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Microsoft researchers are working out the perfect strategies for worms to spread through networks — with a view to distributing software patches and other friendly information this way and reducing load on servers. This raises the prospect of worm races — deploying a whitehat worm to spread a fix faster than a new attacking worm can reach vulnerable machines.

LiquidCoooled writes "Just a reminder people, its Christmas already in parts of the world and Norad has once again started tracking Santa. http://www.noradsanta.org/"

Two of Saturn's small moons look eerily like flying saucers, new observations by the Cassini spacecraft reveal. The moons, which lie within the giant planet's rings, may have come by their strange shape by gradually accumulating ring particles in a ridge around their equators.

Louis Wu and Nessus are unavailable for comment.
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13014-saturns-flying-saucer-moons-built-of-ring-material.html

mernil writes "The Independent reports: "A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos."

Erris writes "As commentators like Ars Technica slam WGA as deeply flawed, Microsoft is blaming human error and swears it won't happen again. 'Alex Kochis, Microsofts senior WGA product manager, wrote in a blog posting that the troubles began after preproduction code was installed on live servers. ... rollback fixed the problem on the product-activation servers within 30 minutes ... but it didnt reset the validation servers. ... "we didnt have the right monitoring in place to be sure the fixes had the intended effect"' Critics were not impressed. 'A system thats not totally reliable really should not be so punitive, said Gartner Inc. analyst Michael Silver. Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash., said he was surprised that it was even possible to accidentally load the wrong code onto live servers ... [and asks], "what other things have they not done?' This is not the first time this has happened, either."

LiquidCoooled writes "The New York Times have recently begun offering an exact digital replica of the daily newspaper.
However to get a look at this nifty sounding site, you must signup and leave your credit card details.
The only thing which concerns me is the following:

Page Headline: Free: Try The New York Times Electronic Edition For 7 Days

Clause lower down: The first charge will be on the 5th day of your 7-day free trial.

My question then, how do I get a free 7 day trial?"
https://www.nytimesee.com/

BillGatesLoveChild writes "When Trey Harrison found his music lighting software 'Salvation' had been pirated, he was taken aback. Being an Independent Software Developer, there wasn't much he could do. So he contacted the Warez Group and asked them nicely. They wrote back and said sorry, that they at least hoped more people got to see it and that in accordance with his wishes, they wouldn't release it again.

But what of the Anti-Piracy tool "Armadillo Software Passport" that was supposed to have protected Trey's Software? Unlike the Pirates who responded straight away, Trey says he never heard a peep back from Armadillo. Seems the Pirates have better "customer support" than the Anti-piracy agents!

Of course, "Ask Nicely" may not work for the RIAA who as Orson Scott Card's famous essay pointed out have perhaps irreversible ill-will due to their history of ripping off artists and consumers and buying off Congressmen. But for smaller companies and independents, perhaps it's worth a try? There's even hope for the industry heavies. Mark Ishikawa of Anti-P2P Company BayTSP says 85% of people he sends a gentle warning on behalf of the MPAA "do not come back, with no headlines and no public relations blowups."

Could a softly-softly approach work better for IP owners that heavy-handed threats and lawyers?"

Adam writes "HNS has a story about an accelerating infection in Italy of seemingly legitimate web pages loaded with malicious code that could plant a keylogger to steal user passwords, or turn computers into proxy servers for various other attacks. Tens of thousands of users worldwide have already accessed compromised URLs, oblivious to the threat as a result of their natural web surfing activity. The initial HTML malware takes advantage of a vulnerability in so-called "iFrames" that are commonly used on websites and commonly exploited."

origins writes "On the STOC 2007,thesis about faster integer multiplication was submitted. According to the thesis,multiplication can be calculated faster than ever. Schönhage&Strassen algorithm was known as fastest(O(n log n log log n)) but now Martin Fürer algorithm was((n log n 2^O(log* n)). improvement of multiplication algorithm after decades is quite interesting.
Martin Fürer's homepage
The thesis"

destinyland writes "Blizzard Entertainment is creating a new quest in World of Warcraft for a 10-year-old boy who's fighting brain cancer. The boy's father said the 7-hour visit was the first time he'd seen "contentment and peace" on his son's face — and the second time was when he read warm emails he'd received from Warcraft players online. The Make-a-Wish Foundation arranged the 7-hour meeting with the game's lead designer, who will implement the boy's quest in four weeks. (Players search for a dog modelled after the boy's own pet.) And an online fund was just established if you also want to make a contribution to the boy's medical quest."

San Muel writes "In an official statement, Microsoft has said it has no immediate plans to sue after alleging patent infringements by open-source vendors for the time being. The company goes on to say that, essentially, it could have done that any time in the last three years if it wanted to. So what's the purpose of these bold announcements? '[John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org marketing project lead] added that while Microsoft may not have plans to sue, it could be using the threat of litigation to try to encourage corporate customers to move to those open-source product vendors with whom it had signed licensing agreements, such as Novell. "Microsoft has spent time and money accumulating patents. Maybe it has started using that armory to move corporate customers to open-source software that Microsoft approves of."'"

wattsup writes "It seems that bootable IDE ports are disappearing on newer motherboards.

I recently purchased an MSI G965M-FI motherboard for a system upgrade. Overall the board is pretty good with lots of features, but it had one "unexpected feature" that I didn't know about when I bought it. The PATA100 IDE port won't allow you to install an operating system from a CD-ROM attached to it.

While its on their website, MSI doesn't tell you this on the retail packaging, until you break the seal on the static wrap and look at the motherboard. There, with a tiny label placed over the IDE connector they inform you "This IDE does not support OS installation in hard drive".

This made my out-of-box experience rather maddening, as I had to get a USB based CD-ROM to install a fresh copy of XP. This seems like a pretty lame way to save money, disabling functionality on an IDE port that's included. Some research shows me that other manufacturers are doing the same thing. Why?

My question is; Does anybody know if this is an issue that can be fixed by upgrading the BIOS, or is this hard-wired in the IDE controller?"

davidwr writes "With all the **AA posts lately, it's time for an RIAA POLL:

What is your favorite RIAA target?

College Students
Single Mothers
Dissabled Vets
Household pets
The Deceased
Newborn babies
People without internet
PirateNeal

Credit where credit is due: This is inspired by by Drakin020's comment #18447205 Re:Welcome to ..."

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reports that later today YouTube will launch its 'YouTube Video Awards' for 2006. Nominees (which include big hitters such as Lonelygirl15 and Ask a Ninja) will be invited to upload new content over the next five days to promote themselves and canvas for votes. After which, we can expect a round of acceptance speeches. However, Don Dodge (an ex-VP of Product Development at Napster, during its good old P2P days) says the awards are a tactic by YouTube designed to deflect from their legal woes. The idea, he says, is to show the courts that there is "substantial non-infringing use" of the service."

* * Beatles-Beatles writes "http://news.com.com/New+shield+foiled+Internet+bac kbone+attack/2100-7349_3-6166107.html

http://www.icann.org/announcements/factsheet-dns-a ttack-08mar07.pdf

http://blog.icann.org/?p=37"