Clipmarks | Rashid Malik's clips

The network operation exceeded the user-specified or system time limit.

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:45:45 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Reg Find and Replace lets you to quickly find and replace registry keys or values.

You will have the ability to search through Keys, Sub keys and values and quickly update them. Excellent tool for correcting invalid or bogus registry values that may cause system instability.

Additional uses for Reg Find is the ability to identify and correct possible spyware and adware entries commonly found in the registry.

License: Freeware

Tags: freeware, registry

400,000 PCs infected with Fake 'Antivirus 2009' Software, says Microsoft

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 11:05:48 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik
clipper's remarks: Two of my colleagues also fell in the trap.

Clip Source: www.infopackets.com

Last month Microsoft claimed it purged programs called "Advanced Antivirus," "Ultimate Antivirus 2008," and "XPert Antivirus" from almost a million PCs. This month, Microsoft targeted the Win32/FakeXPA family (including Win32/Yektel and Win32/FakeXPA) which include fake security software called "Antivirus XP," "AntivirusXP 2008," and "Antivirus 2009." (Source: technet.com)

Free Tools to Remove Antivirus 2009 (Rogue)

If your system has any of the above mentioned rogue programs, you should scan your PC with MSRT from Microsoft immediately.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/

Other useful resources and tools to remove the rogue Antivirus 2009 malware:

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is a free tool that removes all traces of Antivirus 2009

A-squared Anti-Malware is another free tool that will remove all traces of Antivirus 2009

Antivirus 2009 information from BleepingComputer.com

Removing the Antivirus 2009 Infection from Miguel Campos Blog

Tags: virus

2009 to Arrive Not a Second Too Soon

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:32:54 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.space.com

Wait a second. The start of next year will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone's control. Time will stand still for one second on New Year's Eve, as we ring in the New Year on that Wednesday night. As a result, you'll have an extra second to celebrate because a "Leap Second" will be added to 2008 to let a lagging Earth catch up to super-accurate clocks.

By international agreement, the world's timekeepers, in order to keep their official atomic clocks in step with the world's irregular but gradually slowing rotation, have decreed that a Leap Second be inserted between 2008 and 2009.

So at precisely 23:59:60 at Greenwich, England, on New Year's Eve, there will be a one-second void before the onset of midnight and the start of the New Year. Wednesday will see the 24th Leap Second that has been needed since the practice was initiated in 1972, and will be the first in three years.

Tags: time

Smoking Celebs

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:00:14 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: abcnews.go.com

Tags: celebrities

Researchers Use PlayStation Cluster to Forge a Web Skeleton Key

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:54:25 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

A powerful digital certificate that can be used to forge the identity of any website on the internet is in the hands of in international band of security researchers, thanks to a sophisticated attack on the ailing MD5 hash algorithm, a slip-up by Verisign, and about 200 PlayStation 3s.

"We can impersonate Amazon.com and you won't notice," says David Molnar, a computer science PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. "The padlock will be there and everything will look like it's a perfectly ordinary certificate."

At issue is the crypto technology used to ensure visitors to Amazon.com, for example, are actually connected to the online retailer and not to a fake site erected by a fraudster. That assurance comes from a digital certificate that's vouched for and digitally signed by a trusted authority like Verisign. The certificate is transmitted to a user's browser and automatically verified during SSL connections -- the high-security web links heralded by a locked-padlock icon in the browser.

Tags: news

Most extreme news stories of 2008

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:14:04 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Roundest and shortest

In July, an international team of craftsmen unveiled an unusual pair of balls - believed to be the roundest objects in the world. "If you were to blow up our spheres to the size of the Earth, you would see a variation of only 3 to 5 metres in the roundness," said optical engineer Achim Leistner. The silicon balls are designed to each contain a near-identical number of silicon atoms, and become a new way to define the kilogram.

Hottest and earliest

Later in the year, archaeologists unearthed the earliest nuclear family - an adult couple and their two children, buried together 4600 years ago in Eulau, Germany. "The two kids have her mitochondrial DNA, and his Y chromosome - that's a nuclear family," said molecular anthropologist Brian Kemp of Washington State University. But the real-life Flintstones had it much worse than their cartoon counterparts. Their shared grave is one of a number in the area, apparently marking the site of an ancient massacre.

Tags: news

FBI issues code cracking challenge

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:49:16 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.networkworld.com

The FBI today challenged anyone in the online community to break a cipher code on its site. The code was created by FBI cryptanalysts. The bureau invited hackers to a similar code-cracking challenge last year and got tens of thousands of responses it said.

The FBI offers a few primers on the subject including:

A relatively basic form of substitution cipher is the Caesar Cipher, named for its Roman origins. The Caesar Cipher involves writing two alphabets, one above the other. The lower alphabet is shifted by one or more characters to the right or left and is used as the cipher text to represent the plain text letter in the alphabet above it.

Plain Text

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Cipher Text

B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A

The FBI of course doesn't always invite folks to break code on its site. In fact last spring a consultant managed to access the bureau's National Crime Information Center database.

Tags: cracking, decoding

US enters 2009 with 305 million residents

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:42:05 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.startribune.com

The United States will enter 2009 with 305,529,237 residents, the Census Bureau estimated on Monday.

That's an increase of 2,743,429 this year.

The bureau says that in January, one birth is expected to occur every eight seconds in the United States and one death every 12 seconds.

In addition, international migration is expected to add one person every 36 seconds to the U.S. population in January.

WASHINGTON - My, how the country has grown.

Tags: us

Top 10 tech embarrassments you'll want to avoid

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:23:31 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.infoworld.com

Tech Embarrassment 1: Bad husband, no nookie

Tech Embarrassment 2: Is that a laser pointer, or are you just happy to see me?

Clip Source: www.infoworld.com

Tech Embarrassment 3: The audience is listening

Tech Embarrassment 4: Your cell phone is not a flotation device

Tech Embarrassment 5: When you animate e-mail, the terrorists win

Clip Source: www.infoworld.com

Tech Embarrassment 6: Change your wiki ways

Tech Embarrassment 7: Good morning...now please clean out your desk

Clip Source: www.infoworld.com

Tech Embarrassment 8: Don't show, don't tell

Tech Embarrassment 9: Photo no-no's

Microsoft Seeks Pay-As-You-Go Computing Patent

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:14:50 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.techweb.com

Microsoft has applied for a patent on a pay-as-you-go computing model that would charge people only for the hardware, software, and services used.

The patent application, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in June 2007, was released Christmas Day. While such patent applications do not always lead to products, they do give some inkling as to what the applicant is considering.

The application is for a method of operating a computer that present to the user a catalog of options with a price associated with each. The total cost would depend on the number and kind of options selected. The charge for operating the computer could be a fixed rate for a specific time period, a onetime charge, or an hourly rate, the application says

In explaining various bundles of software and computing power, Microsoft said an Office bundle, for example, could cost $1 an hour, a gaming bundle $1.25 an hour and a Web browsing bundle 80 cents an hour.

Tags: microsoft

Air New Zealand successfully tests flying a jetliner partially fueled by vegetable oil

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:08:10 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.startribune.com

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A passenger jet powered in part by vegetable oil successfully completed a two-hour flight Tuesday to test a biofuel that could lower airplane emissions and cut costs, Air New Zealand said.

One engine of a Boeing 747-400 airplane was powered by a 50-50 blend of oil from jatropha plants and standard A1 jet fuel.

This year has seen an unprecedented push for alternative fuels by airlines, which were slammed by skyrocketing oil prices earlier in 2008 and are now bracing for a falloff in air travel in the face of a global economic slowdown.

While Air New Zealand couldn't say whether the blend would be cheaper than standard jet fuel since jatropha is not yet produced on a commercial scale, the company expects the blend to be "cost competitive," according to company spokeswoman Tracy Mills.

The flight was the first to use jatropha as part of a biofuel mix.

Tags: fuel

Hardwork redefined!

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:47:20 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.internetnews.com

Commentary: A person who works with total focus has an enormous advantage over a workaholic who's "multi-tasking" all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption.

But since the turn of the new millennium, the nature of work has evolved to the point where hard work is becoming less important to a successful work ethic than another, more useful value: attention.

Columnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell's latest book called "Outliers," made a statement as profound as it was accurate: "Control of attention is the ultimate individual power," he wrote. "People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them."

In a world in which entire industries bet their businesses on gaining access to our attention, which value leads to better personal success: hard work or the ability to control attention?

Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?

Samsung's 8-Megapixel Innov8 Coming To AT&T

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 10:15:05 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: www.techweb.com

Shutterbugs may soon have a reason to smile, as Samsung is bringing a smartphone with an 8-megapixel camera to the United States, according to an FCC filing.

The Samsung Innov8 has been available in Europe for a few months now, but the handset has been retooled to utilize the 850- and 1900-MHz frequencies to operate on AT&T's high-speed 3G network. The smartphone also will have integrated Wi-Fi for surfing the Web, uploading photos, and retrieving e-mail.

The camera is probably the most appealing feature of the Innov8, and it comes with autofocus technology, facial recognition, image stabilizer, and flash. The integrated GPS can be used to geotag photos, as well as provide location-based searches. There's onboard software for editing pictures, and the international version came pre-loaded with ShoZu, which makes uploading and sharing photos simple.

The Innov8 is more than just a camera phone, though, as it packs the Symbian S60 operating system.

Tags: mobile phone

Oldest American man dies at 112

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:58:41 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

LOS ANGELES, (AFP) – America's oldest man, an African-American who befriended Louis Armstrong and voted for president-elect Barack Obama "because he's black," has died in Sacramento, California, his family said.

Born in New Orleans on June 6, 1896, George Rene Francis smoked cigars until he was 75, ate a diet heavy on milk, cheese, eggs and lard sandwiches and slept six hours a day. He died of congestive heart failure at a nursing home on Saturday.

Francis, who in his life worked as a chauffeur, an auto mechanic and a barber, became a friend of young jazz trumpet player Louis Armstrong and cast his vote November 4 for Obama.

Francis was hospitalized with pneumonia several weeks ago, but asked his family to return him to his nursing home where his friends were, his daughter said.

Francis' wife, Josephine, died in 1963 after 46 years of marriage. He is survived by four children, 19 grandchildren, and some 30 great-grandchildren.

Tags: oldest

How Visiting Your Family Warps Your Brain

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:47:35 GMT

clipped by: Rashid Malik

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Dec. 29, 2008 -- Visiting -- or even just viewing photos of family members -- prompts brain activity that affects how you feel about them, your friends, and even yourself, a new study suggests.

The study is the first to compare brain activity associated with seeing relatives with that linked to seeing friends and strangers. It suggests our feelings about biological relatives are at least somewhat primal.

The findings may help explain everything from why our family can get on our nerves to why people who look like us can spark immediate feelings of trust, "but not lust," said Steven Platek, who co-authored the study with Shelly Kemp.

"We like to be around people that look more like us, but we do not find them as sexually attractive," added Platek, editor-in-chief of the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. "I think it is linked to our subconscious ability to detect facial resemblances so we avoid lusting after those that may be related to us."

Tags: brain