TechBlog

Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report posted something interesting in ZDNet: You want a good, solid, free antivirus program? Microsoft Security Essentials fills the bill nicely. Unfortunately, even though it was officially released more than a year ago, it’s still one of the best-kept secrets in personal computing. Its installed base of 30 million users worldwide might sound big in raw numbers, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the billion-plus Windows PCs in use. ...

SANS.edu: We received a couple of reports about Microsoft’s “Smart Screen” flagging harmless sites as malicious. Initially, we considered the possibility of an infected ad service. But it may be a bug in Smartfilter as well. Some reports on twitter show that the problem has been resolved. Please let us know if you have sample URLs that are still affected. To disable smart screen: Select “Internet Options” from the “Tools” menu. Select the “Advanced” tab and find the “Enable SmartScreen Filter” setting (about the 10th item from the bottom. Scroll all the way down). Needless to say: This will also remove the smart screen protection from real-evil sites, not just from appear-to-be-evil-to-smartscreen-today sites. The setting should only be changed if you can’t wait for the problem to be fixed.

A perverted hacker who spied upon more than 200 women via their webcams and microphones, after infecting their computers with malware, was arrested earlier this year by the FBI after a two year investigation. The 31-year-old man broke into victims’ personal computers, and stole personal information. Threatening to share the private information with their parents and email contacts, the man pressured the young women (some of them still young teenagers) into providing him with risqué pictures and videos. ...

Microsoft has released a security advisory concerning a vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8. This vulnerability may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Full details here. Visit Microsoft’s page here to get full instructions. You can find the workarounds under the “Suggested Actions” twisty. The workarounds include overriding the Web site CSS with a user-defined style sheet, deploying the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, enabling Data Execution Prevention (DEP) for Internet Explorer 7 and setting Internet and Local intranet security zone settings to “High” to block ActiveX Controls and Active Scripting in these zones.

Wall Street Journal: It looks like Steve Jobs may have something to be nervous about after all. Google Inc.’s Android platform has taken the lead in the U.S. smartphone market, according to several new reports by technology research firms. In the third quarter, devices with the Android operating system were installed in 44% of smartphones, while Apple Inc.’s iPhone came in second place with 23%, according to market research firm, NPD Group. RIM’s BlackBerry trailed behind in third place with 22%. One big caveat: NPD tracks consumer activity, but doesn’t measure corporate cellphone purchases. ...

The Jack PC from Chip PC Technologies offers a neat and novel thin-client desktop computing solution where the computer doesn’t just plug into the wall, it is the plug in the wall. Running on power provided by the Ethernet cable that also connects it to the data center server, the computer-in-a-wall-socket supports wireless connectivity, has dual display capabilities and runs on the RISC processor architecture – which gives the solution the equivalent of 1.2GHz of x86 processing power… Continue Reading With the Jack PC, the computer’s in the wall! ...

There are a lot of URL shortening services out there, but Pingdom has worked out which is the fastest. Reliability and performance is key for URL shortening services and Goo.gl is on top! As you can see from the above chart Goo.gl has the fastest service in all locations. Additionally, it was reported that they have a 100% uptime. So if you have already checked out the Goo.gl service then make sure you take a look.

(CNN) — Facebook is the biggest name in social networking. But overnight, it got smaller. The font size on much of the site appears to have shrunk — a tweak that has folks complaining about their poor, News Feed-browsing eyes. By Wednesday morning, users had taken to Twitter to sound off on the change, mostly for the negative. “Eye doctors everywhere must love the smaller default font on Facebook this morning. Eyes squinting everywhere!” wrote Twitter user esilverstein. ...

Chinese website eNet has filled in some missing information – notably TDP and TMU count. The TDP of GeForce GTX 580 is at 244W, slightly lower than the GeForce GTX 480. The texture fillrate had been viewed by many as one of the bottlenecks for GF100, and eNet reports that GF110 effectively doubles the TMU count to 128 TMUs. Apart from this substantial improvement in TMU, the GF110 is a “full revision” and fixed version of GF100. ...

On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users. Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter’s performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent. ...