Absolute Computer Solutions2010-03-10T12:09:20ZAdminCopyright 2010, AdminSPHPBLOGMicrosoft search to be powered by open sourceMicrosoft for years has been warning the world not to use open-source software. Apparently, its Kumo search team didn't get the memo.
Kumo will weigh heavily on open source. (Credit: Screenshot by Ina Fried/CNET)
As The Register reports, Microsoft's new Kumo search technology is filled with open source and, in fact, the Kumo search team, formerly Powerset, "tr(ies) to use open-source software, if it is available."
In other words, open-source software appears to be the default choice for the Kumo team, not proprietary software. It looks like Microsoft's anti-open-source bubble really has burst.
Indeed, reading through the Powerset-turned-Microsoft-Kumo team's description of its approach reads like it was written by an open source-friendly IBM:
Instead of creating a proprietary copy of these pieces of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, a Lucene subproject that is a framework for running data-intensive applications on large clusters of commodity hardware...Unfortunately, there was no Hadoop equivalent to Google's BigTable storage engine.
Read More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry090514-0712522009-05-14T00:00:00Z2009-05-14T00:00:00ZBlue Screen of Death Survival Guide: Every Error ExplainedPicture this: It’s late at night, you’re sitting at your computer playing a game or working on a project when, suddenly, Windows freezes completely. All your work is gone, and you find a blue screen full of gibberish staring back at you. Windows is dead, Jim, at least until you reboot it. You have no choice but to sigh loudly, shake your fist at Bill Gates and angrily push the reset button. You’ve just been visited by the ghost of windows crashed: the Blue Screen of Death.
More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry090513-0710242009-05-13T00:00:00Z2009-05-13T00:00:00ZConficker Worm: Not Finished YetConficker Worm: Not Finished Yet
Ian Paul
April 1 has come and gone, and the Internet has not disintegrated and no major cyber-attacks were reported. But Conficker still remains a threat. Now don't panic, this doesn't mean cyber-Armageddon could strike at any minute, it just means you need to make sure your computer is fully updated if it isn't already. Feel better? Good, then let's take a look at what's going on.
Why It Ain't Over Yet
The Conficker Working Group -- which is made up of 27 tech companies and agencies including AOL, F-Secure, Facebook, ICANN, Kaspersky, McAffee, Microsoft, Symantec -- says that Conficker, also known as Downup, Downadup, and Kido, is the largest worldwide computer infection since the SQL Slammer in 2003. The CWG estimates anywhere from 3 to 15 million computers are infected worldwide, and says 30 percent of Windows computers across the globe are not updated with the latest patches to protect against Conficker. The virus authors are also still at large and able to communicate with Conficker, although that capability has been significantly reduced.
Read More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry090404-0944312009-04-04T00:00:00Z2009-04-04T00:00:00ZPasswords of 8,000 Comcast Customers ExposedA list of more than 8,000 user names and passwords for customers of Comcast, one of the nation’s largest Internet service providers, sat unprotected on the Web for the last two months.
Kevin Andreyo, an educational technology specialist in Reading, Pa., and a professor at Wilkes University, came across the list Monday on Scribd, a document-sharing Web site.
Mr. Andreyo was reading a recent article in PC World entitled “People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets… And Tell Anyone,” when he was inspired to find out what information about him was online. He searched for his own e-mail address on the search engine Pipl.
The list on Scribd was one of four results, and it also included his password, which was a riff on his love for a local sports team. Statistics on Scribd indicated that the list, which was uploaded by someone with the user name vuthanhan2004, had been viewed over 345 times and had been downloaded 27 times.
More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry090316-2027372009-03-17T00:00:00Z2009-03-17T00:00:00ZResearcher: Worm infects 1.1M Windows PCs in 24 hoursIt would make 'one big badass botnet,' says Finnish security companyThe computer worm that exploits a months-old Windows bug has infected more than a million PCs in the past 24 hours, a security company said today.
Early Wednesday, Helsinki, Finland-based security firm F-Secure Corp. estimated that 3.5 million PCs have been compromised by the "Downadup" worm, an increase of more than 1.1 million since Tuesday.
"[And] we still consider this to be a conservative estimate," said Sean Sullivan, a researcher at F-Secure, in an entry to the company's Security Lab blog. Yesterday, F-Secure said the worm had infected an estimated 2.4 million machines.
The worm, which several security companies have described as surging dramatically during the past few days, exploits a bug in the Windows Server service used by all supported versions of Microsoft Corp.'s operating system, including Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008. More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry090115-1438262009-01-15T00:00:00Z2009-01-15T00:00:00ZSo what does Comcast's quota mean?By now, it's common knowledge that the ISP megalomaniac, Comcast, has finally disclosed exactly where its bandwidth cap is. While I had often thought that Comcast's cap was low enough to trap anybody that's ever used YouTube, it turns out that the cap has actually been placed at 250GB.
Let me begin by saying that, if my last two months of router logs are any indicator, I don't use 250GB of bandwidth in a full year's time.
Of course, Comcast's own explanation of their quota is still somewhat ambiguous - a certain number of photos or songs, without actually mentioning the size or bitrate of the media being downloaded. Are we talking the 64kbps-sort-of-music that can be streamed from band websites, or can I actually assume that I can download some ridiculously large number of songs at 256kbps from the Amazon music store? Is that millions of photos taken with camera phones, or millions of high-res pictures from NASA? I did a bit of math to try and figure it out while at the same time being slightly more descriptive. Not considering traffic overhead, 250GB will give you:
* 40 hours of ATSC 1080i-quality audio and video, assuming a 17.82Mbps ATSC channel * 2840 hours of music from the Amazon MP3 store (assuming songs average five minutes, that's roughly 34000 songs) * Just over four million photos from an average 0.3-megapixel cameraphone, with shots averaging 65k * Just under 375,000 photos shot at the 1600x1200 "High-Quality" mode on a 3.3-megapixel Olympus C-3000Z, with shots averaging 700k * 8500 standard-quality, ten-minute YouTube videos; even I don't know anyone with a YouTube addiction that's this bad * And for those that frequently download Linux on DVDs: 67 copies of Ubuntu 8.10, 58 copies of openSuSE 11 or Mandriva 2008 Spring, or about thirteen copies of the entire Debian "main" repository
That's more than ample breathing room, I'd say, regardless of whether or not Comcast is being deceptive with their numbers. I normally transfer about 20GB a month, and as of late had tried to refrain from using streaming audio and video services just in case Comcast's barrier was something considerably lower; say, 50GB. Now that I know the real figure... Well, my bandwidth for today is already 2GB, since I've spent the day streaming the news feeds from both Fox and CNN while following Hurricane Gustav, downloading a 600mb ISO image, and then uploading that same image back to someone else (it's legal). In other words, I increased my bandwidth usage, which probably isn't exactly what Comcast had in mind...]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry090105-1510152009-01-05T00:00:00Z2009-01-05T00:00:00ZHow to run Linux from a USB driveNothing can beat having a great Linux distro installed on a super-fast hard drive, with all your favourite apps configured just how you like them and all your files at your fingertips.
But this has one major drawback: perfect as your setup is, it's also just one machine, and sooner or later you'll be forced to leave that computer behind and use something else.
Something that might run Windows. Something that might not even have Firefox. Because no one likes being parted from their data for too long, we present a smarter option: store it all on a USB flash drive.
In older days, you were able to store Linux on a CD and use a flash drive just to save changes. After some advancements, you were able to run Linux straight from the flash drive, but it didn't store any changes you made. But the latest generation of Linux distros – namely Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 9 – have a memory overlay system that allows you to store your Linux distro and any changes you make to it on a single flash drive. Sure, you'll need at least 1GB to be able to fit the entire distro on there, but it does mean everything you need is all on the one device.
Read more here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry090104-1042062009-01-04T00:00:00Z2009-01-04T00:00:00ZInternet Explorer security alert: Microsoft says all users at risk Users of Internet Explorer, the world's most popular web browser, are at risk of having their computers hijacked because of a security flaw.
By Matthew Moore Last Updated: 2:22PM GMT 16 Dec 2008
The flaw allows criminal gangs to take control of people's computers and steal their personal information when they visit websites that have been corrupted by malicious hackers.
It is believed that as many 10,000 sites have been compromised since last week.
Microsoft said that it had detected attacks on machines using Internet Explorer 7, the most widely-used version of the browser, but that other versions are "potentially vulnerable".
"We are actively investigating the vulnerability that these attacks attempt to exploit," the firm, which also makes the Windows operating system, said in a security statement.
Read More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry081216-1104522008-12-16T00:00:00Z2008-12-16T00:00:00ZFacebook Is Infected With 'Koobface' VirusA virus dubbed as "Koobface" is infiltrating Facebook's 120 million users by using the social network's messaging system to infect PCs, and get credit card numbers.
This is the most recent attempt of hackers looking to take advantage of users on social network sites.
"A few other viruses have tried to use Facebook in similar ways to propagate themselves," Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said in an e-mail. He said a "very small percentage of users" had been affected by these viruses
"It is on the rise, relative to other threats like e-mails," said Craig Schmugar, a researcher with McAfee Inc.
Read More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry081206-1055152008-12-06T00:00:00Z2008-12-06T00:00:00ZWhat the data miners are digging up about you In today's technological world we leave electronic traces wherever we go, whether shopping online or on the high street, at work or at play. That data is the raw material for a new industry of number crunchers trying to explain and influence human behaviour, as Stephen Baker explains in his new book The Numerati.
In the book, Baker meets the maths whizzes at the bleeding edge of this new way of doing business, politics, and even matchmaking.
You might be surprised at some of the things Baker's "numerati" want to know and can already find out about you. Read on for some examples taken from the book, and click here to read our full review.
Read More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry081130-0830442008-11-30T00:00:00Z2008-11-30T00:00:00ZTest Driving PCLinuxOSPCLinuxOS (also known as PCLOS) is an installable Live CD distribution based on the Mandriva Linux operating system. While PCLinuxOS tries to be a very elegant Linux desktop, on the other hand its main aim is to be easy to use by everyone who dares to try a Linux distribution. Looking back in time (a few years), PCLinuxOS project was started as a set of RPM packages created to improve Mandriva Linux distros (Mandrake was called at that time) and Texstar is responsible for the PCLinuxOS Linux distribution, which was created in 2003 as a fork of the Mandrake Linux 9.2.
Today, the PCLinuxOS project is proud to have three more "brothers": MiniMe (a minimal Live CD/HDD install with a basic KDE desktop environment), Junior (a self booting Live CD with advanced hardware detection) and Big Daddy (aka PCLinuxOS Full Edition). But wait, PCLinuxOS has more relatives (because of a nice script, which comes with the system, that can remaster the whole distribution). Here is a list with some of them:
Read More Here]]>http://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry081128-1053162008-11-28T00:00:00Z2008-11-28T00:00:00ZInternet worm exploits Windows vulnerabilityInternet worm exploits Windows vulnerability Posted by Elinor Mills
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://acsberks.com/index.php?entry=entry081128-1048512008-11-28T00:00:00Z2008-11-28T00:00:00Z
The computer worm that exploits a months-old Windows bug has infected more than a million PCs in the past 24 hours, a security company said today.
By now, it's common knowledge that the ISP megalomaniac, Comcast, has finally disclosed exactly where its bandwidth cap is. While I had often thought that Comcast's cap was low enough to trap anybody that's ever used YouTube, it turns out that the cap has actually been placed at 250GB.;)
A virus dubbed as "Koobface" is infiltrating Facebook's 120 million users by using the social network's messaging system to infect PCs, and get credit card numbers.;)