Download Windows 7 Antivirus from AVG, Kaspersky and Symantec

Just as it was the case with Windows Vista, the mitigations introduced by Microsoft alone in Windows 7 are not sufficient to bulletproof the operating system on their own.

While security for Windows 7 is not a new subject, as you have been able to already read materials on this subject, fact is that following the release of the first Beta for the next iteration of the Windows client, I have seen questions from users related to how they could protect themselves best. Microsoft is indeed providing, in collaboration with members of the security industry, solutions designed to integrate with Windows 7, even if the operating system is in Beta.


Brandon LeBlanc, Windows communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team, revealed that Microsoft had been hard at work attempting to get security providers to offer anti-virus for Windows 7. No less than three companies have rushed to Microsoft's call, and are offering their products even if Windows 7 is still in Beta.

“The following anti-virus solutions are available [for Windows 7]: Symantec offers the Norton 360 3.0 Beta, which works on the Windows 7 Beta; AVG offers AVG Internet Security and AVG Anti-Virus that works with the Windows 7 Beta; Kaspersky is offering a technical preview of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows 7. It is great to see that these partners were able to have their solutions working so early in our development process,” LeBlanc added.

Norton 360 3.0 Beta is available for download here.

VG Antivirus Professional 8.0 is available for download here.

AVG Internet Security 8.0 is available for download here.

Technical Preview Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Microsoft Windows 7 is available for download here.

source: softpedia.com

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Ubuntu 9.04 Boots in 21.4 Seconds

There are only two days left until the third Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) will be available (for testing), and...

we couldn't resist the temptation to take the current daily build for a test drive, before our usual screenshot tour, and taste the "sweetness" of that evolutionary EXT4 Linux filesystem.

Announced on Christmas Eve, the EXT4 filesystem is now declared stable and it is distributed with version 2.6.28 of the Linux kernel and later. However, the good news is that the EXT4 filesystem was implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 a couple of days ago and it will be available in the Ubuntu Installer, if you choose manual partitioning (see the screenshot below for details). The bad news is that EXT4 will not be the default filesystem for the Ubuntu OS until version 9.10, due for release in late October this year.

OK, OK... so how will the end user benefit from this EXT4 filesystem? Well, first of all, the whole system will be much faster and more reliable compared to one with EXT3 (I guess that some of you still remember the Firefox/Ext3 issue), it will boot faster (the current article proves that) and it's able to handle files with sizes of up to 16 terabytes (1 TB = 1000 GB). But these are just a few of the futures brought by the fourth extended filesystem, for more details you can check the Wikipedia entry for EXT4.

We've tested the boot process of a default Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) installation on two machines, an AMD Sempron 1.8 Ghz, 80 GB IDE hard drive with 512 RAM DDR and an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 running at 2.2 Ghz, 250 GB SATA hard drive with 4 GB RAM DDR2. Here are the results of our tests:

· Ubuntu 8.10 with EXT3 filesystem boots in 31.8 seconds (on the AMD Sempron system);
· Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT3 filesystem boots in 28.3 seconds (on the AMD Sempron system);
· Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT4 filesystem boots in 23.1 seconds (on the AMD Sempron system);
· Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT4 filesystem boots in 21.4 seconds (on the Intel Core 2 Duo system)!

The boot times were calculated from the moment the GRUB boot loader appeared on the screen and until the login manager was displayed. As you can see, there is an approximately 10 second difference between an Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) installation and an Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) one. But this does not stop us from hoping that the boot times will decrease even more until the final version of Ubuntu 9.04 hits the streets.

Currently, EXT4 can only be applied from the text mode installation of Ubuntu 9.04 (the Alternate CD). Don't forget to check our website on Thursday for the screenshot tour of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Alpha 3 when we will reveal even more goodies from the Ubuntu land.

source: news.softpedia.com

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu,Linux,Performance

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Windows 7 : Personalize Your PC!

Download fun extras to give your PC a personal touch. Windows 7 provides a full range of features and the experience of using a PC with a different way. Many of the features offered by Windows 7, among others, is Desktop Theme, Desktop Background, Desktop Gadgets and Slideshow Gadget.

A theme is a desktop background plus glass color, sounds, icons, and more to help you personalize your computer with one click.

A desktop background, formerly called wallpaper, is a picture on the desktop that provides a backdrop to your open windows.

Desktop gadgets are mini-programs that you can add to your Windows desktop.

Sideshow gadgets are mini-programs that run on a Windows Sideshow-compatible device and update the device with information from your computer.

Visit this link to know more about how to Personalize your windows 7.

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Personalize,Download

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Ministries in Bulgaria and New Zealand Fight Computer Viruses

The Bulgarian Interior Ministry and the Health Ministry in New Zealand are being confronted with virus outbreaks on their computer networks. The infections have hindered the normal operations in several departments.

Bulgaria's Minister of Interior, Mihail Mikov, announced that an unnamed computer virus had spread on the nationwide computer network operated by the ministry. According to him, operations that required heavy use of computer systems, such as the issuing of identity documents or the activity of the traffic police, had been most affected.

The outbreak seems to have originated in the network of Sofia's Direction of Interior Affairs, and the incident escalated last Thursday when parts of the computer infrastructure had to be isolated. The Ministry is in process of cleaning the virus from its network, but, according to Mr. Mikov, the action is advancing at a slow pace because each computer has to be checked and cleared individually.

“Things like that happen not only here, other countries have had the same problem as well,” the Minister of Interior commented, and he was right, as at almost the same time, in another part of the world, the New Zealand Minister of Health was fighting a mutating computer virus.

Alan Hesketh, deputy director general of New Zealand's health information directorate, noted that the  e-mail system had to be shut down in order to contain a computer virus outbreak that had wrecked havoc the Ministry's network the past week. Some other external services might also be affected, Mr Hesketh noted, but he gave assurances that no payments made through the Ministry's Proclaim system had been compromised.

The ministry is having trouble with handling the infection, because the virus has mutated to a new, more resilient variant. “The virus has mutated, Variant B has arrived. We actually have a way of removing variant A off our systems, so we are confident we can figure out how to get this new variant off as well. We are working with the vendors to get this procedure in place,” an internal advisory read, according to Computer World New Zealand.

The virus has not been named, probably for security reasons, but it's said to be causing blue screens on affected computers once every five minutes. Symantec, who's products are being used by the Ministry in order to protect its network, have been contacted in order to help with the containment efforts.

We recently reported that the U.S. Army was confronted with a similar outbreak, which led to a temporary ban of all removable media devices on its networks. Three London hospitals also had to deal with a virus spreading through e-mail on their common computer network.

Source : news.softpedia.com

Technorati Tags: Virus,Security

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Windows 7 - What we still don’t know …

With today’s release of the public beta of Windows 7, there are still plenty of unanswered questions related to Microsoft’s new OS. Let’s examine some of them here.

Windows 7 editions

The beta build that Connect beta testers, TechNet/MSDN subscribers and the general public interested in testing the OS will bet is the Ultimate flavor.

A thousand beta testers have been given access to Windows 7 Home Premium beta 1 (I’m one of those beta testers). So we know that there will be two versions. Crave has confirmed that there will be a Netbook edition of Windows 7 too. There’s also word of a Professional edition (replacing Business) and Enterprise.

That gives us:

* Home Premium
* Professional
* Enterprise
* Ultimate
* Netbook
We can also assume that there will be “N” sub-flavors of each edition that satisfies the EU that won’t have Windows Media Player installed. (and that no one will want)
Is that accurate? Is it complete? No idea … we’ll just have to wait and see!

What will be in each edition?

No word from Microsoft on this one either, other than to assume that things will be roughly equivalent to Vista.

How easy will it be to migrate to 7 from XP?

This question is a biggie, especially when you consider that XP has a 65% market share, compared to Vista’s 21%. Problem is, Windows 7 Beta 1 doesn’t allow testers to upgrade from XP, only from Vista SP1. Why? Not sure. Maybe that feature is unfinished, or maybe it’s not as smoother or impressive as going from Vista SP1. Either way, it’s odd that Microsoft isn’t trying to tempt XP users with Windows 7.

Final system requirements

Speaking broadly, Microsoft is telling people that a PC that can run Vista should be able to run Windows 7. However, we don’t yet have the system requirements for Windows 7.

Price

Beyond guessing that it will have similar tiers to those of the Vista editions, there’s been no word on pricing from Microsoft.

When will Windows 7 ship?

Microsoft is sticking to its “early 2010? timeline. However, unless something catastrophic turns up during the beta test phase, I really can’t see Microsoft dragging out the beta phase for a year.

source: blogs.zdnet.com

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Blog,Known

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Iranian hackers bring down Mossad web site

They did it to protest the ongoing Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

A group of Iranian hackers have managed to bring down the Israeli secret service's web site and the site had to stop its activity for several hours, Iranian media launched information.

Ashiyaneh, a group of Iranian hackers announced they had carried out the cyber attack against Mossad's web site to protest the ongoing Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

The web site was down more than two hours and the Israeli intelligence service  failed to resume the function of the Web site.

Source : anspress.com

Technorati Tags: Hacker,Website,Gaza

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New program allows everyone to design video games

AS VEGAS — Budding designers will soon have an easier way to create their own video games using the Xbox 360.

For more than a year, garage programmers have been able to use Microsoft's XNA Game Studio to create video games. But that still requires some knowledge of actual programming.

A new Microsoft game creation software program called Kodu, scheduled to be released on Xbox Live later this spring (no price set), will give children — and their parents — the ability to pick up a controller and make a game in minutes.

BALLMER INTERVIEWED: Brave techies can try Microsoft's new Windows 7

Kodu gives users control of powerful programming tools using simple image-based creation commands. Players can bring to life a variety of Kodu characters and items. About any as 20 are planned, including the stylized floating Pac-Man-like Kodu main character as well as flying saucers, submarines, motorcycles. They can inhabit worlds that fledgling designers create from scratch or customize from several pre-loaded levels.

Simple programming "wheels" let users direct their creations to do specific actions when certain instances arise. For instance, when a Kodu character sees an object or enemy it can collect or shoot it. Combine dozens of these commands and you have a simple game.

He decided to create a simple game creation program that "you could sit down and start creating right away and play in half an hour have something that is really fun to play with," he says.

More : usatoday.com

Technorati Tags: Games,Program,Design

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Windows 7 Beta 1 on Next Tuesday!

The beta of Windows 7 will be available by next week.

According to this Microsoft blog: "Breaking News! Attend an accessible MSDN Developer Conference and you will accept a Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD."

The next accessible MSDN Developer Conference on Tuesday, January 13 in Chicago.

On his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show tomorrow, Ballmer is widely anticipated to annunciate the departure of the beta edition of the new operating system.

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Released,Microsoft

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Malaysia Consider Cyber Court

Kuala Lumpur - The number of the virtual world of crime continued to increase in Malaysia. This country began to consider to create a special court to deal with internet cyber crimes..

Disclosed by the Minister of Communications Shaziman Abu Mansor, as quoted from AFP, on Tuesday (6/1/2009), there are more than 30 cases related to the Internet are registered in the Malaysian judiciary majestic in the last three years.

"If later we have not able to handle more, because too many cases, we may need a cyber court," said Shaziman.

Further disclosed by Shaziman, at this time the police investigate a case of blog publishing content that is considered to attack Islam and Prophet Muhammad.

So far, Malaysia is known as a strict state control in the media. According to the Reporter Without Borders, Malaysia to position-124 of 169 countries in the world in press freedom index.

Technorati Tags: Malaysia,Court,Cyber

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Pro-Gaza hackers target Israeli websites

A number of frequently-visited Israeli websites have been defaced amid indications of an imminent full-scale ground offensive into Gaza.
Since an Israeli military campaign against the Gaza Strip began on Saturday, various Israeli websites have come under cyber attack.

The widely-circulated Israeli daily's website, Ynetnews.com, has been defaced and is now a picture guide to the progressive takeover of Palestinian land by settlers since 1946.

The website, which is widely acknowledged as pro-Zionism, also draws parallels between the US conduct in Iraq and the Israeli siege on Gaza with a picture showing Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks above an image of American soldiers torturing detainees in Abu Ghraib prison.

Hackers also hacked into the Bank Discount website on Friday, according to Ha'aretz, publishing further messages in condemnation of Israeli crimes.

Bank officials responded by assuring customers that their accounts had not been touched.
The number of websites defaced since the Saturday air operations against the Gaza Strip has reportedly been in the thousands with small businesses and vanity websites having been affected most.

"RitualistaS GrouP Hacked your System!!! The world isn't insurance!!! For a better world," PC World quoted the website of Israel's Galoz Electronics Ltd as reading after it was hacked on Wednesday.

One hacker, called Cold Z3ro, claims to have hacked nearly 5,000 webpages, says Gary Warner, the director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
According to the forensics expert, the majority of hacking groups operate out of Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran.

Israel began air operations against the Gaza Strip -- home to 1.5 million Palestinians -- on Saturday. The attacks have so far left over 430 Palestinians dead and more than 2250 injured.

Israel says through its military campaign, it seeks to topple the Hamas movement, which took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 after winning the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections in January 2006.

In retaliation to the attacks on Gaza, Hamas has been launching rocket strikes against Israel. Unlike the state-of-the-art weapons and ammunition Israel holds, the homemade Qassam rockets rarely cause casualties.

Source : presstv.ir

Technorati Tags: Hacker,Israeli,Cyber,War

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VeriSign drops vulnerable certificate algorithm

The provider of Internet trust assurances said it was transitioning from MD5 to the SHA-1 algorithm for its new RapidSSL brand certificates. It also pledged to reissue any RapidSSL certificates created with MD5, using SHA-1.

Earlier this week, several teams of researchers presented research at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin about MD5 problems.

The researchers included independent ones from California, as well as teams from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne in Switzerland.

The researchers were able to generate two messages with one digital signature, using MD5. Digital certificates are supposed to have unique signatures. Four years ago, Chinese researchers first identified the vulnerability when they created a similar collision attack.

Researchers had estimated it would take more than 30 years of computer processing to generate such a fake certificate.

But the paper presented in Berlin showed there are more efficient ways. Using more than 200 Sony PlayStation 3 video-game machines in a cluster, the latest research effort was able to generate two fake messages with the same digital signature in only three days.

Observers had differing opinions on the impact of the research. The head of computer security at British Telecom, for instance, told news media that most people don't rely on digital certificates anyway.

But many others suggested the impact could be enormous. Although only some sites are using the older digital certificates, all browsers accept them.

When visiting Web sites, a locked padlock in a browser corner is intended to indicate to the user that the site uses digital certificates issued by one of several trusted certificate authorities, such as VeriSign.

(Source: NewsFactor)

Technorati Tags: Verisign,Vulnerable,Algorithm

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Ati Catalyst Windows 7 Preview

ATI Catalyst Windows 7 preview driver package - includes the Windows 7 driver, and the ATI Catalyst Control Center (with limited feature support).

The information in this article applies to the following configuration(s):

• Radeon™ HD 4000 Series 
• Radeon™ HD 3000 Series  
• Radeon™ HD 2000 Series
• Mobility Radeon™ HD 4000 Series
• Mobility Radeon™ HD 3000 Series
• Mobility Radeon™ HD 2000 Series
• AMD 780G
• AMD 780V
• AMD 790GX
• Windows 7

To download the Catalyst Windows 7 Preview Driver , please click on the links below:

Catalyst 32-bit Windows 7 Preview Driver
Catalyst 64-bit Windows 7 Preview Driver

Technorati Tags: Ati,Catalyst,Windows 7,Driver

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Download Free Foobar2000 v0.9.6.1

Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Main features

• Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND... and more with additional components.
• Gapless playback.
• Full unicode support.
• Easily customizable user interface layout.
• Advanced tagging capabilities.
• Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
• Full ReplayGain support.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

Download : Foobar2000

Technorati Tags: Foobar2000,Download,Audio,Player

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