Windows Factor

The Phoenix Mars Lander, which completed a heart-stopping, autonomous landing on the Martian surface on Sunday, has begun beaming pictures the millions of miles back to Earth.

If you missed the landing, this gallery should provide a photographic catch-up on a mission that is likely to allow scientists to examine extraterrestrial water for the first time ever during this initial exploration of a Martian polar region.

Now that the lander is in position, NASA will use the craft's robotic arm to dig into the red planet's regolith to look for the subsurface ice that scientists believe exists there. If they find it, instruments aboard the craft will melt the ice and analyze the water to look for organic compounds, which contain carbon, the building block of life.

These photos take an amazing path to get to your desktop. First, the Surface Stereoscopic Imager snaps them. Then the Lander sends data at about 15 kilobytes a second via an UHF antenna to two spacecraft orbiting Mars. The orbiters relay the data to NASA's Deep Space Network antenna arrays in Canberra Australia, Madrid, and in California's Mojave Desert.

Raw images are sent to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and posted to the Phoenix Mars Mission website.

Left: The small blue object in the center of the Martian Arctic plain pictured is NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, as seen from above by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The lander touched down safely and scientists have been delighted to find all its instruments in working order. Now, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Arizona scientists will race to do as much research as possible over the next three months before the Martian winter incapacitates the lander




Source: Wired

Love or hate its nagging prompts, Vista's Account Control feature (UAC) has a security feature that marks it out from any other type of Windows security programme -- it can spot rootkits before they install.

This is one finding buried in a report published in two German computer magazines some months ago after testing by the respected AV-Test.org, which set out to find out how well antivirus programs fared against known rootkits.

The answer was not particularly well at all, either for Windows XP, or Vista-oriented products. Of 30 rootkits thrown at XP anti-malware scanners, none of the seven AV suites found all 30, a similar story to the six web-based scanners assessed. Only four of the 14 specialized anti-rootkit tools managed a perfect score.

<H2 class=artSubtitle>Best Protection
</H2>The best of the all-purpose suites was Avira AntiVir Premium Security Suite, which found 29 active rootkits, with Norton finding as few as 18. The anti-rootkit tools fared better, with AVG Anti-Rootkit Free, GMER, Rootkit Unhooker LE, and Trend Micro Rootkit Buster achieving perfect scores. The scores for removal were patchy, however, with all failing to remove any of the rootkits they had found.

The results for Vista products were harder to assess because only six rootkits could run on the OS, but the testers had to turn off UAC to get even this far. Vista's UAC itself spotted everything thrown in front of it.

Only three of the 17 AV tools for Vista managed to both detect and successfully remove them, F-Secure Anti-Virus 2008, Panda Security Antivirus 2008, and Norton Antivirus 2008.

Once on a PC, rootkits can bury themselves quietly, but they have to get to that point first. As long as users interpret prompts from the UAC system attentively, or those messages haven't in some way been spoofed, rootkits struggle to jump to the PC without drawing attention to themselves.

That UAC can tell a user when a rootkit is trying to install itself is not in itself surprising, as Vista is supposedly engineered from the ground up to intercept all applications requests of any significance.

<H2 class=artSubtitle>Danger of Rootkits
</H2>Rootkits matter. By their nature, they set out to bypass the operating system. Once installed, they can do whatever they like, including loading other malware from a position of privilege. The question is, how can one be sure that a scanner is spotting a type of program built on the principle of extreme stealth?

An interesting footnote to the XP rootkit testing was that the samples chosen included three 'professsional' rootkits, apparently legitimate programs designed to enforce things such as copy protection. The most infamous example of this category included is the Sony XCP/First4Internet rootkit, which caused the company so much embarrassment when it was discovered in 2005.

But in a period of weeks when Vista has received criticism for its rate of vulnerabilities, Microsoft's programmers can at least point to evidence that UAC is efficient at stopping those infections from happening automatically.

Source: PC World

A possible zero day exploit has been discovered for a flaw in Flash thought to have been patched by Adobe a month ago.

Symantec researchers claim the exploit has several different payloads, including one to steal passwords from systems with the vulnerable software. Affected versions of Adobe Flash Player include 9.0.124.0 (latest version) and 9.0.115.0.

Around 20,000 legitimate Web pages have been manipulated, likely via SQL-injection vulnerabilities, to redirect browsers to domains in China which host the exploit, according to Vincent Weafer, senior director of development for Symantec's Security Response team.

</IMG>View Full Article: ZDNet Australia

The European Commission is pushing for 25 per cent of the bloc's government bodies, industry and public to switch to IPv6 by 2010, amid warnings that the current IPv4 protocol is fast running out of net addresses.

Doom-mongers have said for years that a shortage of the current generation of addresses will soon limit the growth of the internet unless ISPs and governments make a concerted effort to encourage upgrades. About 16 per cent of the 4.3 billion total IPv4 numbers remain available.

View Full Article: The Register

Now, we know that the MacBook Air is one thin laptop, but some Apple forum members in Germany are claiming that the edge of the laptop is not only sharp -- but downright dangerous. According to "Apple Talk" reader Bajuware, his MBA went kill-crazy all over his elbow while he was cold-chillin' on his couch. The details are a little hard to suss out due to the language barrier (and machine translation), but it would appear the Air's bottom edge made nasty work of the human flesh like someone had insulted its mother. Another MBA owner claims his computer is sharp enough to slice bread, though we assume it's not used for buttering. Honestly, we're not sure what kind of danger an innocent MacBook Air could really pose besides causing you to throw out your back constantly plugging in the AC to charge that not-quite-as-advertised battery.

Source:Engadget

Eighteen months after its launch, Windows Vista is growing in popularity because of its low power requirements and good security, a senior UK manager for Microsoft has claimed.

Speaking at a round-table in London on Wednesday, John Curran, director of the Windows group for Microsoft in the UK, said: "First and foremost, businesses like Vista for security". The operating system (OS) "has, since its launch, been the safest operating system on the market with the fewest vulnerabilities of any OS available," he added.

Curran said that, after security, the most important feature for corporate users was Vista's contribution to the "green agenda". The savings possible here "really help drive down the carbon footprint and help drive down the costs in an IT environment", he claimed.

View Full Article: ZDNet.co.uk

We’re proud to announce: Ad-Aware 2008 Free, Plus, and Pro versions are now available. While we continue to offer a full-powered anti-spyware solution that is free of charge for personal home use, with this new release, there’s more reason than ever to boost your defenses with our Plus or Pro products. Ad-Aware 2008 Plus and Pro now offer even bigger and better detection; integrated anti-virus along with real-time monitoring provides constant protection to guard against today’s complex threats. Visit our Ad-Aware 2008 Free, Plus and Pro product pages to see the full features of each new version.

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Remember, if you have a valid Ad-Aware 2007 Plus or Pro license, update to Ad-Aware 2008 free of charge through the Lavasoft Support Center. Follow these three easy steps:

1. Log-in to the Support Center and download Ad-Aware 2008 from the download link option in the “Your Licenses” menu.

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3. Install Ad-Aware 2008. Ad-Aware 2008 will automatically recognize your previous license information and the Plus or Pro features will be activated.

Source: Lavasoft Blog

We feel we are achieving parity in how Office treats the format, by making them all part of just one simple list of formats supported by Office," said Microsoft Office Product Manager Doug Mahugh, in an interview with BetaNews.

For the history of applications up until now, the specification of the format used to encode documents was defined largely and almost inescapably by the functionality of the programs which utilize them. A format represented what an application was designed to do, and that format changed when the application changed.


For more:
BetaNews: Next Office 2007 service pack will include ODF, PDF support options

View Full Article: BetaNews

On Monday during a press conference at its Zeitgeist Partner Forum in Great Britain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-Presidents Sergey Brin and Larry Page were widely cited as having opened up the door to a possible partnership, or even something more, with Yahoo.

But this afternoon, a Google spokesperson denied to BetaNews that any of its executives made such overtures. And a YouTube video of the conference which re-emerged this morning after having been absent from public view for most of yesterday, would appear to confirm the spokesperson's take on the story. In fact, Brin and Page were openly reluctant to comment, deferring to Schmidt who made a brief reference to what was then considered a rumor -- later confirmed -- that Microsoft would be open to a purchase of part of Yahoo.

View Full Article: BetaNews

It wasn't exactly 'Minority Report' but Bill Gates's technology demonstration at the company's CEO Summit earlier today may be remembered years from now as a harbinger of the end for the keyboard and mouse era. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon enough. (Cue Winston Churchill here about how this is not the end, the beginning of the end, but perhaps, it's the end of the beginning.)

View Full Article: CNET News Blogs