F-secure has noticed a trend that more malware is being spread though FTP. As most can remember when viruses and other nasties were spread through email attachments, well that’s be fairly well defeated. Then came the drive-by-downloaders which use http to transfer the infectious payload, that’s been slowing down since browsers have evolved. Now though there is a new way to become infected, through trusty old FTP. How this happens is that a user receives a spam email with some links claiming they have an offer which can’t be refused and as we all know most really can’t refuse it. So the unsuspecting user clicks the link and a ftp connection to some bot-net controlled computer is initiated and some infected files downloaded. So now there is one more thing to scan for in your emails.

Or Stupid people should own electronics.

Ontrack data recovery tells stories of the unusual and usually stupid ways people break stuff. Everything from a photographer spray insecticide inside his computer because of an ant infestation, to a scientist drilling a hole in his hard drive and pouring oil to stop a squeak in his computer. I thought scientist were supposed to be smart, I guess not. Then there’s the woman who washed a usd drive, I have to admit I’ve washed and dried the same usb drive not once but twice and it still works to this day. Then there’s the professional wedding photographer who overwrote someone’s wedding with another couples.

Source: ComputerWorld

It seems that with XP’s newest service pack won’t only be a bug fix/patch release but will actually help performance. Using an Office benchmarking tool the Devil Mountain Software group have shown the new Service Pack to have as much as a 10% boost over Service Pack 2 and over twice as fast of the same test under Vista. One more reason to stick with trusty old XP a little longer. Just goes to prove that Vista’s biggest competitor is XP itself.

Source: TechSpot

Fedora 8 was released and some of the biggest improvements were to the audio system. A new daemon dubbed PulseAudio allows much more control over audio streams and the programs producing them. Another big improvement is the inclusion of a little utility called Codeina which allows user to purchase legal codecs for dealing with different media formats. PolicyKit is the new authentication system that aims to make programs that require root access more secure by only allowing certain processes of the program root access.

The full feature list can be found here.

Source: ArsTechnica

Windows Home Server (WHS)

I did a review of the beta release of WHS back in March, and now it seems that it has finally it the market. WHS is a nice product that simplifies the process of backups and acts as a central repository for all your photos, music, moves. The beta was very simple to install and extremely easy to connect client computer to the server (inserting a CD). HP delayed their release of the product as they were adding custom software to connect to some of their other software.

From HP

MediaSmart, which won’t ship until later this month, is priced at US$599 with 500GB of storage, or $749 with a terabyte of disk space. Those prices were identical to the listings leaked by Amazon.com in late August.

Although this is more of a niche product that niche has been growing lately, 50% of homes have at least two PCs and 25% have more than three. Although I personally use a Linux server for all my needs, this is a very nice product from Microsoft (I know I can’t believe I said it either)

Source: PCWorld