TechBlog

For the second time recently, a security researcher has pointed out that running machines without administrative privileges could significantly improve security. Mikko Hypponen, the head of research at Finnish AV company F-Secure in an interview with The Inquirer, said a great way to stop a lot of malware would be to take administrative rights away from online users. “Most wouldn’t notice (although those who did would be incandescent with annoyance) and most malware would be stopped from functioning. It should have been done already,” he said. ...

We want to warn you of an email message in Spanish we’ve received with the subject ( Urgente ) Posible Terremoto y Tsunami con un 89 % de efectividad and that is of course false. The message consists of different images and informs users about an alert of earthquake and tsunami in Chile. Besides, it passes itself off as a warning of National Geographic, in order to make it more credible. ...

Microsoft Visio 2010 Viewer allows anyone to view Visio drawings and diagrams (created with Visio 5.0 through Visio 2010) inside Internet Explorer (versions 5 through Web browser. ****The Visio 2010 Viewer has all the functionality of the previous viewers, and includes all the security fixes. Visio Viewer enables users to discover the advantages of using Visio drawings, charts, and illustrations in a Web-based environment. You can view Visio drawings files with a .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, or .vtx extension) in Windows Explorer. Internet Explorer will open, and Visio Viewer will render the drawing in the browser window. ...

For a short while today a couple of treas.gov websites were hacked, and were reaching out to an attack site in Ukraine. The websites involved were bep.gov (Bureau of Engraving and Printing), bep.treas.gov and moneyfactory.gov. They had been script injected with the line of code circled in red… Btw, you should _not_ mess with the attack site (grepad) … it was dead earlier today, but could easily come back to life. ...

Hi dear visitors, I’m sorry I’ve not been here for a while, there are some personal problems here in my life and I could not keep up updating my blog 🙁 , I guess it would take up to one more week, so I hope I can back here updating my blog from next week 🙂 The best way you can help me is donate via the link in right column of the my blog. ...

The Obama administration’s Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission has been working with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to make a computer game about managing the United States federal budget and deficit, USA Today reports. President Obama appointed Erskine Bowles and Alan K. Simpson to lead an 18-person, bi-partisan commission to generate ideas for dealing with the nation’s rising deficit and other fiscal challenges. The game is just a footnote amid the commission’s broader objectives, of course, but it’s actually not a bad idea. ...

Gmail has a new feature for Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome users: drag-and-drop file attachments. The feature is very straightforward — just drag files from your desktop onto your e-mail, and a green box will appear where you can drop your files. Google promises it will “enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature.” Why the wait? Drag-and-drop functionality is an HTML5 feature. Currently only the Gecko layout engine — the engine that powers Firefox — fully supports HTML5 drag-and-drop. WebKit, which powers both Safari and Chrome, has only partial support for drag-and-drop. ...

Short answer: an infinitesimally small amount. If you have any sympathy for musicians you’ll buy their CDs from their web sites or at their performances. That’s pretty much the conclusion you’ll draw from a great attempt at quantifying musicians’ pay rates in the online music business(es) by David McCandless of InformationIsBeautiful.net. McCandless tried to determine how many songs or CDs a musician would need to sell in various ways to make the U.S. minimum wage ($1,600 per month). It was a tough project. He wrote: “As ever, this was incredibly difficult to research. Industry figures are hard to get hold of.” ...

On Jimmy Kimmel Live 2 nights ago, Jimmy asked guest Alyssa Milano to explain Twitter and hashtags to him. In the video below, Alyssa explains that she tweets 12 to 22 times per day, that she likes to imagine Jimmy Kimmel naked when she’s nervous and that she uses a lot of hashtags — a big plus in my book. A closer look at the actress’s Twitter stream reveals that she uses TweetDeck, an app she likes so much that she asks Twitter “not to kill TweetDeck.” The acquisition of Tweetie has made the future of other third party Twitter clients a little uncertain, but with support like this, the folks at TweetDeck have nothing to worry about.

Backdoor.Rohimafo is a Trojan that has several back door functions. It not only opens a back door and performs the usual functions but it also can perform some decidedly unusual functions. It attempts to block users from connecting to remote servers; not only specific servers but also specific network segments by using PersistentRoutes in Windows. PersistentRoutes can be used to add a routing entry to a routing table persistently. The route.exe command can be used to add an entry like the following: ...