Posts by happygeek

Everyone knows that Linus Torvalds 'is a Linux' but did you know he is also a born-again gnome?

An Australian interview with the often outspoken creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, has revealed that he is a gnome once more. Well, OK, that he is a GNOME user once again having made the switch back from KDE.

It doesn't, to be fair, seem like that long when Torvalds was complaining that GNOME was pants by being too simple to do what he needed. Indeed, a couple of years back he changed from GNOME to KDE. Now things are different, and it would appear that the problem is KDE 4. When this was released it came with rather a lot of changes, including many at an architectural level. Unsurprisingly it has got more than a little negative press for being a somewhat half-baked upgrade. Torvalds himself calls KDE 4 "a disaster" and says it uses a painful "break everything model."

Complaining that his right button no longer does what he wants his right button to do, Torvalds argues that the 4.0 release was done badly. "The desktop was not as functional" he insists in his Network World interview, adding that "it was just a bad experience for me."

Remember when China officially declared war on Internet pornography and set a target of just six months to purge the Web of sexually explicit images, stories and AV clips? No, well read this to refresh your memory. While you are at it, make a note of the date: that story was posted back in April 2007. A little more than six months ago, and yet porn is as much of a reality in China today as it was back then.

In 2007 the Vice Minister of the Ministry of Public Security, Zhang Xinfeng, was quoted as stating that the boom of pornographic content on the Internet had "contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds" and arguing that the inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control were "to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace."

Today we have Liu Zhengrong, the Deputy Director of the Chinese Cabinet Internet Affairs Bureau, saying that some 41 people have been arrested so far this month and 1250 pornographic websites closed down. Some 3.2 million pieces of 'porn' have also been deleted during the sweep. But as anyone who knows anything about the online sex industry will tell you, 3 million pieces of porn and a tad over 1000 websites are the equivalent of spitting in the ocean.

Liu says that the IAB has made some "apparent achievements" but admits it still has "a lot of work to do."

So much for regulating …

Apparently it would appear that the Tomb raider franchise is not as healthy as it used to be. The days of movie spin-offs with Angelina Jolie would look like being long gone (was it really 2001 that the movie came out?) Indeed, publisher Eidos even had to renegotiate debt covenants according to some reports, so badly did the latest episode of the video game fare when released.

However, talking in one still very popular Tomb Raider support forum, a member rumoured to be none other than Eric Lindstrom (creative director on Tomb Raider: Underworld) has hinted that the ESRB teen rating which prevents sexual content in the game might be scrapped in future versions. "...yes the Teen rating meant we couldn't do things we wanted to" he says, adding "It won't always necessarily be so, though, the future can always be different."

This has led to some speculation that the next Tomb Raider release could feature a naked Lara Croft.

To be honest, given that teens seem to love posting naked pictures of themselves online anyway I am not sure if this would be such a revelation. Now if it were a naked Angelina Jolie in a new movie things might be different, but a cartoon character in a video game? Plus, remember, that parents have made it quite clear how sex in games is a bigger turn off than virtual violence. So such a move could even damage, …

There has been much speculation regarding job losses at Microsoft of late, and now the truth is out. Thankfully the scale of the damage is not as great as at first feared, and nowhere near the 15,000 job losses talked about recently.

It would seem that 1400 jobs are to be axed with immediate effect, impacting most every part of the Microsoft operation from R&D to marketing, finance and sales. A further 3600 jobs will go during the coming 18 months, making a total of 5000 staff feeling the chop.

As a result, Microsoft hopes to save in the region of $1.5 billion in annual operating expenses, and boy does it need to find that money. The latest quarterly results are not good, with a fall in net profit of 11 percent.

So in the same week that we learn how Microsoft wants to know what you do when you poo we now discover it is up to it's neck in it, so to speak.

Here's what Monkey Dancing CEO Steve Ballmer had to say in an email to Microsoft staff on the matter entitled: Realigning Resources and Reducing Costs.

"In response to the realities of a deteriorating economy, we're taking important steps to realign Microsoft's business. I want to tell you about what we're doing and why. Today we announced second quarter revenue of $16.6 billion. This number is an increase of just 2 per cent …

Hey, it is not really such a silly question is it? After all, we now have the new President of the United States of America giving regular video addresses on YouTube which comes as no real surprise given his apparent belief in Google Government.

In the UK there have been similar attempts to get government politics into the viral video age, such as the laughable Lords of YouTube incident. However, up until now, organised religion has usually only popped up in order to condemn the evil that is Internet video rather than praise it or, God forbid, actually embrace it.

That looks like all changing with the news, released by Google itself today, that with immediate effect the Vatican will be broadcasting on YouTube. The Vatican channel will include news clips to update the faithful and curious alike with regards to the Pope's daily activities. To be made available in English, Spanish, German and Italian the first video was broadcast today in the Press Room of the Holy See in Rome.

Although this contained clips of Pope Benedict XVI, such as his Christmas Message and Blessing, the Pope was not around to hype up the YouTube vids in person. So I guess that, unlike Obama, the answer will have to remain that no the Pope is not a YouTube user.

Father Federico Lombardi, Director of the Press Room, Television Center and Vatican Radio, contends that the launch of the Vatican Channel on …

How many passwords do you have to remember? The common answer is either too many and I sometimes forget them, or alternatively just the one as I use it for everything. Both options are bad in terms of security. Which is where password management systems come in, and these can take many different formats. Some people use the pen and paper format, writing down all logins and passwords in a book and hiding it somewhere. Bad, bad security. Others do the same, but using dedicated software, which is much better security-wise as the list can be encrypted. Atek has come up with a physical alternative in the Logio Secure Password Organizer.

Much the same size as a credit card, and only one eighth of an inch thick, the Logio can store up to 200 logins and has the processing power to generate random passwords if you want. The resulting database is protected using AES encryption, so you only have to remember one master password to unlock them all via a three line LCD display. This means that you can afford to make that master password a truly secure one because it is the only password you need to actually be able to recall. Don't worry, your passwords are kept in nonvolatile memory when the battery runs out and needs changing as well.

Atek itself admits that the input buttons on the Logio are relatively small and those with arthritis might have problems, however my stubby man …

Security experts McAfee confirm what we already know: when the economy starts to hurt, the purveyors of malware jump in to increase the pain. With the revelation of it's 2009 threat predictions, McAfee looks ahead to a dismal year of continuing cyberthreats.

Like I say, with no hint of surprise at all, the top trend to emerge is the exploitation of economic suffering, adding to the financial woes we face. People are being hit with fake financial transactions services, fake investment firms, and fake legal services. “Computer users face a dangerous one-two punch today” says Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs, adding “The current economic crisis is delivering a blow to our financial well-being, while malware authors are taking advantage of our distraction to deliver a roundhouse strike.”

So what else does McAfee see while rubbing it's crystal security balls?

Well, there is the concept of criminals transitioning to the Internet cloud as the main delivery vehicle, slowly displacing the more traditional vectors of malware distribution. And then there are those threats that take evasive action against security measures such as single-use binary files. Think of these as being the criminal equivalent of a single-use credit card number for online usage. These binaries create a swathe of threats, making it harder for victims to describe their assailants, and harder for defenders to catch them. McAfee predicts malware in languages other than English will grow, because by diversifying into a global …

With Inauguration Day finally upon us, mobile phone operators across the US are preparing for what could be a bigger test of capacity than the traditional biggest strain on the mobile network, New Year's Eve. Hopefully the months of hard work, involving adding capacity and prepping networks to cope with the upsurge of voice, text and MMS traffic, will pay off and you will not find your self without coverage later on. Obviously, the Washington DC area is expected to take the brunt of the surge, so if you happen to be there here is some industry advice:

Send a text, it stands a better chance of getting through than voice when networks are congested. Don't send photos using MMS as this soaks up bandwidth, save them for later when you are out of the area and when things have calmed down. Same goes for video, but with knobs on!

Internet Service Providers do not expect any problems despite the equally huge upswing that will start hitting news sites in just a few short hours. Some are admitting there could be a little jittery video during the crucial swearing in moments, but no national or regional outages are expected. This despite the fact that the amount of video traffic is likely to break all records for a single day. Not surprising, given that you have collaborations between the likes of CNN and Facebook which sees multiple video cameras in Washington covering all kinds of events and enables Facebook …

What do you do when you poo? It is the kind of question you might expect your ten year old son to ask his ten year old mates in the school playground. However, it seems that Microsoft has been asking pretty much the same thing in order to generate some much needed publicity for Windows Mobile.

Yep, people from Synovate on behalf of Microsoft Mobile Communications Business have been conducting a survey of mobile phone usage in the toilet amongst Australians.

Well, actually, they claim it is intended to determine just how integral the mobile phone is to the people of Australia, but that amounts to much the same thing. We have seen this kind of thing before, of course. I recall the tale of mobile phones and GPS being combined to provide a SatLav service in London last year as well, especially for those people caught short when in need of a pee.

And who could forget the survey into mobile phone use during sex for example? That survey, from the summer of 2008, revealed that three quarters of a million folk in the UK admitted to chatting on their mobiles during the act of lovemaking. Funnily enough, it too could not resist the playground lure of the toilet and also revealed that 35 percent of Brits use their mobile phone while on the loo.

This new survey, however, would seem to suggest that the Australians are even more …

If you are a Windows user and have not installed the MS08-067 patch from last October, then perhaps you had better pull your finger out. Of course, it could well be too late, and you could well be one of the nine million or so users who have already fallen victim to one of the most widespread of worms to hit Windows for a long time. If you are a Linux or Mac user, of course, you can sit back and relax.

Known by various names such as Conficker, Downadup and Kido, the worm is exploiting the double-edged sword that is user slowness in applying Microsoft security patches and equal apathy in running up-to-date antivirus software.

The worm will adopt the guise of the services.exe executable, copy itself to your Windows folder as a .dll file and proceeds to modify the Registry in order to grant itself the necessary permissions to run as a service. At this point, things start turning really nasty. The malicious code will install an HTTP server on your network and even reset your Windows OS System Restore point just in case it is discovered so it can copy itself right back again.

Naturally it then goes on to start downloading various other bits of malware, but what makes Conficker a little unusual is that it is capable of generating hundreds of new and varied domain names each day. One of them will be the real host for the malware downloads, …

I think we will have to agree to disagree about this one, as I certainly do not consider the tone to be gossipy. Should a news story ignore the fact that people are speculating about his health, especially as that fact is directly related to the point made just before it regarding how the two announcements have turned into something of a PR disaster for Apple?

It is called 'news' and, like it or not, the health of the CEO of a major corporation is newsworthy - especially when prolonged denial of any problem allows speculation to grow and impact the stock price, to be followed by an 'all is OK and I am doing my job' statement which changes to an 'actually, I had better take six months off thinking about it' one a week later.

Nobody forces anyone to read a story called 'how sick is Steve Jobs' and the title does give the idea of what the posting might be talking about after all.

He has gone from dead to having cancer to suffering from hormone problems in the space of a few short weeks, now the Apple CEO is taking six months off work to recover. So just how sick is Steve Jobs?

Last year the mention of the word cancer in the same breath as 'Steve Jobs' was enough to send Apple shares into freefall. Stories circulated that he was planning to quit Apple and there were even reports that he had died. No wonder, as Apple grabs record market share for the Mac OS the rapidly thinning Apple CEO has been, rather belatedly, trying to fire-fight the ill health rumour machine.

Just last week Jobs published a long and open letter in which he revealed the problem to be his hormones. Jobs stated quite clearly that "...my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis." He also quite clearly stated the treatment plan: "The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery."

The Apple community breathed a sigh of relief, as did …

It looks ever more likely that 2009 could indeed be the year of the scam.

Symantec owned MessageLabs is warning that cases of advance fee 419 fraud, along with other financial scams, have spiked as we enter 2009. From December 22nd 2008, through into January 2009, the number of scams detected by MessageLabs more than doubled. The numbers show that this kind of fraud has increased from 4.2 percent to 10.2 percent during the period. That compares to just 3.1 percent during the same time last year.

But that is just the start of it, according to MessageLabs which predicts that 419 scams will start switching tactic from the traditional elaborate prose, which can often be highly amusing courtesy of a poor grasp of the English language. Instead, we are told to expect the scammers to switch to a much simpler message which tries to force the user into replying in order to learn about the so-called business opportunity.

"The new year means new opportunities for spammers," said Paul Wood, Senior Analyst, MessageLabs. "As the economic climate continues to be frosty and the inability to secure credit through official channels remains spammers are tempted by the possibility that consumers facing uncertain futures may be more tempted by some of these hard-to-resist offers."

If you work in IT support you pretty much learn to expect the unexpected, but nobody could have seen some of these little gems, just revealed by the Panda Security tech support team, coming.

For example, how about the customer who wondered if Panda antivirus software could be blowing the fuses in their house? Here is the actual support query received:

“Hello: For some time now, my fuses have been blown, and until the power is restored, I am left without electricity (light, fridge and other electrical appliances). I have carried out several checks and have reached the conclusion that it could be caused by my “Panda Titanium” antivirus which I am very satisfied with. I think the antivirus blows the fuses when trying to update while the computer is turned off. Could this be the cause? Please send me a reply so I can solve this problem”.

I also rather liked the reports of a farting virus: “For some time now I have been unable to make my ActiveScan Pro work. I enter the user name and password, but the only answer I get is a ‘fart’ sound (pardon the expression)”.

I wonder if this is related to the problem another customer was having: “Three days ago, when I sent a fax from my PC I heard a sound which I once read corresponded to that of a virus (the sound is similar to taking a foot out of jelly). I have scanned …

My youngest daughter got a Nintendo DS for xmas, complete with a bunch of cutesy games which seem to involve patting animals of various kinds. It is, of course, pink. Which has kind of summed up the DS, a handheld games console for the family which is all cuddly and inoffensive. All that is about to change as the DS goes X-rated.

Yes, it is true, while mum has her brain training games, and the kids can save a Lego universe or an endangered animal, dad has pretty much been left behind. Until now. With the news that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS has been granted an adults only 18 certificate by the BBFC for the UK release in March, the DS had finally grown up.

In awarding the 18 certificate, which used to be known as an X-rating here in the UK, the BBFC warns consumers that the game "contains very strong language and drug references" and was awarded the certification with no cuts being made at all.

GTA, of course, has a habit of making the news. Be it for breaking entertainment sales records or involving virtual paedophile stings in the game there is always something to keep we the media happy. Or should that be unhappy? After all, most of the headlines will be of the 'chugging beer and watching porno less harmful for kids than playing GTA' ilk.

Now that we have …

The E-Victims Organisation, a non-for-profit UK community interest company set up to benefit Internet users by assisting the victims of e-crime after the event, has released a top 10 Internet Scams of 2009 predictions list. Indeed, E-Victims.Org goes as far as to suggest that with new scams appearing almost daily, 2009 could reach new lows with numbers of scams reaching new highs. "We’ve seen honest traders go rogue due to financial pressures and we’ve seen desperate consumers taking more risks." says managing director Jennifer Perry, continuing "Rising unemployment and a global recession means we expect to see a huge increase in e- victims this year.”

This is, to be honest, not that great a feat of prediction. After all, we have already seen phishing scams rise dramatically towards the end of 2008. What's more, we know that spam penetration levels finished the year in excess of 80 percent by volume of all mail.

But anyway, here is that top 10 scams prediction list for the coming year in full, with E-Victims Organisation comments in brackets:

1 - Identity theft and phishing.

(Don’t share unnecessary personal data with websites. If they insist on your date of birth, post code - don’t use your real ones.)

2 - Viruses and spyware.

(It is impossible to know if you are visiting an infected website" warns E-Victims.)

3 - Advance fee scams

(Nigerian and lottery scams have also been around …

Games are dangerous, corrupting, evil things. After all we have been told that playing GTA IV is more harmful to kids than watching porn and drinking beer, and how the Nintendo Wii can cause serious injury to players and observers alike.

Now, it appears, the truth is emerging. A brilliantly uplifting report explains how one-legged patients at Seacroft Hospital in England have been using the Wii for rehabilitation.

Physiotherapists at the hospital have been using Wii Fit and the balance board to help teach new amputees how to use their prosthetic legs. Apparently the balance board gets past the problem that many have with being able to put weight through the false leg by enabling them to see exactly where the weight is going. Wii Skiing has also been used to improve balance and control for these patients.

Meanwhile, that classic game of Tetris has found a place in the first aid box as well. Scientists are claiming that a game of Tetris can help overcome the symptoms associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, such as worrying flashbacks for example.

Researchers from Oxford University have described the game as being a cognitive vaccine that prevents painful flashback memories by providing a visiospatial cognitive stimulation for the patient if used in the immediate aftermath of the traumatic event. It would seem that there is a six hour window in which to act, which does rather restrict the possibility of …

Cast your minds back a couple of years to 2007 and as far as hacking was concerned there was only really one big story, and I do mean big. The biggest reported case of cyber-criminals using hacking skill to steal something in the region of 40 million credit card details. Although most widely reported as the TJ Maxx hack thanks to TJX (which operates as TJ Maxx or TK Maxx depending upon where in the world you shop) other stores such as Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority and OfficeMax were also impacted by the hacking gang.

Now, according to Graham Cluley over at Sophos, one man found to be guilty of the crime, a 25 year old Ukrainian by the name of Maksym Yastremskiy, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Yastremskiy, who went by the name of Maksik, is thought to have sold hundreds of thousands of stolen credit card numbers following the theft which in turn caused tens of millions of dollars worth of losses for retailers and banks. Maksik will serve his time in a Turkish prison, following his arrest along with other gang members there last year.

"Yastremskiy will certainly have plenty of time to ponder whether his hacking activities were worthwhile," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "The length of this jail time should also make others engaged in cybercrime think again - the rewards may be large, but you risk ruining the rest of …

According to the latest figures to be released, it would seem that as far as gamers in the UK are concerned Nintendo is the bees knees grabbing nearly half the market.

The ELSPA numbers show that the Wii managed to increase game software sales by 112 percent over the previous year to hit a total of 20.1 million sold. Only just behind was the DS with some 19.1 million games. Add it all up and you get, if my math is correct, 39.2 million Nintendo games sold in the UK during 2008. Not bad, considering the total number of games sold across all platforms was 82.8 million. Hold on while I grab the calculator again, blimey o'reilly that works out to an incredible 47 percent of the total number of games sold in the UK.

Some might say that the Sony PlayStation 3 did even better, if you compare numbers sold in 2007 and 2008. The Sony PS3 saw a jump of 145 percent, year on year, to 10.4 million games sold. Meanwhile the Xbox 360 was also up, although not as spectacularly, by 51 percent to 14.9 million games sold.

However, Nintendo really are the clear winners, even if you look at the financial league table. The Wii generated a huge UKP £481million in games sales, the DS an equally impressive UKP £366 million. The Xbox 360 didn't do too badly either, with software sales in the UK …

Er, as it says in the piece: "If you want to give it a try yourself then you will need to be equipped with a PC containing a 1 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, 128MB of DX9 supporting graphics and at least 16GB drive space."

Barmy Steve Ballmer, sometime monkey dancer and full time Microsoft top dog now that Bill Gates has gone, has surprised us all by informing the world that January 13th will not be Windows 7 day as predicted. The good news is that Windows 7 day will be on the 9th January instead.

Yes, Ballmer has confirmed that an almost feature complete Beta version of Windows 7 will be made available for public download for the first time tomorrow. Talking during his keynote address at the opening of CES in Las Vegas, Ballmer revealed that software developers can get their hands on the Windows 7 Beta immediately, while the general public would only have to wait an additional couple of days.

You had better hurry if you want a copy though, as Microsoft will almost certainly restrict the total number of downloads available in this fashion.

Which is not great news, considering that tens of thousands of people have been downloading Build 7000, a pirated version of Windows 7 that many security experts have warned could be a ticking time bomb, during the last week or so. If the official Beta gets closed down too quickly, people will surely turn back to the dodgy Torrent version instead.

Ballmer, however, promises that Windows 7 will help to re-define how we think about Windows. Although to be fair, I seem to recall Microsoft saying pretty much the same about Vista and I am …

Asus might have lost the netbook war to Acer, but it is fighting back as far as the keyboard PC wars are concerned. With the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) still a day away in Vegas, the geeky and gadgetry announcements are coming thick and fast. We've already got a taster of the new AMD Yukon platform and now we have the weirdest of wonderful concepts from Asus. The Eee Keyboard PC.

OK, hands up, I know that the whole idea of a PC stuffed inside a keyboard casing is not exactly new. Heck I can recall such things from back in the eighties, unless my brain has finally become nothing more than a hunk of silly putty. The point being, all of those keyboard PCs were, well, pants.

The Asus Eee PC Keyboard looks like it could be different. Not least because the time is right for such a beast to actually have a place in the living room rather than be something confined to the nerd back bedroom.

First looks suggest a rather Apple inspired design, with that silver metal casing and the inset dark full QWERTY keys. Then there is the integrated 5 inch touchscreen display that hints at the fully functional PC contained within this thing of beauty. Word is that this, while being a prototype, is actually pretty close to the finished product. Asus is keeping quiet regarding potential costs or release dates, but it …

According to numerous reports that is exactly what is being suggested. If the axe does fall, then it will be the first time that the company has had to make any really major cuts in the workforce during it's 32 year history.

Of course, there has been no official confirmation or indeed denial from Microsoft, but some analysts expect it to make some sort of comment at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week to try and put a stop to the ongoing rumour and speculation.

Personally, I doubt that we will hear anything but technology news from Microsoft at CES. Not least more about Windows 7 and possibly some upbeat news concerning the troubled Zune. There might even be an official announcement about the new Jasper-enabled Xbox 360 that has already started quietly appearing in shops.

I expect that any news of layoffs will have to wait until the end of the month after the company releases the second quarter results on January 22nd. Again, others insist that the announcement will come the week before those results are made public.

Whatever, the rumours persist, with some technology websites claiming insider knowledge and stating that Microsoft staff have been informed to expect major layoffs on a worldwide basis. MSN is said to be the most likely to be hit hardest, along with staff employed in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa.)

Most likely …

Sophos, the security outfit, has issued a warning for users of Twitter to be on the lookout for an evolving phishing attack which could steal personal data if they are not very careful. Already thousands of Twitterers are thought to have received messages from their friends which invite them to visit a specific website for a number of various reasons. Amongst them, it seems, is Stephen Fry.

According to reports the bait used in the messages can be anything from the lure of winning an Apple iPhone through to promises of funny pictures or blog articles supposedly about the recipient of the message.

Usually, I would suggest, anyone stupid enough to follow a link to something that says "Hey, i found a website with your pic on it... LOL check it out here" deserves everything they get. But these messages come from your friends accounts, giving them a certain amount of authority and painting them with a certain amount of trust. Indeed, if a close friend sends you a message saying "hey. i won an iphone! come see how here" then you might be tempted to do just that.

Of course, follow the link and you arrive at a bogus Twitter page designed to steal your login name and password. Doh!

According to various reports one person who was fooled was none other than UK celebrity and host of the popular QI television programme, Stephen Fry. Sophos, for example, says that he …

According to the latest figures just published by Net Applications, a specialist Internet measurement company, Apple has seen Mac OS X grab a record gain taking it dangerously close to a 10 percent market share for the first time since the company started tracking OS usage.

In stark contrast, however, Microsoft saw a drop in the market share reported for the second month running, close to a full percentage point in fact. Indeed, the Net Applications numbers have it at an all time low now. Linux, meanwhile, continues to go nowhere fast. It seems to have somewhat stagnated in a distant third place with less than a percentage point to keep it company.

The figures would suggest that of those people browsing the web in December, and importantly visiting those sites which are monitored by Net Applications, some 88.7 percent did so using a Windows powered machine. Still a pretty impressive domination of the market, of course, but industry watchers are quick to point out that it is down by 0.94 percent on November and represents the biggest slide in four years. For the year in full, Microsoft dropped a total of 3.1 percentage points.

Apple, on the other hand, pushes ever upwards. In November it showed a record rise, and in December it did likewise with 0.76 percent growth to take it to an impressive 9.6 percent market share. Over the course of the year, the Mac OS X market share was up 2.3 …

Ever wondered what the most popular passwords being used are? Ever wondered what the crappiest, most insecure passwords being used are? Hey, you are in luck as it seems the two lists are exactly the same. The What's My Pass 'Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time' list makes for interesting, if sometimes rather offensive (you have been warned), reading.

So I have stripped out the expletives and compiled the top 20 most popular and crappy passwords to give you something to ponder upon as we approach the end of the year. Just please don't tell me that you use any of these!

1. 123456
2. password
3. 12345678
4. 1234
5. 12345
6. dragon
7. qwerty
8. 696969
9. mustang
10. letmein
11. baseball
12. master
13. michael
14. football
15. shadow
16. monkey
17. abc123
18. pass
19. 6969
20. jordan

The only real surprise is that 'sex' does not make the top 500 list at all. The closest variant being sexy at number 44 and then sexsex at 64.

So go on then, do share, what is the crappiest password you have ever stumbled upon? Remember, keep it clean!

Although most people do not pass their Microsoft Certified Professional exams until their twenties, maybe late teens if they are really good, some make the geek grade a little earlier. Indeed, one girl from Pakistan managed to do just that at the tender age of ten. However, now M. Lavinashree has surprised everyone by passing her Microsoft Certified Professional exam at the age of, well, nine.

I say she surprised everyone, but that does probably not include her parents as the girl had apparently managed to recite the 1300 couplets from a 2000 year old Tamil epic at the age of just three if we are to believe the reports circulating online.

Those same reports suggest that the young girl is currently busy studying for the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer exams.

My youngest daughter is only eight, and I am happy to say would have no idea about such things. She is happy spending her time making me fairies out of pipe-cleaners and wool, painting pictures of her favourite animals and passing her ice skating exams. And thank goodness for that, after all there is nothing to be achieved in becoming a MCP at 9, is there?

MessageLabs Intelligence data reveals that, in an announcement that will probably come as no shock to anyone who actually uses the Internet, the average spam level for the year managed to hit 81.2 percent. Perhaps a little more surprisingly, especially given the number of security vendor warnings throughout 2008, malware levels only managed to average out at 0.7 percent or just 1 in 143.8 messages.

MessageLabs, recently acquired by Symantec, has also released a Top Cybercrimes of 2008 list which serves to showcase the most notable of these malware attacks.

The Storm worm was certainly among the most aggressively spreading of malware attacks we saw during 2008, leading to the formation of one of the biggest botnets ever seen. How big? How does something in the region of 2 million compromised computers grab you?

Meanwhile, search engine spam also took hold during the year, with spammers abusing those search engine redirects which enabled them to include a link from a genuine query within an email message. Of course, the link then resolves to the spammers forged web site to allow them to bypass many traditional anti-spam detection mechanisms. After all, 'legitimate' search engine sites will not usually be flagged as malicious.

Who can forget all the stories about CAPTCHA getting broken? It all started back in February with webmail CAPTCHA systems getting cracked, although the hackers did not stop there and as MessageLabs says "as 2008 …

If you ever wondered just what it takes to look for aliens, then prepare to get informed. Sure, you might imagine it doesn't take much more than hooking up a load of computers to form a gigantic zombie network which, for a change, does not use spare CPU cycles to send spam. Indeed, the SETI@home project has been doing this for years by listening to space and scanning what it hears for signs of alien life.

This past year, the SETI@home team has been working hard on the Astropulse application which searches the collected data for high power pulses. Many belive that this methodology could well be a much more efficient technique for your average extraterrestrial to transmit signals. The downside of Astropulse, however, is that it consumes significantly more CPU cycles in order to do what it does. Which means that SETI is looking for more volunteers to donate their spare computer resources to the networked search. Volunteer efforts are better used by applying the new and improved Near Time Persistency Checker (NTPCKR) to sift through potential signals returned and prioritise those which are most likely to be of an extraterrestrial origin.

So what is the true cost of searching for alien life then? Well, according to SETI@home it is USD $548,200 more than they have available. That is the amount the project says it needs in order to continue the effort during 2009. "With more funds we hope to hire an additional person to …

Although you might think that your personal information, including your financial data, is hugely valuable to the cyber-criminal fraternity the truth would appear to be somewhat different. Security vendor Trend Micro has published research which shows that at this time of the year, as we fast approach the climax to the holiday season, cyber attacks are on the up. In fact, says Trend Micro, cyber attacks rose by about 500 percent this time last year and this year is not looking much different.

Of course, this activity is driven by greed and cyber criminals are only in the game because they can make a serious profit selling stolen data on the web underground, the Internet black market if you like.

So what does the top 10 black market malware sales list look like?

At number 10 we have a basic malware package that can enable criminals to get hold of your information in the first place. Priced at around UKP 700.

In at number 9 comes an information stealing Trojan, guaranteed to be undetectable, and costing just UKP 60.

Thought that was cheap given the potential return, then look at our number 8 spot which is your stolen banking data for a starting price of around UKP 35.

Number 7 is a stolen credit card, or at least all the information you need to be able to purchase stuff from online sources, and at a cost of around UKP 25 (although prices …

Generally speaking, it takes quite a few years of studying and hard graft before someone gets to wear the wig and robes of a barrister in the British legal system. Unless, that is, you buy them on eBay. Surprisingly, that's precisely what one man did and ended up defending a number of clients at court before getting found out and exposed.

Ian Clegg, 32, charged a very reasonable £75 an hour for his services. Well, it would have been reasonable had he been qualified. In fact, he dropped out of a law degree course after a single year at university.

That did not stop him from making appearances at a number of court hearings where his style was said to be very aggressive. He managed to convince three people to take him on to defend them in civil cases, as well as two people in criminal court on motoring offences. It wasn't until officials at the magistrates' court in Guisborough, North Yorkshire became a little suspicious that a barrister was unaware of proper court procedure that investigations were made and the truth revealed.

Having been arrested, Clegg eventually pleaded guilty to charges of impersonating a barrister and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Still, it makes a change for a story about the law and eBay not to involve threats of negative feedback libel or selling fake designer products.

It really should come as no surprise that Apple apparently does not consider the iPhone to be a phone at all, but rather what John Geleynse, Apple Director of Technology Evangelism calls "a console experience." That's what Geleynse told an iPhone Tech Talk developer event in San Jose, putting the iPhone firmly on a competitive footing with the likes of the Nintendo DS and possibly the Sony PSP.

I am not at all surprised by this, and have in fact been arguing that the iPhone is really just a games console that makes calls for some time now. I mean, look at the facts. In the five months since July 11th, when the iPhone App Store opened up shop, some 300 million applications have been downloaded to the device. It took iTunes a year just to hit 50 million downloads, if you need a yardstick by which to measure the popularity of the iPhone against older iPods.

But it is when you look at the nature of the most downloaded iPhone applications from the 10,000 or so that are currently available that the reality of the games console claim starts to hit home. Games really do rule the roost, especially when it comes to commercial downloads, there is just no escaping the fact.

The boss of US iPhone network provider AT&T, Ralph de la Vega, has even suggested that the iPhone of the future will wake you …

You cannot have missed the story this week about how a picture of a naked girl on an album cover led to Wikipedia being blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK. That blacklisting, which in turn prevented people from being able to edit Wikipedia posts depending upon their ISP, was lifted after a global media protest about treating the virtual image differently to the real one. Being in possession of the original Scorpions album would be unlikely to lead to a prosecution, so how come the exact same image was being treated as 'potentially illegal' when found on Wikipedia?

Anyway, I digress. The point being that naked images of teenagers and young adults are not all posted online by perverts and paedophiles, a large number are put there by the teenagers themselves.

A new survey, undertaken by a company called TRU which specialises in research on teens and twenty-somethings, and published by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com reveals that 36 percent of teen girls have posted online, or electronically sent, nude or semi-nude images of themselves.

Pretty much the same number of teenage boys (31 percent) have done the same. One suspects that the availability of the mobile phone camera has helped boost the bravado of the naked teens and lead to more naked images being posted online.

Although more often than not these images were meant to …

Asus pretty much invented the whole netbook concept as we understand it today with the Eee PC, and for the longest time it sat pretty at the top of the netbook sales charts. The more astute reader might have noticed the past tense here, because Asus no longer rules the netbook roost it would seem.

Indeed, according to the latest 'Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report' from DisplaySearch which covers the growth of the portable computing market, things are changing pretty rapidly all round.

While other parts of the PC industry prepare for lean times in the face of the economic downturn, netbook sales continue to soar. The report shows growth of more than 160 percent during quarter three of 2008. What's more, it shows that Asus has been knocked off the netbook sales perch by Acer which managed to capture an impressive 35 percent of the market.

Back in 2007, the whole mini-PC come netbook market was around 1 million units. By the end of this year that should have grown to at least 14 million units, propelled by low prices and enthusiastic user-experience feedback.

“With the lone exception of Apple, all of the top 10 PC brands have entered the mini-note PC market, initially as a response to the competitive threat posed by Asus, but also to satisfy demand from customers for low-priced, thin and very light (less than 3 pounds) products that provide at least a modicum of typical office …

It had to happen, and it has. Ever since the Internet Watch Foundation, a British charitable organisation that acts as the official watchdog to track and report illegal content online, in particular child pornography, introduced a blacklist we all knew it would get controversial one day. That day has come.

That blacklist is used by a number of leading Internet Service Providers in the UK, companies such as Virgin Media, Demon, O2, EasyNet and PlusNet to name but a few. So when someone reported that Wikipedia was displaying a 'potentially illegal' image of young naked girl with only a crack in the camera lens covering her below stairs area, the IWF sprung into action. It investigated and assessed the image "according to the UK Sentencing Guidelines Council" a spokesperson says. The result being that the content was "considered to be a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18, but hosted outside the UK." because the IWF does not issue takedown notices to companies outside the UK, it instead notified a "law enforcement partner agency" and then added the specific Wikipedia URL to the blacklist in order that ISPs could "protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child."

Which all seems OK, after all nobody wants child porn popping up on their computer when they are browsing something educational such as Wikipedia. Trouble is, the whole notion that this is child porn is a dodgy …

The iPhone App Store has been open for just five months, since July 11th to be precise. Yet in this time, so an Apple advert running in the New York Times informs us, no less than 300 million applications have been downloaded. Now those are two hugely important numbers, 300 million downloads in five months, not least because the iTunes Store did not come anywhere close to matching them.

More to the point, it took iTunes nearly a year before it even passed then 50 million mark. Sure, it eventually went passed the 300 million songs downloaded but it took years, not months.

However, there is one important difference here and Apple is not being quick to come forward with any clarification on the matter: many of the 10,000 iPhone applications available at the App Store cost nothing. One has to suspect that many, and almost certainly a fairly hefty majority, of those 300 million downloads did not involve money changing hands. Unlike iTunes which not only sells the songs being downloaded, but does not exactly sell them cheap either.

Titles such as Pandora Radio, Facebook and Tap Tap Revenge top the iPhone application popularity charts by numbers of downloads, and games dominate the paid for download charts. So there is no doubting the popularity of the iPhone as a social communications tool (well duh!) and a portable games console, but I for one would be really interested to see how it compares to the …

An alpha version of Opera 10, the latest in a long line of web browser clients from the Norwegian-based developers, has been made available to download. Anyone remember Opera? It used to be the next big thing, until the next big thing came along in the shape of Firefox that is. Opera did turn its attention, briefly, to throwing rocks at Microsoft but those attempts to claim unfair treatment seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

Deaf ears could also describe the powers that be at Apple, who have decided that the one area where Opera does do well, in providing a mini-browser for mobile devices, cannot apply to the iPhone. Apple has prevented Opera from distributing the mini-browser through the iPhone App Store, effectively putting the kibosh on it for that device. Not that this has stopped Opera from grabbing some attention on other smartphones, such as the recent announcement of an Opera browser for the Google Android.

But it is in the big browser league that Opera has the biggest struggle, with Internet Explorer still ruling the roost and Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari pretty much mopping up the spills, with a very little help from new entrant Google Chrome.

In an attempt to woo back some users, Opera has announced a brand new browser rendering engine called Opera Presto 2.2 which will be the foundation of all future Opera 10 products. Promising a 30 …

We already know quite a lot about Windows 7: it has a distinct Office 2007 feel to the UI, it is likely to feature some kind of instant on fast booting process, and the OS itself should scale to some 256 processors. The launch of an official 'Engineering Windows 7' blog has helped with this knowledge, as indeed has the fact that early pre-betas were given away freely at the recent Microsoft Professional Developer Conference and Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.

What we have not known, and what has kept us all guessing, is when the first actual beta copies would become available. There have been plenty of informed rumours around that point to December, but Microsoft has always maintained that January 2009 was the month that matters. Now it seems that, surprise surprise, Microsoft was right.

We are led to believe that a Windows 7 beta will go live on January 13th in fact.

How so and who is doing the leading towards this date? None other than a Microsoft employee called Keith Combs who, in his blog, drops mention that if you go to the January 13th Microsoft Developer Conference you will get a copy of the Windows 7 beta on DVD. The official Microsoft Developer Conference site is also now confirming the Windows 7 beta DVD giveaway for the 13th January, so it looks like a done deal.

Of course, …

Microsoft has kept it fairly quiet, no press releases or launch trumpeting, but it now looks like the Xbox 360 has been upgraded with the new Jasper motherboard. The new Xbox 360 has been spotted in the wild by the eagle eyed Xbox Scene chaps and as a result we now know that it has a 65nm GPU which, Microsoft is likely to be down on both knees praying, will mean less of those Red Rings of Death problems which have haunted owners of the console, myself included.

The Jasper mobo's were spotted in Arcade versions of the Xbox 360, and come with a different PSU. The new power supply, with a different plug to the old one so do not get any fancy ideas of swapping these things around, is less powerful at just 150W compared to 175W previously.

More interesting has to be the not so small matter of the onboard flash memory which has ballooned from a measly 16MB to a whopping great huge 256MB and, get this, includes internal memory storage capabilities. Which means the Xbox 360 Arcade no longer has an external memory unit, and you can save game data on that internal memory rather than a HDD if you want. That said, it is also used for kernel and dashboard stuff, and I suspect that the new dashboard will eat most of it.

Everything else, so I am told, is pretty much the same as the old …

Fixed :)

Hands up if you remember Opera Software, you know the Norway-based developer of alternative web browser clients. In the days before Firefox, Opera was the client most likely to shake up Microsoft and for a while seemed to be doing pretty well in that regard. Then Firefox came along and rained on the Opera parade. Some people all but wrote the Norwegians off, but while grabbing a decent slice of the desktop browser market may now be a distant dream there are other areas where Opera is no fantasy.

Mainly in mobiles.

Indeed, Opera Mini has become something of an embedded favourite with all sorts of mobile device users and if you use anything other than an iPhone the chances are high that an Opera client is working away inside your handset. Now Opera has announced the first Opera client for Android, indeed it harks back to the glory days in some regards as Opera is keen to remind the media that it is the first web browser client alternative for the Android operating system.

Opera Mini 4.2 for mobiles promises speed enhancements in excess of 30 percent compared to previous versions, as long as you are located in the US that is as it comes courtesy of a new Opera MIni server park within the United States.

Everyone else gets:

• More than 90 language versions, including the recently added Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kirghiz, Lingala, Marathi, Malayalam, Mongolian, …

The United States holds many titles, some of them causes for joy while others are reason for shame. The latter category has long included 'King of Spam' being the country from which the majority of the spam on the planet originates.

However, thanks to the closure of just one spam hosting service recently, it has now lost that crown of shame to China. According to one security outfit that monitors spam traffic, Network Box, China now produces more spam than the US, more spam than anywhere else for that matter.

As a direct consequence of the California-based McColo hosting service, said to have been responsible for distributing as much as 75 percent of global spam, spam volumes dropped dramatically as botnet herders struggle to regain control over compromised computers the world over. It seems that malware traffic has also taken a big hit. Simon Heron, Internet Security Analyst at Network Box, told me that "We've also seen a significant drop in emails containing viruses and phishing attacks. This indicates that McColo's servers were also used to distribute malicious emails containing viruses, and not just the usual junk marketing mail."

However, Heron also warns that "McColo came back online briefly over last weekend, most likely uploading all the command and control software required to run the botnets. So we'd expect spam to be back to usual levels in a couple of weeks using servers based in Russia."

For the moment though, China gets the …

It has been a long time coming, but Google has at last approached the Wiki concept for search. With the announcement of the SearchWiki tool, Google now has something that lets users have a fair degree of control over results and adds sharing into the search mix.

Control such as the customisation of results with the ability to re-rank, add and comment upon them. So you can move certain results to the top of the page if you disagree with the default ordering, where it will stay when you do the same search the next time (if you ever do of course.) You can just as easily remove results from the list, or add a one that doesn't appear. I am not sure about the latter, because if you have searched for something then surely you do not know where it is and so cannot add sites.

Commenting allows you to add basic notation to your searches, like a mini-review of the web page it refers to for example. These comments, being a Wiki, are public however. So you do need to remember that others in the community will be able to see what you said.

Unlike commenting, the changes you make to search ranks etc are not public fodder and only impact upon your own Google account.

It is easy to use, just do a Google search while logged in to your Google account and the SearchWiki stuff is there by default. You should see …

Better still use appropriate security measures to prevent unauthorised devices from being connected in the first place, it is not rocket science. That way you still get the benefits of USB without the dangers. We do not want a return to the 'good old days' where IT Admins superglued USB ports to prevent them being used.

Hi Eddie, happygeek.com is my 'this is what I do' page and acts as a central depository for work published online at various other places, including DaniWeb. By listing news stories and columns etc with a brief para and a link to the original source, people who only know of me from my print work can see what I am up to online - and the traffic all ends up with the original publisher as that is where the full story is. Hopefully everyone wins :)

When cornered by their wife, men sometimes say the most ridiculous things in order to wiggle out of trouble. However, blaming your iPhone for giving the impression you are having an affair has to rate as one of the best excuses ever.

According to a posting in the Apple discussion forums a lady called Susan became suspicious of her husband in the infidelity department. Looking through his stuff, she claims that she "took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account)."

OK, well, fair enough. Sounds pretty damning evidence of wring doing to me. That's what Susan thought, until her husband sought to confuse her by blaming the iPhone. "When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture" Susan says, adding "but says that he never sent it to anyone."

So, we have a man taking a photo of his privates and not sending them via email to a woman who appears to have received it anyway? Still sounds a hard excuse to swallow. So how does the husband explain the evidence? Could he be suggesting that his iPhone got drunk and did the dirty deed? Maybe the penguins attacked and allowed someone to access his iPhone and send the picture?

None of the above. What he actually did was tell …

Was anyone else really looking forward to being able to use the much hyped Google Voice Search feature for the iPhone? I mean, you could not move for news about the thing in the blogosphere last week, even the New York Times ran with a story about it and there was a tempting video demo doing the rounds.

Who would not be seduced by the thought of bringing Star Trek alive and doing a Captain Kirk in the high street? iPhone: Google 'fish and chip shops' it is a dream come true for sad folk like me.

Well, not quite true. Mainly because Google seems to have lost its voice on this occasion. There is still no sign of the iPhone app that will let you speak and search. Maybe this is not altogether surprising, given that voice recognition remains pants in most real world implementations. By real world I mean when used in an environment which is not otherwise silent. By real world I mean when used with your normal speaking voice and not involving you having to do an impression of that chap who introduces movie trailers or speak so slow that passers by think you are retarded. By real world I mean that when you say 'what is the time' the software does not think you said 'where is the toilet.'

The chances of actually being able to speak and search, on the street, via your iPhone and get Google results that come anywhere …

Facebook is many different things to many different people, but surely a social networking should be just that, social. Sure, there will always the odd group with a less than pleasant agenda, although usually these take the humour route rather than being downright nasty. So while an anti-Microsoft group might not be all hugs and flowers in intent, it is not in the same league as one proclaiming that members should 'Turn Gypsies into Fuel' for example.

The renowned Paris-based anti-nazi organisation, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, recently had cause to write an official complaint to Facebook under the title of "Do Not Serve as a Platform for Hate." On the 12th November, Dr Shimon Samuels who is the centre's Director for International Relations, sent a letter to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which expressed unsurprising outrage at the fact that Facebook was hosting no less than seven very unsocial groups indeed. The seven were fascist groups based in Italy with names such as the aforementioned fuel example as well as 'Useful work for gypsies: testers of gas chambers' and 'Let's burn them all.'

Samuels took the initiative, along with several members of the European Parliament, to remind Zuckerberg how offensive this was on the "70th anniversary of 'Kristallnacht', the prelude to the Holocaust" that "we find your networking service abused for the propagation of attacks on Roma."

Suggesting that Facebook "install appropriate filters to exclude such unwelcome guests" Samuels offered …

Nintendo is sitting firmly at the top of the games console tree right now, having just been 'bigged up' by the release of the US sales figures for October which show the Wii on 803,000 and the DS on 491,000. Both well ahead of nearest rival, the Xbox 360 on 371,000. The old, original, Xbox quite unsurprisingly does not feature in the top six list. That said, the PlayStation 2 does, at the bottom, on 136,000. So why mention the Xbox at all then?

Simply because the Xbox 360 has yet to manage to sell more units than the original Xbox overall, since release.

Now that is a surprising fact, surely? This is predicted to change by the end of the month. According to Mindy Mount, corporate VP and CFO of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division "we expect our global installed base to reach 25 million units, surpassing that of the first Xbox."

With Christmas fast approaching, and Xbox 360 prices free falling, it stands to reason that sales will start rising. Trouble is, while the Xbox 360 is performing really well compared to the much more expensive PlayStation 3 by selling twice as many units at the moment, the same cannot be said of it's performance against the Wii where it trails by pretty much the same margin.

Only the most brazen of die-hard retro gamers, or those on a real tight budget, would champion the Xbox over the far superior Xbox 360. …