GuruNews, Volume 9 Number 24, 7-11-09

Sat Jul 11 18:00:16 PDT 2009

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Vol. 9, No. 24                           

7-11-09

1 Potpourri             

2 Misplaced disappointment

3 ImageShack hack, Tower of Babel squabble, spoofed auctions, Gintel?

4 Bowling for the desktop

5 Buying online

We take a week off and look what happens, all manner of chaos rends the fabric of the Internet.

Starting on July 4th, a very obvious target date, servers at several US and South Korean government agencies were hit by a barrage of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and either knocked offline or slowed considerably.

Early on some of the sites suffered heavily under the swell of ping, UDP and syn packets and folded like a pair of deuces after the river.  For now most are back up and authorities are digging for those responsible.  So far security firms have made most of the progress, though.

Panda and other labs have identified the attack as coming from a new variant of MyDoom, which has been floating around for five years and originally targeted about everything but Macs.  This new MyDoom has an embedded list of target sites (which coincides suspiciously with the ones actually attacked) that led to the lead suspect. 

You can see this list below, with the sites attacked in blue hyperlinks and the missed sites in gray.  Many of the gray sites, by the way, are incorrect URLs.

http://tinyurl.com/mz88ds

Considering the sites that were hit the likely culprit is obvious, which indicates what may become the battleground of the future.  Take out an enemy’s command-and-control structure, financial underpinnings and major businesses and you cripple them before any shots are ever fired.  In this case the attack was amateurish and easily blocked shortly after discovery but it doesn’t bode well for things to come.

On another frightening security note, a glitch in an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer was exploited in a “0 day” wave of infections starting over the weekend.

The flaw allows a machine to be taken over remotely through rogue ads, mostly from Chinese sites but it’s still spreading.  The infections happen without participation from the user and it’s estimated that over 3 million websites have been breached and infected with the virus.

The flaw is in the MSVidCtrl ActiveX control and can’t be disabled with a simple setting through Internet Options.  It takes editing a whopping 49 Class ID keys in the Registry.

Microsoft has posted a temporary workaround at:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972890

You can enable and disable the workaround with a simple click on a button from there until a patch is released, which will be next week’s Patch Tuesday.  I would suggest doing this post haste.

Last but not least on the security front, Google has announced that is developing a web-centric OS for netbooks and PCs, currently dubbed Chrome OS.

According to Google it will be a windowing environment running on a Linux kernel and will make security concerns a thing of the past.  Considering the flaws found so far with the Chrome browser I’d have to see that statement verified to believe it.

The OS, still over a year away, will concentrate on speed, ease-of-use and security and most computing tasks will apparently be carried out “in the cloud”, meaning that most of the applications will actually be web-based and not installed on the local machine.

Privacy advocates will likely drop like flies with strokes over the idea of your private documents and pictures being stored on some online server.

While it may have a “new” GUI instead of Gnome or KDE, at its core it will be just another Linux distro just like Redhat, Mandrake or Ubuntu; in other words, nothing to write home about.

Since all three of these stories have been developing all week I wasn’t satisfied with the information early on, so this issue is a little late.  We should be back to Thursday evening next week bar any new unforeseen event. 

Kevin Mefford, Editor

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

Photo storage site ImageShack hacked:

http://mashable.com/2009/07/10/imageshack-hacked/

Rosetta Stone sues Google over misuse of its trademark.  Which language they used is unknown at this point:

http://tinyurl.com/mknecm

eBay auctions may be “rigged”.  Who knew?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/10/ebay_and_shill_bidding/

Intel working with Google on Chrome OS:

http://tinyurl.com/lx7qrw

Download of the Week

Go bowling without leaving the house. Bowling PC is a cinematic-looking 3D bowling game and is exceedingly simple: Knock down the pins. You control the ball's placement by using the arrow keys, and then use other keys to determine when and where to throw it. 

You can play against the computer, or against other people on your PC, and you get plenty of options, such as for which ball to use, whether to play rock music while bowling, the angle of the "camera" that tracks the ball and the game, and so on.  Get it here:

http://www.freegamepick.com/en/games_bowlingpc.html  

Note: When you install the software, it will also by default install the Ask toolbar and change your default search engine to Ask.com. If you don't want the toolbar or change in your search engine, uncheck the boxes during installation.

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com

Email Question of the Week

Q:  Just to update you..........I found the invoice for the LG burner and it only had a 30 warranty so I went ahead and did the flash update.  It didn't fix the problem.......it still does the same thing so I'm just going to buy a new one.  I do have one question though, what is the difference between an 'OEM' and  a 'Retail' model?  I just looked at some burners on Newegg.com and the 'OEM' burners are about $5.00 cheaper than the same model number 'Retail' ones.  Is it better to go 'Retail'?  Again thanks for all your help.

A:  OEM means Original Equipment Manufacturer.  Basically it's just a bare part sometimes with a short warranty that's used by companies that build PCs.  If the warrant a system for a year and the part fails the PC manufacturer will cover it out of pocket, so they get the part at a lesser price.

OEM parts come with no documentation or software, it's just the part in a bag.

Retail parts, on the other hand, have warranties from the part manufacturer that range from one to five years (most hard drives have three-five year coverage), include documentation, hardware to mount the part and software, in your case DVD player and burning software.

In your case I'd say go with the retail since you had bad luck with the last "short warranty" part.  I usually go OEM to save a few bucks because I have plenty of spares and don't need software or booklets.

Hope that explains things and sorry I couldn't solve your issue...

Kevin Mefford

pcguru at microdome.net

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