or a projector into any version of Windows 7; but only Professional (and versions above it), has the options to turn on Presentation Mode and then only on a laptop (you’ll find it in the Windows Mobility centre, shortcut Windows-X).

This is the same feature as in Vista; when you’re giving a presentation the computer stays on even if you leave it past the time when it would normally go to sleep; notifications, system sounds and the screensaver are temporarily disabled; and you can switch to a specific background image instead of whatever embarrassing picture you usually have up – in case you have to view the desktop to find a file. If you do present a lot, it’s very useful, but it proves that only business users need to spend the extra on Professional .

WHICH VERSION? It’s Microsoft marketing speak, but every version of Windows 7 really does suit a different market

Ignore Windows 7 Enterprise (it’s only for large businesses) and Windows 7 Home Basic (because you can only get that in emerging markets like Brazil). You can’t buy Windows 7 Starter Edition, either, but you might get it on a very cheap netbook if the manufacturer wants to keep the price way down by saving on the cost of the Windows licence; according to Microsoft’s marketing materials, Starter Edition is aimed at “customers of small notebooks who might otherwise choose Linux”.

Why you don’t want Windows 7 Starter Edition

Unless the netbook you want is only available with Starter Edition, we’d say pick one with Home Premium instead – or pay for the Anytime Upgrade, which you can get online without re-installing Windows – because there’s a lot of key Windows 7 features that aren’t in Starter.

You don’t get live thumbnail reviews on the taskbar, or any other Aero tools – like Aero Snap to arrange windows, Aero shake to hide other windows, Aero Peek to see the desktop quickly. You don’t even get Aero Glass and the option to choose a personalised background.

Cheap netbooks don’t have touchscreens so you won’t miss that but you don’t get Windows Media Center and you’ll have to buy extra software to watch DVDs (Atom netbooks have no problem playing DVDs or running Media Center, so this is about price not performance).

You can’t use multiple screens, share out your internet connection or switch between accounts without logging off. You can’t create a HomeGroup (although you can join one if you’ve created it on another PC, and you don’t need a HomeGroup if you only have one PC).

There are plenty of free sticky note tools so you won’t miss that too much, but we reckon the Snipping Tool for grabbing sections from web pages and error messages is useful.

Put it all together and although these are nice-to-have rather than must-have features, there’s so much missing from Starter Edition that it’s not a good buy.

Why you don’t want Windows 7 Ultimate

Frankly, neither is Windows 7 Ultimate. Originally Microsoft didn’t plan to sell Ultimate except as an option on high-end PCs; we suspect that changed as much because PC makers weren’t interested as because users were.

If you have Vista Ultimate, you don’t have to upgrade to Ultimate – and we suggest you don’t. There are no extras and you don’t need Ultimate to get Media Center; if you want business and pleasure, remember – it’s all in Professional.

Ultimate is exactly the same as the Enterprise edition, but you’ll only need networking features like DirectAccess and BranchCache and Enterprise Search Scopes if you actually work for an enterprise (in which case, they’ll give it to you).

Booting from VHD is useful if you experiment with different versions of Windows; again, that probably means you work in a big company. Otherwise there are only two reasons to even consider enterprise. One is multiple languages; if you need to change your PC back and forth between an English and Spanish interface regularly, you have to shell out for Ultimate.

The other is BitLocker and BitLocker To Go; encryption for your whole hard drive and removable drives respectively.

Frankly, we’re surprised Microsoft hasn’t put these features into the Windows 7 Professional; in fact, if you keep details like your downloaded internet banking statements on your PC the way the Inland Revenue expects you to (unless you want to kill the same number of trees at your own expense by printing the statements for your records), you’d probably like to encrypt your hard drive, too.

Perhaps Microsoft thinks BitLocker is enough of a feature to keep big companies shelling out for the Enterprise version, or it doesn’t think enough small business users care about protecting their data to find BitLocker useful.

Apart from that, each Windows 7 version does have the right features; there’s one version for home users, one version for business users and one version for making sure you don’t have to spend time upgrading your cheap netbook to Windows yourself.

Source – Techradar.com

This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990’s.

“Hyper Giants” Rule Today’s Internet

The biggest trend to come out of Arbor Networks’ report is clearly that of the Internet’s consolidation. Today’s Internet is “flatter” and “more densely connected” than ever before, reveals Arbor Networks’ Chief Research Officer Danny McPherson. Not only is Google the largest traffic source, there are only 30 large companies in addition to Google and including sites like Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube which now account for a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.

According to Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, this shift represents the Internet’s move into a second phase where it’s no longer “all about contacting websites.” Rather, “over the past two years larger organizations have been buying up the smaller websites and by July 2009, 30 per cent of the internet was owned by a few large sites.” The acquisitions, the result of billions of dollars spent by large companies snapping up smaller ones, has created a new Internet core of “hyper giants,” a coin termed by the report.

The other companies making the list of Internet giants include names like Akamai, Limelight, BitGravity, Highwinds, and Gravity – hardly household names, and certainly not big telco providers. Instead, these content delivery networks (CDNs), are the new Internet backbone that help move large amounts of data across the web.

So Long P2P, Hello Streaming Media

Consolidation is not the only trend revealed by the new findings, however. The report also discovered a sharp decline in peer-to-peer traffic, which only two years prior peaked at 40% of all traffic worldwide. Today, while still a hefty number, P2P traffic has dropped down to 18%. Why the change? For the most part, the file-sharing that took place on networks like Limewire and Napster back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, has now been largely replaced by streaming video thanks to to sites like YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix. Given easier and less technical ways of accessing media, consumers have begun to shift away from the headache of P2P to these new and often free or ad-supported sites. Today, as much as 20% of web traffic is video, Labovitz estimates.

As far as Internet traffic in general, more than half (52%) is web-based, up from 42% in 2007. The remaining traffic comes from email and private networks.

A “Dramatic” Shift?

“Saying the Internet has changed dramatically over the last five years is cliché – the Internet is always changing dramatically,” notes Labovitz. “However, over the course of the last five years, we’ve witnessed the start of an equally dramatic shift in the fundamental business of the Internet.” He adds, “as content is getting faster and better quality it will change the face of the internet.”

Source – NYTimes.com

Computerworld –

Samsung told Computerworld at the Storage Networking World show that its new SSD conforms to the new mini-SATA (mSATA) interface that the SATA International Organization (SATA-IO) announced at Intel’s Developer’s Forum last month.

The new drive’s form factor leaves behind the hard disk drive case that most solid state disk (SSD) drives come in today that require serial ATA (SATA) slots.

Samsung’s new mSATA drive currently has capacities of up to 64GB. Industry observers have said that the 2.5-in and 3.5-in disk drive casings used to house solid state chips that make up SSDs are only a stop-gap measure until makers modify mother boards to include PCIe slots.

While the drive may not contend with today’s traditional hard disk drives (HDD) that are approaching 2TB in size, it can be used to run the PC’s OS and higher performance applications right next to a slower, higher capacity HDD that would be used for mass storage of things such as photos, video, music and slower applications.

The mSATA drive uses a PCIe slot that does not currently exist in today’s desktops, laptops and netbooks. So hardware makers would need to modify their products to include a PCIe slot. The mSATA drive, however, still uses the serial ATA (SATA) protocol, which would allow data and applications to be moved seamlessly between a hard disk drive and the smaller SSD.

“mSATA will eventually be an industry standard,” said Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor.

Source – ComputerWorld

Of all Microsoft’s advertising moves, this certainly falls in more clever side of the spectrum. Redmond et al. have announced they’ll be “sponsoring” a November 8th variety special on Fox, “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show.” The episode’ll be a mix of live-action musical performance and animated shorts with the usual celebrity cameos you’ve come to expect. This show will be commercial free, so long as you don’t count all the Windows 7 that’ll somehow be integrated — and that’s the most interesting mystery of all, how Microsoft will get its brand recognition without too many jabs from showrunner Seth McFarlane and company. If you don’t recall the last time McFarlane teamed up with a big company to enliven its image, check out video from “Burger King presents Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” a venture also done in tandem with one of the ad agencies responsible for this new deal, Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. It’s just after the break.

Update: As commenter Zebb reminded us, Bill Gates pulled off a cameo in Frasier “answering caller questions” about Windows XP. We couldn’t help but add it to the post just below, jump to the 2:20 mark for the relevant scene.

Source – Engadget

The update will include 13 bulletins that between them tackle 34 vulnerabilities.

Microsoft said that eight of the bulletins were rated as critical – the most serious sort of vulnerability.

The security patches will close loopholes in many different programs including different editions of Windows, Internet Explorer and some elements of Office.

One update, rated as critical, tackles a loophole in Internet Explorer 8 running under Windows 7. The next version of Microsoft’s operating system is due to be released on 22 October.

Most people will get the updates automatically but links to download them can also be found on Microsoft’s security pages. Once applied to a PC, the machine will need to be re-started before the fixes take effect.

In a blog posting giving an outline of the updates, Jerry Bryant, a Microsoft security expert, said two of the fixes were for problems flagged up in earlier advisories.

One of those loopholes, for the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) bundled in with Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, is already being exploited by some hi-tech criminals.

Windows is by far the most popular target for cyber criminals and the vast majority of the millions of malicious programs, including worms and trojans, are aimed at the operating system.

Prior to the bumper October security update, Microsoft’s biggest every update was released in June 2009. That package of 10 fixes tackled 31 vulnerabilities.

Microsoft typically issues its updates on the second Tuesday of every month. It started this regular monthly update system in late 2003.

Source – BBC News