GuruNews, Volume 10 Number 6, 3-27-10

Sat Mar 27 18:53:33 PDT 2010

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Vol. 10, No. 6                           

3-27-10

1 Hodgepodge 

2 Tourney time

3 Wii streaming. Browsers and iPhone hacked, China exodus, Obama hacked  

4 Online backups

5 Facebook viruses

Hulu is having a small issue.  Well, actually it’s a large issue.  Comedy Central has pulled all its videos out, meaning Hulu is losing two of it’s most watched offerings in “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”.

It seems Hulu and Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, couldn’t come to an agreement on sharing advertising income.

Hulu’s ad revenue has been below expectations, and this certainly won’t help.  The company is considering many options to increase revenue, including a subscription or pay-per-view plan.

Regardless of what they eventually do, something will have to change for Hulu to remain viable.

Speaking of streaming video, Google and YouTube are both killing support for IE6 this month.  Newer versions of video plug-ins such as Adobe Flash Player no longer support IE6 and many sites are anxious to upgrade.

Internet Explorer 6, which was released in 2001, is still used by nearly 20% of Internet users.  It even outranks IE7 in number of users, but many webmasters have abandoned coding for it.

If you’re still running Windows 98, ME or 2000 you can’t install anything above IE6 so it may be time to consider a new PC.

Google, being the top search engine in the world, in reality is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to data searches.  It seems there are scads of sites out there, called “The Deep Web”, that Google and other mainstream search sites don’t or can’t index.

http://tinyurl.com/ycrb66k lists 10 search engines, with links to each, which will dig through mostly professional journals and college publications for research purposes.  While that sounds like something useful for High School and College students, there’s a surprising amount of information to be found that’s useful for everyday problems.

And lastly, I think my ongoing email issues may actually be fixed this time.  The last newsletter came out in a brief four day period in which I answered as many emails as possible but, naturally I lost the outgoing again.

I finally logged into my ISP account and deleted my primary email account and recreated it.  That seems to have fixed it.  If you sent an email to me directly, or sent one to the team that has gone unanswered, look for a response over the next few days.

I’ve been able to send out for nearly a week now but I wanted to test things thoroughly before I tried to get back into the normal flow of things.

Hopefully things will get back to normal starting now :)

Kevin Mefford, Editor

microdome at thepcgurus.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

Those of you who have Netflix accounts and wish to do the Instant Streaming over your Nintendo Wii's are now in luck.  The disc used to be able to do that are shipping as of today.  If you have a Wii and a Netflix account, visit here to request a disc be sent to you, or log into your account, and see if the disc has already shipped:

http://www.netflix.com/wii

At the annual computer security contest Pwn2Own, hackers (in the malicious sense of the word) were able to exploit security flaws in Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6, Safari 4.0 web browsers, as well the iPhone operating system in order to retrieve data from the machines that these programs were on.  Look for security fixes to come shortly:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361810,00.asp

Google, GoDaddy, and Dell are all leaving China in part or in whole due to government restrictions or safety concerns:

Google: http://tinyurl.com/yjnetun
GoDaddy: http://tinyurl.com/ygx6add
Dell: http://tinyurl.com/ydtbodx

Frenchman arrested this week for breaking into President Obama's Twitter account:

http://tinyurl.com/yaqptjd

Daniel A. Williams

daniel at thepcgurus.com

Download of the Week

SpiderOak is useful for backing up and sharing documents and media with other nice features like access to your files via the Web, backup of multiple PCs and long-term retention of previous versions of files.  Secure online data storage offers one more layer of protection for valuable documents and information.  SpiderOak is free for 2 gigabytes of space and there are charges involved for larger storage needs.  Get it here: 

https://spideroak.com/ 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com

Email Question of the Week

Q:  I have several friends who belong to Facebook and invited me to join ... which I did.  Now, with all the "friends" and going from friend to friend I am concerned about picking up a virus or something else.  What do you think the chances are?  

Thanks and I have missed you not being on line.

A:  Chances are pretty small other than using Facebook email.  There are several viruses circulating on there so I never even go into my Inbox for messages.  My actual friends can contact me in other ways ;)

>From what I can tell the ads on the right of your Facebook home page are all from Google Adsense and they are pretty good about keeping those free of the polymorphic viruses that are rampant on other ad servers.  I wouldn't vouch for the content of the ads since most are completely bogus scams but at least they appear to be malware free.

I'm still using work-arounds to do Guru work but you can never totally get rid of me, so don't worry ;)

Kevin Mefford

microdome at thepcgurus.com

Contact info and legal stuff

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