sr243 - Slashdot User

Ruckus Closes Down 125

Posted by timothy on Monday February 09, 2009 @09:10AM from the long-overdue dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to TechCrunch, Ruckus, the ad-supported music service targeted at college students, has closed down for good. Ruckus was notable for its poorly-designed client software and .wma-only DRM-laden catalog of 3,000,000 tracks, somewhat less than half the size of the iTunes catalog."

Against Unknown Viruses, Avira AntiVir the Winner For Now 170

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 04, 2008 @03:37PM from the evolving-bleakosystem dept.

KingofGnG writes "AV-Comparatives, the Austrian team of experts dedicated to antivirus tests acknowledged as a reference point in the field, has published the second part of the mid-year comparative, an ideal addendum to the one already released last September. This time the aim is to evaluate the antimalware tools' effectiveness against unknown threats in a test scenario meant to prove the heuristic part and the generic markers of the on-demand scanning engines." The best in show (of 16 anti-malware packages evaluated), Avira AntiVir was able to find 71% of the unknown malware it was exposed to in the first week, dropping to 67% after the fourth.

Making BitTorrent Clients Prioritize By Geography? 227

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @01:43PM from the hey-you're-blocking-my-bandwidth dept.

Daengbo writes "While I live in S.Korea and have virtually unlimited bandwidth in and out of the country, not all my Asian friends are so lucky. Many of the SE Asian and African countries have small international pipes. Even when a user has a high-speed local connection, downloads from abroad will trickle in. Bittorrent clients apparently don't prioritize other users on the same ISP or at least in the same country. Why is that? Is it difficult to manage? If I were to write a plug-in for, say, Deluge, what hurdles would I be likely to come across? If this functionality is available in other clients or through plug-ins, please chime in."

Comment Full text (Score 5, Informative) 286

by sr243 on Sunday October 07, 2007 @04:38PM (#20890593) Attached to: Windows XP SP3 Build 3205 Released w/ New Features

Following our coverage of the Windows XP SP3 beta leak almost a month ago in August, here's some more info on the official beta, which just had its first authorized distributable released earlier today. Say hello to Windows XP SP3, build 3205!

While the newly-released build and the one leaked a month ago (Build 3180) may share the same name, we can exclusively reveal that they are not identical releases. This release, also shipped as windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu.exe, is 334.2 megabytes and has been made available to tier-one Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 beta testers. Hashes are as follows:

CRC: 56e08837
MD5: c8c24ec004332198c47b9ac2b3d400f7

Along with the standalone installer redistributables (in English, Japanese, and German), Microsoft also provided the usual release notes and a list of all the hotfixes included in this release. Contrary to popular belief, Windows XP SP3 does ship with all-new features - not just patches and hotfixes, most of them backported from Windows Vista:

* New Windows Product Activation model: no need to enter product key during setup. Thank God for that!
* Network Access Protection modules and policies have been brought to XP after being one of the more-well-received features in Windows Vista. You can read more about NAP here.
* New Microsoft Kernel Mode Cryptographic Module - the Windows XP SP3 kernel now includes an entire module that provides easy access to multiple cryptographic algorithms and is available for use in kernel-mode drivers and services.
* New "Black Hole Router" detection - Windows XP SP3 can detect and protect against rogue routers that are discarding data.

Windows XP SP3 is compatible with all versions of Windows x86, included Embedded, Fundamentals, Start, Professional, Media Center, and Home Editions.

Windows XP SP3 now contains 1,073 patches/hotfixes, not including those in previous service packs. Of the 1,073 included updates, 114 are for security-related issues. The remainder are updates to performance & reliability, bugfixes, improvements to kernel-mode driver modules, and many BSOD fixes.

As with Service Pack 2, these include both previously publicly-available updates (whether through support.microsoft.com or via Windows Update) as well as any and all privately-redistributed updates for select customers or partners with specific problems/scenarios.

The first included update: KB123456 (April 7, 2006). The last: KB942367 (September 29, 2007).

We're checking with our MS contacts if we can provide you with the actual comprehensive list of updates included in Windows XP SP3, along with their descriptions and KB article links.

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