Research In Motion Ltd. has patched a piece of software for Windows PCs that could leave them vulnerable to attack when loading new applications onto BlackBerry devices.

The flaw lies in an ActiveX control used to load third-party applications onto BlackBerries connected to a PC via a USB cable. An ActiveX control is a small add-on program that works in a Web browser to facilitate the downloading of programs or security updates. However, the controls have been prone to vulnerabilities.

RIM said in a security advisory that a vulnerability is introduced to a PC when someone runs the BlackBerry Application Web Loader Version 1.0 ActiveX control with any version of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser. The advisory contains a link to the patch.

The vulnerability is an exploitable buffer overflow, which is a problem in memory that could allow an unauthorized program to run on systems. RIM didn't give details on how the flaw might be exploited.

However, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) said an attacker could be able to execute arbitrary code with the system privileges of a user by getting the user to view a specially crafted HTML document. The vulnerability also could cause IE to crash, according to an advisory issued by US-CERT.

The flaw was given a score of 9.3 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, a tool used by vendors to evaluate the potential dangers of vulnerabilities. A CVSS score of 10 is the highest possible, and anything above a seven is considered to be highly dangerous.

RIM advised users to apply the new software patch. In Microsoft's latest security updates on Tuesday, the software vendor also released a "kill bit" for the affected ActiveX control to block it from running within IE.

source : Computerworld

License: Free

Operating Systems: Windows Vista, Windows 95, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 98

Additional Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista

Limitations: No limitations

Avast Home Edition is a complete ICSA & Checkmark certified antivirus, Checkmark certified anti-spyware & anti-rootkit package. Avast includes the following components: On demand scanner with skinnable simple interface, just select what do you want to scan in which way and press the Play button; On access scanner, special providers to protect the most of available e-mail clients; Instant messaging--ICQ, Miranda; Network traffic--intrusion detection, lightweight firewall; P2P protection for Kazaa, BitTorrent; Web shield--monitors and filters all HTTP traffic; NNTP scanner--scans all Usenet Newsgroup traffic and all operations with files on PC; Boot time scanner--scans disks in the same way and in the same time as Windows CHKDSK does.

Version 4.8.1335.90205 brings many improvements in the scanning engine as well as performance optimizations.


You'll have to register (free) on the publisher site to be able to continue using this program after 60 days.

you can download on avast

source : www.avast.com and www.download.com

Are you ready to buy a notebook? This recommendations for specifications that will fit the needs of the average user.

A 2.0-GHz Core 2 Duo processor. For everyday work--word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail--you don't need the latest, greatest (read: "most expensive") processor, but thankfully, with the Core Duo, you get strong performance and great battery life.

2GB or more of memory. Anything less will slow your work. The only new machines that still carry less than 2GB of RAM are netbooks. Upgrade to a 64-bit OS if you want to carry more than 3GB on your laptop.

Supplemental battery. If you want more time away from an outlet, buy a higher-capacity supplementary battery when you purchase the laptop, or buy a notebook that has a modular bay capable of holding a supplementary power pack. Secondary batteries usually cost between $99 and $200.

A 13.3-inch wide screen. A screen larger than 12.1 inches permits higher resolutions. Unless you're pinching pennies--or you crave a tiny laptop--bigger is usually better, especially on your eyes. (Compare prices for laptops with screens that are at least 14.1 inches in size.)

A 160GB hard drive. Even some netbooks that cost under $500 are bundling a 160GB hard drive (granted, they spin slowly at 4200 rpm). So if you can get a large hard drive in your unit, do so. And as tempting as a solid-state drive may sound, it's an expensive choice for relatively little storage capacity.

A touchpad pointing device. Pointing devices are a matter of taste. Most people, however, find a touchpad easier to use than a pointing stick. For people who can't decide between a touchpad and an eraserhead pointing device, some notebooks include both. If you buy one of these, make sure that it provides two sets of mouse buttons--one for the touchpad and the other for the eraserhead--so you don't have to stretch to reach.

Multiple USB ports. Many laptops now come with two or more USB 2.0 ports, useful for connecting more of the latest peripherals.

All-in-one design. Unless you need a lightweight notebook, opt for one with an internal bay for the optical drive. This design enables you to swap in other devices, such as an extra hard drive or a second battery.

The Omnia has an elegant look, thanks to its chrome finish and black matte plastic back. The phone's crisp, 3.2-inch, 640-by-480-pixel-resolution touch screen occupies most of the space on its 4.4-by-2.2-by-0.5-inch body. (The screen is just 0.3 inch smaller than the one on the iPhone.) End and send keys surround a smallish optical mouse at the bottom of the device. A volume rocker and a dedicated camera button sit on the left spine of the phone; a proprietary headphone and charger jack, and a stylus tether sit on the right. The Omnia carries 8GB of internal flash memory and a microSD slot that can accommodate a card with up to 16GB of external memory.

The Omnia weighs 4.3 ounces--that's 0.4 ounce lighter than the iPhone--and it feels comfortable in hand and in pocket. Call quality was consistently good over Verizon's 3G network, though I did notice a faint hiss on one call. The vast majority of my calls sounded loud and clear with very little background noise or distortion. We haven't yet finished our lab testing of the Omnia's talk-time battery life. Once the PC World Test Center completes its battery life tests, we'll update this review with a final PCW rating.

The Omnia has a landscape QWERTY keyboard and uses T9 predictive text entry. The T9 function often made the wrong prediction, however, so I took advantage of the key that lets you turn it off. The keys themselves are a bit narrow, and I frequently hit the wrong ones while typing long messages. Another annoyance is that the Menu key, which launches a menu of messaging options, can be difficult to access because it's located directly below the minuscule space bar. On the plus side, haptic feedback made the Omnia's keyboard much more comfortable to type on than many other touch-screen keyboards are. Still, the Omnia would have benefited greatly from having a physical, slideout QWERTY keyboard.

Like HTC with its TouchFLO 3D, Samsung has its own proprietary overlay (called TouchWiz) that runs over Windows Mobile 6.1. Though not as visually attractive as TouchFLO 3D, TouchWiz is user-friendly and responsive. The Today screen--the Omnia's home screen--has a widget bar running along its left side. You can arrange the widgets in any order you choose and drag them into the main screen. Available widgets include a calendar, a phone book, games, and a world clock. I wish that Samsung had included a weather widget, though, as the one offered by HTC is spectacular.

In my hands-on tests, TouchWiz was sluggish in some areas. For example, dragging the widgets back to their bar sometimes took multiple finger swipes. I also noticed a lag when I scrolled through my contacts in the Phonebook app. Similarly, the accelerometer reacted slowly and sometimes got stuck when switching between portrait and landscape modes. Another issue is that not all of Samsung's applications support finger scrolling; for those that don't, you must use the optical mouse, which is small and not always responsive.

Like all Windows Mobile devices, Omnia comes preloaded with the mobile version of Microsoft's Office suite. Consequently it was easy to set up my e-mail in Outlook, and the phone's calendar widget integrates nicely with my Outlook calendar. Setting up POP and Web-based e-mail clients such as Gmail is a breeze as well. The Omnia also has an IM client, which supports AIM, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and ICQ. For Web browsing the Omnia offers Windows Mobile Internet Explorer and Opera 9.5. Pages loaded quickly over Verizon's 3G network and over the phone's built-in Wi-Fi.

The Omnia's 5-megapixel camera launches when you press the dedicated camera key on the device's spine. The camera has autofocus and a power LED flash, but it lacks optical zoom. It comes with a handful of advanced features, including white balance and shooting modes such as Sports, Sunset, Night Shots, and even one for shooting text. Image quality was very good, though I noticed some noise in several indoor, low-light shots. Video quality wasn't as good as the image quality of still shots, but adequate for sending short video messages.

The Omnia comes loaded with Windows Media Player and Samsung's own TouchPlayer, a touch-based player that supports album art and background music mode. Loading music onto the Omnia from a PC is a snap. And if you get tired of the music on your phone, you can listen to the Omnia's FM radio. Unfortunately, Samsung's failure to provide a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack undermines the device's potential as a music player--a shortcoming it shares with the T-Mobile G1 and the HTC Fuze for AT&T. If these phones' makers want to compete with Apple's iPhone, they should at least throw in a standard headphone jack.

The Omnia's other applications include a podcast organizer; VZ Navigator, a GPS app; TVOut viewer, which lets you connect the Omnia to your TV; and ShoZu, a picture-sharing service. Surprisingly, the Omnia lacks support for Verizon's multimedia V-Cast hub, which is included even on low-end Verizon phones.

Despite a few kinks relating to the interface and a few omissions in the design, the Samsung Omnia is a high-quality handset that delivers a generous array of features

source : PCWORLD

License: Free

Operating Systems: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000

Additional Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista

Limitations: No limitations

AVG Free Edition is the well-known antivirus protection tool. AVG Free is available free of charge to home users for the life of the product. Rapid virus database updates are available for the lifetime of the product, thereby providing the high level of detection capability that millions of users around the world trust to protect their computers. AVG Free is easy to use and will not slow your system down (low system resource requirements. Highlights include automatic update functionality, the AVG Resident Shield, which provides real-time protection as files are opened and programs are run, free Virus Database Updates for the lifetime of the product, and AVG Virus Vault for safe handling of infected files.

Version 8.0.233 includes wide array of bug fixes and improvements, included a revamped UI that allows easier management via keyboard.

you can donwload free.avg.com

source : www.download.com/ and free.avg.com

There have been big computer worm outbreaks before, but nothing quite like Conficker.
First spotted in November, the worm had soon infected more computers than any worm in recent years. By some estimates it is now installed on more than 10 million PCs. But ever since its first appearance, it has been strangely quiet. Conficker infects PCs and spreads around networks, but it doesn't do anything else. It could be used to launch a massive cyberattack, crippling virtually any server on the Internet, or it could be leased out to spammers in order to pump out billions upon billions of spam messages. Instead, it sits there, a massive engine of destruction waiting for someone to turn the key.

Until recently, many security researchers simply didn't know what the Conficker network was waiting for. On Thursday, however, an international coalition revealed that they had taken unprecedented steps to keep the worm separate from the command-and-control servers that could control it. The group is comprised of security researchers, technology companies, domain name registrars who have joined forces with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the Internet's Domain Name System.

Researchers had taken apart Conficker's code and discovered that it uses a tricky new technique to phone home for new instructions. Each day, the worm generates a fresh list of about 250 random domain names such as aklkanpbq.info. It then checks those domains for new instructions, verifying their cryptographic signature to ensure that they were created by Conficker's author.

When Conficker's code was first cracked, security experts snatched up some of these randomly generated domains, creating what are known as sinkhole servers to receive data from hacked machines and observe how the worm worked. But as the infection became more widespread, they began registering all of the domains -- close to 2,000 per week -- taking them out of circulation before criminals had a chanc. If ever the bad guys tried to register one of these command-and-control domains, they would have found that they'd already been taken, by a fictional group calling itself the "Conficker Cabal." Its address? 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond Washington.

This is a new kind of cat-and-mouse game for researchers, but it has been tested a few times over the past few months. In November, for example, another group used the technique to take control of domains used by one of the world's largest botnet networks, known as Srizbi, cutting it off from its command-and-control servers.

With thousands of domains, however, this tactic can become time consuming and expensive. So with Conficker, the group has identified and locked up names using a new technique, called domain pre-registration and lock.

By dividing up the work of identifying and locking out Conficker's domains, the group has only kept the worm in check, not dealt it a fatal blow, said Andre DiMino, co-founder of The Shadowserver Foundation, a cybercrime watchdog group. "This is really the first key effort at this level that has the potential to make a substantial difference," he said. "We'd like to think we've had some effect in crippling it."

This is uncharted territory for ICANN, the group responsible for managing the Internet's address system. In the past, ICANN has been criticized for being slow to use its power to revoke accreditation from domain name registrars who have been widely used by criminals. But this time it's getting praise for relaxing rules that made it hard to lock down domains and for bringing together the group's participants.

"In this specific case they greased the wheels so that things would move quickly," said David Ulevitch, founder of OpenDNS. "I think they should be commended for that. ... It's one of the first times that ICANN has really done something positive."

The fact that such a diverse group of organizations are all working together is remarkable, said Rick Wesson, CEO of network security consultancy Support Intelligence. "That China and America cooperated to defeat a malicious activity on a global scale... that's serious. That's never happened," he said.

ICANN did not return calls seeking comment for this story and many of the participants in the Conficker effort, including Microsoft, Verisign and the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) declined to be interviewed for this article.

Privately, some participants say that they do not want to draw attention to their individual efforts to combat what may well be an organized cybercrime group. Other say that because the effort is so new, it is still premature to discuss tactics.

Whatever the full story, the stakes are clearly high. Conficker has already been spotted on government and military networks and has been particularly virulent within corporate networks. One slip-up, and Conficker's creators could reprogram their network, giving the computers a new algorithm that would have to be cracked and giving them an opportunity to use these computers for nefarious purposes. "We have to be 100 percent accurate," Wesson said. "And the battle is a daily battle."

source : PCWORLD

The BlackBerry Bold 9000, Research in Motion's formidable contender in the 3G market, has finally arrived. And though the Bold boasts a sleek design, a sharp display, and high-speed connectivity, it fails to impress in other areas--particularly, its call quality and its camera's image quality.

The most stylish BlackBerry yet, the Bold comes with a removable black leatherette cover that gives the phone a classy, sophisticated look and makes the handset comfortable to hold. (You can personalize the back cover with an optional blue, brown, green, gray, or red back.) At 4.5 inches by 2.6 inches by 0.55 inch, the Bold has roughly the same dimensions as its predecessor, the BlackBerry Curve 8300; it also has curved corners and a glossy face. The phone weighs 4.8 ounces, making it heavier than the the BlackBerry Curve 8320 (which weighs about 4 ounces) but equal in weight to Apple's iPhone 3G.

The Bold lacks the iPhone's touch screen, though that feature will appear on RIM's forthcoming BlackBerry Storm. But the Bold does have a terrific keyboard and the various corporate e-mail and infrastructure-friendly characteristics that the BlackBerry platform is known for.

The Bold also has superior battery life. In our lab tests, its battery provided 7 hours, 56 minutes of talk time. That's longer than any other 3G phone we've tested; the iPhone 3G's battery only provided five hours, 38 minutes of talk time.

Unfortunately, the Bold's call quality disappointed me. For some reason, while calls to landline phones sounded clear, calls to other cell phones (on various carriers) consistently suffered from background hiss. And though voices had ample volume, they sounded somewhat tinny. Meanwhile, the people I called on the Bold reported hearing a lot of background noise, as well as some distortion in my voice; one of my contacts said that I sounded robotic.

Though it takes a lot for a handset's QWERTY keyboard to impress me, the Bold succeeded. For this model, RIM revamped its keyboard with sculpted keys designed to minimize finger slippage. Thin metal dividers akin to a guitar frets separate the keys and enhance the keyboard's usability. The result is a roomy, ergonomic typing area that makes texting and e-mailing a breeze.

The BlackBerry operating system gets a makeover as well. Now in version 4.6, the interface looks cleaner and more attractive than it did in previous iterations. The home screen features background wallpaper, and a customizable application-shortcut view, also known as the Ribbon. Pushing the dedicated menu key takes you to the main application screen, which is populated with spruced-up new app icons. Sometimes it's a bit hard to tell what a particular icon symbolizes; many of them look pretty similar. But when you roll over an icon with the Bold's handy trackball, a label appears in a text line beneath, clearly identifying the icon's function.

The phone supports 3G, tri-band HSDPA and quad-band EDGE data connectivity. Accessed over AT&T's 3G network, Web pages loaded quickly on the Bold's browser. NBC.com's home page loaded in 21 seconds, as did PCWorld.com; and Amazon.com loaded in 31 seconds. Wi-Fi performance impressed, too, with NBC.com loading in 18 seconds, PCWorld.com loading in 14 seconds, and Amazon.com loading in 21 seconds.

The phone's display wowed me: Images and video looked spectacular on the Bold's 480-by-320-pixel VGA display (with support for over 65,000 colors). That's twice the resolution of the BlackBerry Curve, and it matches the iPhone's resolution (though not its screen size). Video playback looked great, and ran smoothly with little pixelation or blurring.

Unlike the T-Mobile G1 and the iPhone 3G--which display large album art and are highly visual--the Bold incorporates a fairly plain native music app that leaves much to be desired. You can view your library by song, artist, or genre. During playback, a miniature album thumbnail appears. The app also has playlist and shuffle features and a headphone equalizer.

The Bold comes with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (the T-Mobile G1 does not), which boosts its potential as a media player.

The 2.0-megapixel camera includes some advanced features, including a flash and 5X digital zoom. But in my hands-on tests, the flash was blindingly bright, causing indoor pictures to look grainy and overexposed. For such an expensive smart phone, the Bold seems weak on megapixels (3.0 would have been a more suitable number) and extras (such as white-balance controls and a self-timer, both absent here).

The BlackBerry comes preloaded with Mobi4Biz (a subscription-based on-demand video service), as well as a few games. RIM's BlackBerry Storefront, due to launch in March 2009, will provide a centralized online market for BlackBerry apps, to compete with Apple's iPhone 3G App Store and the T-Mobile G1's Android Market.

The BlackBerry Bold delivers high-speed browsing and powerful messaging capabilities, and it represents a major step up in form and function over existing BlackBerry models. But faults such as mediocre call quality and an unimpressive camera impede its potential to compete with the iPhone and the Android-based T-Mobile G1. In addition, its high price will make competing for consumers' attention even harder for the Bold.