http://www.regcure.com/

Still kicking. Just downloaded service pack 3 from Microsoft. Loooong download even at that crazy speed.

For the Firefox users (again from MacInTouch)

"Mozilla released Firefox 3.0, a major update for the popular open source web browser. Firefox 3 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 web rendering platform and includes warnings for known malware sites, web page forgery protection, the ability to save passwords after a successful login, full-page zoom, a save-tabs-on-exit option, tagging for bookmarks, Smart Bookmark Folders, a new Library window for organizing and searching bookmarks, tags, and history, improved performance, resumable downloads, and more. Firefox 3 is free for Mac OS X 10.4 and up (Universal Binary), Windows 2000 and up, or Linux."

Firefox 3 suffers its first vulnerability
Posted by Robert Vamosi 13 comments
Less than one day after its launch, Firefox 3 has a vulnerability.

According to Tipping Point's Zero Day Initiative, the vulnerability, which it rates as critical, was reported within the first five hours of Firefox 3's release.

"Once the vulnerability was verified in TippingPoint's DVLabs and acquired from the researcher, the vulnerability was promptly reported to the Mozilla security team," said a representative.

Although the Zero Day Initiative team does not offer specifics until the vendor has a chance to patch it, the blog post did say this vulnerability, which also affects Firefox 2, requires user interaction and could result in an attacker executing arbitrary code.

Mozilla is reported to be working on a fix.

The Zero Day Initiative has been criticized in the past for paying researchers who find vulnerabilities.


http://news.cnet.com/8301-10789_3-9972207-...ml?tag=nefd.top

Jammie Thomas likely to get another day in court
Posted by Charles Cooper 15 comments

A move's afoot to get a new trial for Jammie Thomas. She's the Minnesota woman a court ordered to pay the recording industry $222,000 for copyright violations related to sharing songs.

Jammie Thomas

You may recall that the jury never found that Thomas had downloaded any music but had infringed by making the music available for others to download. So Friday the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with a coalition of consumer and industry groups, said the court's judgment should be overturned because of erroneous instructions to the jury.

The headline here should be: EFF to court: Jammie Thomas judge was a dolt. At the time, the instructions the jury heard posited the following:

The act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners' exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.

But that was a mistake, according to the EFF (and a lot of copyright specialists who have since weighed in on the verdict.) Again, from the EFF submission:

The plain language of the Copyright Act and applicable precedents mandate that an infringement of the distribution right requires the unauthorized, actual dissemination of copies of a copyrighted work--a completed act of transfer. To permit a finding of distribution liability based on anything less would be to transform section 106(3) into an unbounded form of civil attempt liability, even where no copies had ever been distributed and thus no harm had ever been inflicted on the copyright owner.

This is potentially a big deal. If the so-called "making available" theory holds up, you're likely going to see some odd copyright decisions come down the pike.

Already, the EFF notes, Google's been the target of some copyright owners who have pressed their case using the theory. Ditto for the DMCA notices sent to colleges and universities "based solely on evidence that students have made songs available for possible download by others."

Even the judge in the case now acknowledges that he may have goofed up. In October, when the Thomas verdict came in, my colleague Declan McCullagh observed that the Recording Industry Association of America's victory was vulnerable.

(It) rests in large part on...the judge's decision that the record labels need only prove that Thomas made copyrighted music "available" on the Kazaa network. That means leaving the songs in a publicly accessible directory where they might possibly have been downloaded. Thomas confirmed earlier Monday that her appeal to the 8th Circuit will center on that point...It's true that ditching the "making available" idea and making the RIAA prove the songs were actually downloaded means its lawyers would have to work harder. And it wouldn't solve all of these problems above. But it would be a small step toward repairing some of the imbalances in copyright law today.

That's an important distinction. Based on what we know now, the courts agree. Bottom line: Thomas should get another day in court. And she likely will.


http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-9973882-...ml?tag=nefd.top

For all you Firefox users: (again from MacInTouch)

"Firefox 2.0.0.16 updates the older line of Mozilla's open source web browser to fix two security issues:

* Command-line URLs launch multiple tabs when Firefox not running
* Remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter

Mozilla also released SeaMonkey 1.1.11, an update of its suite that combines a web browser, email client, IRC chat client, and WYSIWYG web page composer. This SeaMonkey release addresses a single security issue (Remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter). SeaMonkey is free for Mac OS X (Universal Binary), Linux, and Windows."

and

"Firefox 3.0.1 updates the popular open source web browser to address security and stability issues, plus some bugs:

* Fixed several security issues.
* Fixed several stability issues.
* Fixed an issue where the phishing and malware database did not update on first launch.
* Under certain circumstances, Firefox 3.0 did not properly save the SSL certificate exceptions list.
* Updated the internal Public Suffix list.
* In certain cases, installing Firefox 2 in the same directory in which Firefox 3 has been installed resulted in Firefox 2 being unstable. This issue was fixed as part of Firefox 2.0.0.15.
* Fixed an issue where, when printing a selected region of content from the middle of a page, some of the output was missing (bug 433373).
* Fixed a Linux issues where, for users on a PPP connection (dialup or DSL) Firefox always started in "Offline" mode (bug 424626).

CAN ANYONE HELP!!



I can't stay on line... keeps shutting down every couple minutes. I've run my antivirus... nothing, disk scan, Registry Mechanic, rebooted, reset modem & routers..

Through what service (type, not necessarily provider ID) are you connecting?

And what kind of messages are you getting, if any?

cable, desktop wireless connection no message.. I'll respond to a post, for example and hit preview post and it vanishesl.. never to return. The computer functions OK off line... just online. I did a system restore but that didn't help.

It doesn't appear to be a cable problem because my notebook is functioning OK...

Should I throw it out the window?

Are you sure that you are no longer connected at that point, or is it just the preview post function that's acting up?

If you are not actually connected after attempting the preview, what process are you using to regain connection?

clean the baffles on the cpu

Usually it's just C-span sucks that shuts down, a few time another window will shut down a few seconds later but other windows will stay open. I can open new windows so I'm still connected to the internet.

This started happening yesterday.

I don't understand that.

Neither does he.

How much stuff do you have open at any one time and what browser are you using?

your processor has a fan

under the fan is a cooling baffle

if it gets filled with dust it will shut down

I use a vacuum to clear it about every 2 months

a blast of canned air works too

shut your machine down and unplug it first

at least look at it... you'll know if it needs cleaning

http://www.google.com/search?q=clean+dust+...amp;rlz=1I7ADBR

Probably too much... emails, spider cell , c span suck, plus a couple of others at any given time.

IE 7

Now I'm on the notebook and it's fine, but my desktop made it impossible to post because I kept losing them. .. the stupid, the more stupid and the stupidest....

Thank you. I didn't know the jargon. I'm trying everything.

Try clearing the cookies, offline files, and history in IE 7. Go to Tools>Internet Options and start clearing things (gives you three or four options to clear.

I'm doing this from memory since I don't use MS IE at home just at the office and I have to say it pretty much sucks - similar behavior to what you describe at times and cleaning stuff out often helps, as does just shutting down out of all the windows open in IE and re-booting the program. Have to say it just sounds as if IE is too full of itself and the message app provides the tipping point.

Never have been fond of MS Windows memory management schemes.

Will do. Thank you so much.

I've been wanting to get a Mac.... maybe I just needed a good reason and this just may be it.

Get Firefox.

I'll second that.

Or try Flock...

http://flock.com/

Flock that.

Opera is a nice browser too. Sounds like between cleaning out the software and cleaning the hardware everything is covered.

http://www.flixxy.com/blockbuster-super-bowl.htm

http://www.flixxy.com/computer-fights-back.htm

For all you "Firefox-ers", new version out yesterday (3.0.3) fixes a password retrieval bug.

Thanks.

Mine updated all by itself.

Obama-themed malware on the rise




One of the spam messages using Obama's election to entice people to download malware.


Within hours of settling the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, spam seen worldwide began incorporating the name and image of Barack Obama, according to various security vendors. The U.K.'s Sophos reported 60 percent of all spam seen by the lab on Wednesday was in some way Obama related.

One piece of spam alleges to contain a link to video of Obama's acceptance speech. If you follow the video link within the e-mail message you will be taken to a Web page where you'll be asked to update your Adobe Flash Player with a file, adobe_flash9.exe, first. This is not an official Adobe update file and downloading this file may in turn infect your computer with a Trojan.

Sophos named the Trojan Mal/Behav-027. F-Secure named it W32/Papras.CL. Sunbelt Software also has a blog about this particular piece of spam.

Meanwhile, Websense is reporting a separate threat. An e-mail appears to be an interview with the new president elect. The e-mail features embedded links to a video site that attempts to install a file, BarackObama.exe. Downloading this file may infect your computer with a Trojan.

http://www.download.com/8301-2007_4-10083070-12.html

Figures. Those asshat spammers and hackers will do anything to ruin your computer. Adobe is bad enough already.

Internet worm exploits Windows vulnerability


A worm dubbed Win32/Conficker.A is making the rounds on Windows machines, exploiting a security hole that Microsoft released a patch for in October, Microsoft said on Wednesday.

The number of attacks have increased over the past couple of days, exploiting a critical vulnerability that was addressed by security update MS08-067.

The malware mostly was spreading inside corporations, but also hit several hundred home PCs, Microsoft said in a posting on the Microsoft Malware Protection Center Blog.

"It opens a random port between port 1024 and 10000 and acts like a Web server. It propagates to random computers on the network by exploiting MS08-067. Once the remote computer is exploited, that computer will download a copy of the worm via HTTP using the random port opened by the worm. The worm often uses a .JPG extension when copied over and then it is saved to the local system folder as a random named dll," the posting said.

"It is also interesting to note that the worm patches the vulnerable API in memory so the machine will not be vulnerable anymore. It is not that the malware authors care so much about the computer as they want to make sure that other malware will not take it over too," Microsoft said.

Most of the infections are in U.S. PCs, but there have been reports from Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, Turkey, China, Mexico, Canada, Argentina, and Chile. The worm avoids infecting Ukrainian computers, for some reason, Microsoft said.

Several bots, under the generic name Backdoor:Win32/IRCbot.BH, also are exploiting the security hole. They drop a backdoor Trojan that connects to an IRC server to receive commands.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10109080-83.html



So they patch the vulnerability so no one else can screw you. They want you to themselves. Jeez, I feel used.

Smart effers. I say catch them and cut off their hands.

This explains how I recently acquired the Virtumonde malware trojan.

McAfee didn't stop it, couldn't remove it. Neither did spywareblaster or spybot.

I had to stay up watching VH-1 classics Metal Mania and try all sorts of poop to eliminate the farker.

I think I still have some lingering poop to clean up. It's a nasty little farker.

I now dub thee, Obamamonde.

My XP machine got a nasty virus and they ended up erasing the whole hard drive and starting over. The people at Circuit City did all the work but we were without a computer for over a week. It had all the original virus and firewall protection and it still got through.

I had that once. Norton removed most of it but you also have to manually delete some registry entries. It sucked.

I'm with artie. I hate those weasels.

Friggin PC went down last night. Won't even load windows.

I hate when that happens.

Tell me about it. It keps cycling through start up continually and won't even start in safe mode. Called my pc guy and his phone is disconnected.

clean the dust from the cpu

the fan sucks dust into the baffles and it overheats, mimicking the ram failure you're having

Just did. No diff.

I had a motherboard fail like that once

needed a complete rebuild

It's really not expensive for mine. I priced a motherboard a while back. But that's not the problem. I have 10 gigs of photos and 300 CDs worth of music. That would hurt. Maybe they can be recovered.

I guess that's on the hard drive... but so is the operating system...

use a recover disc or slave the drive

Riiight. I have two hard drives on this pc. Sounds like I need a removable hard drive just for pics and music.