I love our campus laptop program for this very reason.
If we get one of these viruses, we swap their hard drive with a preimaged one then clean and copy "my documents", "desktop" and "favorites" from the old drive to the new one, then wipe and image the old drive for the next person.
This way we know the virus is totally dead, since so much crap these days rootkit your box right off the bat.
There is viruses that nothing truly removes. My favorite is still TDSS. There was a varient that would reside in the recycle bin, rogue DHCP the network to spread (Which Bradford Campus Manager would block at the switch thank god.) and would infect a clean machine because it would add an autorun.inf to the system drive to rootkit explorer.exe, so Using My Computer on another PC and double clicking on the drive looked perfectly normal but infected the host OS. Any PC infected with it had to be touched with kid gloves or you would be wiping 2 machines.
Laws of computer stupidity 1) 99% of computer users do not know what they are doing. 2) Computer users do not read. 3) If a computer user can click on it, they will. 4) You can patch software, but you can't patch stupid.
Understanding the above when making your corporate system build will pay off in the end.
You probably don't remember when Microsoft came out with their own antivirus package as part of DOS 6, do you? I do. It was nice, for a while. Support fell off when MS decided to change their focus.
Yes I do. It was made for MS by Central Point Software. Then Symantec bought them out to essentialy kill off MSAV by choking off support for it.
I know I'm replying to this unbelievably late, but here goes.
I actually have one of these CD's. It was sent to me by ticalc.org for contributing before they pulled them off the shelves. To this day I'm surprised that this thing was released.
The biggest problem was that ticalc.org wanted the community to audit the games themselves. What you had to do was select the programs you made that you wanted on the CD and authorize ticalc.org to add it to the CD. They wanted the authors to also not authorize any program that had any inappropriate or copyright material in it. Most people given that choice just selected all and went on their way.
From what was authorized, ticalc.org should of audited the choices. from what I can tell, they either didn't or did a piss poor job of it. Just searching for Mario alone on the disk gets you a couple of hits. The porn was probably a lot harder to find, but It's probably a safe bet it's in the pictures section.
This is the main reason why ticalc.org has the "report inappropriate content" section in the archives now.
The argument can be applied to other plugins (Flash, Silverlight, Java, ETC) on a browser as well, since they do open up the attack surface. The difference here is that the browser plugin being used in this case IS a browser and has it's own set of plugins it's bringing over.
So now you got a IE (Flash, Chrome(Flash, ETC), ETC) situation instead of just an IE(Flash, ETC) situation. Simply put, You would have to deal with exploits with IE flash as well as exploits in Chrome flash. If they are seperated, the attack surface is only IE surface or Chrome's surface, and not both.
Honestly, the only positive thing I see coming from this plugin is maybe this will wake Microsoft up and force them to focus on their Javascript performance in future browsers. IE8 is definetly better at rendering sites than it's predecessors. Now it just needs to have the script performance kicked into overdrive.
Somebody PLEASE make AdBlock Plus for Chrome and IE please!
IE8 has it built in with Inprivate filtering. You can also import lists to filter URL's similar to AdBlockPlus. Although it's not as conveniently automatic or as seamless, it works pretty well.
By running this plugin, you would be exposing yourself to not only Possible IE exploits, but possible Chrome Exploits as well. It would be much safer to run the Chrome browser standalone since it reduces the attack surface. It would probably be faster standalone too.
I remember seeing a beta with the editor but after that I haven't seen anything else. My guess is that they laid off the entire staff since I haven't seen anything past Ti Connect 1.6.
Regardless, there is no good programming editor for the Ti outside of the archaic Ti-graph link. Some open source versions are ok (such as Daisuke-Edit) but they tend to crash or not get abandoned.
Did you ever consider writing an open source editor based on your original code, or is the entire code under NDA? I know this and a true 89 data editor would make my day.
I've been working with Ti calcs and the Ti community for years, and Frankly, I feel that Ti have been giving us programmers a slap in the face.
First off, they keep resurrecting the Ti-82 series of calcs with endless versions and case updates while killing off more capable OS designs like the 85 series. I have a feeling the 92 series (which inclueds the 89, 89ti, and Voyage 200) is next.
Then, they remove program editing from their windows app as well as letting it stagnate with documented link bugs still included.
Finally, they release the Nspire. The Nspire is such a leap backward from their previous calcs that they actually had to make a version that emulates the 83. (again with the 82 love) It has a neutered programming language. no draw support. no 3d support, removed math functions, no proper input or output channels, ETC. I don't know who this calculator is going to appeal to. K-12 don't want it cause its more expensive than an 83, Higher education doesn't want it cause it's neutered vs other calcs in it's class and programmers don't want to touch it cause it's basically useless with no SDK or useful programming language to speak of.
I could probably talk about the SDK and it's lack of updates and support as well, but I'd rather let the Ti Flash community programmers do the talking here.
I'm not a fan of the key facoring, because it's just going to make Ti clamp down on the community that keeps their calc business (and my hobby) alive, but I don't blame the Ti Community, Not when Ti listenes more to a 9th grade teacher whining about little Johnny playing games on his calc instead of the professor or engineer thats using his calc as a cheap portable way of processing a complex algorythm or data probe accqsition device.
You know, I really wonder why MS even bothers getting into open source.
If Microsoft tries to get into open source, it's seen as a move to stranglehold OSS Development and software.
If Microsoft closes the door and goes completely proprietary, it's seen as a move to stranglehold OSS Development and software.
Ballmer should say screw it and just go back to the 90's and steamroll all over the competition. If the government gets involved, split all the divisions into separate companies, get them all to join some consortium group, and keep on steamrolling away.
Get kids interested in science and it goes from there. At least in the 90's we had Beakman's World and Bill Nye. Today all we got is Magic, Vampires and Aliens, so I guess paranormal science isn't doing too bad these days...
although a lot of files still do the false extension stuff, that's not the case with the MP3's were seeing.
These are perfectly legitimate MP3 files. They are not rebadged WMP files. They will play music. they play on an mp3 player. How they work is that they usually have ID3 tag data which tries to exploit WMP or Winamp to execute code or connect to a malicious site. We also see the WMA's disguised as MP3's as well, but the ID3 MP3's have been getting more popular as of late.
as for hiding file extentions. There is a set of laws that I follow.
Laws of computer stupidity 1) 99% of computer users do not know what they are doing. 2) computer users do not read. 3) If a computer user can click on it, they will.
Disabling "hide file extensions" doesn't solve anything because of all of the above.
1) They don't know why that file has an.exe at the end or care for that matter. explaining it to them goes in one ear and out the other.
2) Since they dont read, I'd bet you can make a file called "brittany spears does the nasty dance while going down on her new chihuahua and this file will wipe your hard drive clean.exe" and people would open it because all they read is "brittany spears" and "nasty dance".
3) If it's something they downloaded, they will click on it regardless if the extension is real or fake. This happened to me while I was researching a file I absoletly knew was a virus solely on the icon displayed to me. (in my case, it was the folder icon and instinctively clicked on it to go into the folder. Yes I show file extensions. I also fooled four other techs with this simple test using this icon and it showed the file ext for them too.)
We Use F-secure here. I wish we didn't, especially when they tell us not to go to known malware sites to test if their protection is working (even though a studest is going to do just that). Makes you feel really secure doesn't it? I really wish we were running either Avira Antivir or Microsoft Forefront, since they seem to have the highest detection rates against roges so far, but we decided to give F-secure a second chance. I don't know why.
Anyway, Since we have a laptop program at the college, our answer is simple. You're getting a new hard drive and we will move your favorites, My Documents and anything on your desktop. I know students don't like this option, but they REALLY won't like their credit card being stolen, or worse; their identity. Usually when I explain to them that this method is the safest option and that ID theft has happened to students (Guess what! if you pay for Antivirus 360 at 79.95, it still doesn't work AND they got your $79.95 AND they got your CC number and all the info they need to start swiping away your credit score!!) they agree with it, but some just don't care as long as they can download movies ("My Friends Hot Mom". "Milf Hunter", ETC) or music (from Gnutella, where the music is usually trojans or piggybacking some sort of virus) all day. Most will be back infected within the month as well.
The worst one so far is TDSS.F. It runs a rogue DCHP server across your network and tries to infect anyone that connects through it. It also adds autorun entries to infect across hard and flash drives and likes to install file fixer pro, which encrypts all your files. Luckily, Bradford Campus Manager detects the DHCP rogue and denies them access (That's why many campuses do this registration now.) but our virus scanner always misses it.
One of the interesting factors I've found with Sonic is any time Sega uses the word "Adventure" in any sonic game, the quality goes towards the crapper.
For example, Sonic Rush was pretty good. although it added another friend, but Sonic Rush Adventure was a useless grindfest that made you play stages over and over and over. nowhere near the first Rush.
Also in original games, the word Adventure is almost never found. It's nowhere on Sonic 1 or 2 either on the box art of the manuals. It's on Sonic CD's box art but thats probably why the boss battles were so easy, and it's on Sonic 3's book and Sonic and Knuckes's book and box art, but they both sucked on their own unless you locked on (more like Glued on when it came to my copy) Sonic 3 and S&K.
Considering that the first trailer for this 2D game already says adventure in it, I'm not keeping my hopes up.
This article is flamebait. It's pretty much making up an assumption based on guesses.
I've had Vista on my work desktop going on 7 months and XP on my PC at home going on 7 years now. Both boxes are used all day.
Not once, Not one single time, not ever, did my default search program ever change. In fact the only time it was changed was after installing the Google toolbar by my choice. The only thing that remotely comes to mind when it comes to something changing my PC's settings is the stupid Google button that appears next to the start button every time the Google toolbar updates on my XP box at home. At least it's easy to remove but I've removed it twice now.
I got IE8, I watched my Search icon automatically change from MSN Search to Bing. I got all the MS updates and extras through Windows update. I've installed Windows search 4.0 on the Vista PC, Office Live, and Live Essentials. I use Bing. Hell I'm Beta testing Microsoft products. and Google is still the default. About the only thing I don't have is the MSN toolbar, which I don't need since I have the Google toolbar.
Am I doing something right to keep MS from changing my choice or does MS love me too much to screw with my settings?
How new is it? If it's very new and nothing is on it yet, then reinstall the OS without the installed software. This doesn't work on all systems, but most lenovo systems have this option.
It's different depending on Type. If it's Thinkpad, it's the blue Thinkvantage button at startup. On Ideapads it's usually F11 or enter. anyway, You want to boot into Thinkvantage rescue and recovery.
Once your in there, switch to advanced mode, select "Restore your system", from there, select if you want to back up files and such, but you want to do the factory install.
after that, click through the popup window and click through the eulas, after that you should see a menu or radio button that says custom install or advanced install (I don't remember offhand) from there, select that and a list should show up. select what you want (such as AV scanner, diagnostic, or remove everything) and proceed. It should then install the OS without all of the Thinkvantage stuff installed.
Again I want to stress that not all lenovo's have this feature. All the desktops I ran into have it. the S10e, R60 and R61 laptops have it, but I also know the newer T500 series does not have this custom install as an option. And there's no real way to tell if it's an option for you without doing a factory reinstall of the OS. If you're going to format the OS anyway, it's not going to hurt to give this a shot first.
Also consider looking into getting a factory restore disk set. You can get just about any windows version as well as a factory supported set of Suse available for just about every thinkpad out there. The Suse build is a very good distro oriented towards business installs and is fully supported by Lenovo's support staff. You'll have to zero out your entire drive to install the recovery partition, but if you want to Upgrade your OS or completely remove windows from the equasion it's a great way to go.
As a marketing strategy, the Seinfield ads sucked but were interesting nonetheless.
First of all, people were talking about them. Not exactly in a good way, but I can remember Slashdot posting article after article about them.
The second thing was the subtle message in each one of them. Every one of them had something to do with Vista. for example:
1) Bill Gates needing a Size 10 shoe instead of a size 9 = Vista needing a high end PC instead of a stripped down one. 2) Family accusing Bill and Jerry of stealing a giraffe but later turned out to be framed by family sister = Internet accusing Vista of sucking but later turned out to be spreading from a few sites.
The problem with this is it was never explained in the commercials. They figured that if you knew anything about Vista you would get it and had Seinfield talk about cake computers and Gates doing the robot instead of explaining the message they were trying to get across.
Because in most other operating systems you do not have enough priviledges to be able to do enough to spread the malwear or do enable it to do anything useful
If you can write to a persistant area of a drive that can survive reboots, you can infect it. It may not be sosphicated, but it doesn't have to be to run a botnet, or spam, or trick you into coughing up a credit card, ETC.
On Windows it is getting harder for malwear to install itself but since most people still run XP/IE/Outlook they also mostly run as a user who can be tricked into doing what the malwear considers useful
Example. You run Linux as a user. You boot up Thunderbird. You get an e-mail that says you got a e-card from your grandma. You click on the link, Firefox starts up, and the website (after finding out which OS you run from the user agent string) wants you to download and run ecard on you box, you do so. the ecard program writes the payload into a directory called.virus in your profile and edits your.login to run (PROFILE LOCATION)/.virus/virusfile on login. Everytime you login, virusfile stats up, connects to a botnet, and waits for instructions to either DOS, wait for a kernel exploit to Pwn you, spam/spread your contact list, encrypt and ransom your data files, ETC.
If you beleive that you would never do that. swap the Roles. Grandma will most likely believe everything the mail says, After All, the mail came from you. Also, keep in mind that nowhere in this sceneario is MS ever mentioned, and you could replace the above apps/OS with any multitude of other apps or operating systems and result in the same outcome.
The biggest advantage Vista/Win 7 has is that it discourages (finally) you from running as Admin , but it is still a monoculture and so the malwear can exploit the bugs in the programs it can easily assume you are running....
As much as Vista and 7 are improvements to security, it is not a solution, and changing the OS just makes it a different process to infect. Bugs in software exist, but all bugs do is automate the viral installation process. Virus Inc's have found it much MUCH MUCH EASIER to trick you into running the payload manually and infecting yourself instead of researching, testing, and exploiting bugs.
There's really only two solutions to this problem...
1) Blacklist solution - This is where most AV scanners sit. This is more mitigation rather than a solution. Definition based scanners are useless anymore since mose malware today are compiling on the fly and rotating MD5 hashes. Hierustic / HIPS scanning is better but prone to false positive, and give the (Idiot) user a choice rather than a definitive yes or no.
2) Whitelist solution - Think DRM, Palladium, WGA, Next Generation Secure Computing Base, IPhone Apps, Game Consoles, or whatever evil entity of Software management you can think of. You either have the OS vender sign it or your screwed. This won't fly at all with consumers.
Since #2 is pure evil, #1 is the best option left. At least at some point the AV scanner may be able to get rid of an infection if the virus can't disable it.
what bothers me most about this article is this line
'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,'
At this point, most malware doesn't hack Windows, it hacks your brain. It tricks you into executing it. The only vector that is even being used extensively anymore is Office, Acrobat, and Flash, MS has been phasing out older formats and patching up the holes and Adobe is finally waking up and doing something about their security issues. even in those programs, most of the time a Trojan file is involved.
On top of that, the most recent malware doesn't even need administrative privlages. It simply installs in your user account directory and starts up when you login. I see absoletly no reason why this method of execution wouldn't work in any other OS, Be it Linux, OSX, or BSD regardless of security settings.
Blows AVG out of the water, and consistently scores high on virus software comparasions. Latest version seems to cause some performance issues on lower spec machines, but still scans like a champ.
Slashdot Mirror
I love our campus laptop program for this very reason.
If we get one of these viruses, we swap their hard drive with a preimaged one then clean and copy "my documents", "desktop" and "favorites" from the old drive to the new one, then wipe and image the old drive for the next person.
This way we know the virus is totally dead, since so much crap these days rootkit your box right off the bat.
There is viruses that nothing truly removes. My favorite is still TDSS. There was a varient that would reside in the recycle bin, rogue DHCP the network to spread (Which Bradford Campus Manager would block at the switch thank god.) and would infect a clean machine because it would add an autorun.inf to the system drive to rootkit explorer.exe, so Using My Computer on another PC and double clicking on the drive looked perfectly normal but infected the host OS. Any PC infected with it had to be touched with kid gloves or you would be wiping 2 machines.
Laws of computer stupidity
1) 99% of computer users do not know what they are doing.
2) Computer users do not read.
3) If a computer user can click on it, they will.
4) You can patch software, but you can't patch stupid.
Understanding the above when making your corporate system build will pay off in the end.
Av2009 sucks! Antivirus 360 is the best scanner ever! and it's only 79.95! And it also came with a great product called File Fixer Pro!
All my documents were corrupted, And this File Fixer Pro fixed them all for only $49.95! I was so relieved!
I'm also hearing great things about "Antivirus Number 1" too. After all, It's Number 1!
(Yes this is a Joke. Laugh, becaue you'd be surprised how many times I've heard something similar to this.)
To remove norton, Don't bother with the uninstaller. Get the Norton Removal tool from their site:
http://service1.symantec.com/Support/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039
This is for ANY install of ANY norton products. It also gets rid of shared files and their registry settings.
You probably don't remember when Microsoft came out with their own antivirus package as part of DOS 6, do you? I do. It was nice, for a while. Support fell off when MS decided to change their focus.
Yes I do. It was made for MS by Central Point Software. Then Symantec bought them out to essentialy kill off MSAV by choking off support for it.
Is This
Frankly If this was an actual product Demonstration, Chickens would become Extinct before Norton did anything about it.
I know I'm replying to this unbelievably late, but here goes.
I actually have one of these CD's. It was sent to me by ticalc.org for contributing before they pulled them off the shelves. To this day I'm surprised that this thing was released.
The biggest problem was that ticalc.org wanted the community to audit the games themselves. What you had to do was select the programs you made that you wanted on the CD and authorize ticalc.org to add it to the CD. They wanted the authors to also not authorize any program that had any inappropriate or copyright material in it. Most people given that choice just selected all and went on their way.
From what was authorized, ticalc.org should of audited the choices. from what I can tell, they either didn't or did a piss poor job of it. Just searching for Mario alone on the disk gets you a couple of hits. The porn was probably a lot harder to find, but It's probably a safe bet it's in the pictures section.
This is the main reason why ticalc.org has the "report inappropriate content" section in the archives now.
The argument can be applied to other plugins (Flash, Silverlight, Java, ETC) on a browser as well, since they do open up the attack surface. The difference here is that the browser plugin being used in this case IS a browser and has it's own set of plugins it's bringing over.
So now you got a IE (Flash, Chrome(Flash, ETC), ETC) situation instead of just an IE(Flash, ETC) situation. Simply put, You would have to deal with exploits with IE flash as well as exploits in Chrome flash. If they are seperated, the attack surface is only IE surface or Chrome's surface, and not both.
Honestly, the only positive thing I see coming from this plugin is maybe this will wake Microsoft up and force them to focus on their Javascript performance in future browsers. IE8 is definetly better at rendering sites than it's predecessors. Now it just needs to have the script performance kicked into overdrive.
Somebody PLEASE make AdBlock Plus for Chrome and IE please!
IE8 has it built in with Inprivate filtering. You can also import lists to filter URL's similar to AdBlockPlus. Although it's not as conveniently automatic or as seamless, it works pretty well.
There's a good amount of info in this thread at DSLReports.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22124619-IE8-InPrivate-filter-from-adblock-plus-list
By running this plugin, you would be exposing yourself to not only Possible IE exploits, but possible Chrome Exploits as well. It would be much safer to run the Chrome browser standalone since it reduces the attack surface. It would probably be faster standalone too.
I remember seeing a beta with the editor but after that I haven't seen anything else. My guess is that they laid off the entire staff since I haven't seen anything past Ti Connect 1.6.
Regardless, there is no good programming editor for the Ti outside of the archaic Ti-graph link. Some open source versions are ok (such as Daisuke-Edit) but they tend to crash or not get abandoned.
Did you ever consider writing an open source editor based on your original code, or is the entire code under NDA? I know this and a true 89 data editor would make my day.
I've been working with Ti calcs and the Ti community for years, and Frankly, I feel that Ti have been giving us programmers a slap in the face.
First off, they keep resurrecting the Ti-82 series of calcs with endless versions and case updates while killing off more capable OS designs like the 85 series. I have a feeling the 92 series (which inclueds the 89, 89ti, and Voyage 200) is next.
Then, they remove program editing from their windows app as well as letting it stagnate with documented link bugs still included.
Finally, they release the Nspire. The Nspire is such a leap backward from their previous calcs that they actually had to make a version that emulates the 83. (again with the 82 love) It has a neutered programming language. no draw support. no 3d support, removed math functions, no proper input or output channels, ETC. I don't know who this calculator is going to appeal to. K-12 don't want it cause its more expensive than an 83, Higher education doesn't want it cause it's neutered vs other calcs in it's class and programmers don't want to touch it cause it's basically useless with no SDK or useful programming language to speak of.
I could probably talk about the SDK and it's lack of updates and support as well, but I'd rather let the Ti Flash community programmers do the talking here.
I'm not a fan of the key facoring, because it's just going to make Ti clamp down on the community that keeps their calc business (and my hobby) alive, but I don't blame the Ti Community, Not when Ti listenes more to a 9th grade teacher whining about little Johnny playing games on his calc instead of the professor or engineer thats using his calc as a cheap portable way of processing a complex algorythm or data probe accqsition device.
You know, I really wonder why MS even bothers getting into open source.
If Microsoft tries to get into open source, it's seen as a move to stranglehold OSS Development and software.
If Microsoft closes the door and goes completely proprietary, it's seen as a move to stranglehold OSS Development and software.
Ballmer should say screw it and just go back to the 90's and steamroll all over the competition. If the government gets involved, split all the divisions into separate companies, get them all to join some consortium group, and keep on steamrolling away.
At least the M$ moniker would have meaning again.
We need a new Mr. Wizard.
Get kids interested in science and it goes from there. At least in the 90's we had Beakman's World and Bill Nye. Today all we got is Magic, Vampires and Aliens, so I guess paranormal science isn't doing too bad these days...
although a lot of files still do the false extension stuff, that's not the case with the MP3's were seeing.
These are perfectly legitimate MP3 files. They are not rebadged WMP files. They will play music. they play on an mp3 player. How they work is that they usually have ID3 tag data which tries to exploit WMP or Winamp to execute code or connect to a malicious site. We also see the WMA's disguised as MP3's as well, but the ID3 MP3's have been getting more popular as of late.
as for hiding file extentions. There is a set of laws that I follow.
Laws of computer stupidity
1) 99% of computer users do not know what they are doing.
2) computer users do not read.
3) If a computer user can click on it, they will.
Disabling "hide file extensions" doesn't solve anything because of all of the above.
1) They don't know why that file has an .exe at the end or care for that matter. explaining it to them goes in one ear and out the other.
2) Since they dont read, I'd bet you can make a file called "brittany spears does the nasty dance while going down on her new chihuahua and this file will wipe your hard drive clean.exe" and people would open it because all they read is "brittany spears" and "nasty dance".
3) If it's something they downloaded, they will click on it regardless if the extension is real or fake. This happened to me while I was researching a file I absoletly knew was a virus solely on the icon displayed to me. (in my case, it was the folder icon and instinctively clicked on it to go into the folder. Yes I show file extensions. I also fooled four other techs with this simple test using this icon and it showed the file ext for them too.)
We Use F-secure here. I wish we didn't, especially when they tell us not to go to known malware sites to test if their protection is working (even though a studest is going to do just that). Makes you feel really secure doesn't it? I really wish we were running either Avira Antivir or Microsoft Forefront, since they seem to have the highest detection rates against roges so far, but we decided to give F-secure a second chance. I don't know why.
Anyway, Since we have a laptop program at the college, our answer is simple. You're getting a new hard drive and we will move your favorites, My Documents and anything on your desktop. I know students don't like this option, but they REALLY won't like their credit card being stolen, or worse; their identity. Usually when I explain to them that this method is the safest option and that ID theft has happened to students (Guess what! if you pay for Antivirus 360 at 79.95, it still doesn't work AND they got your $79.95 AND they got your CC number and all the info they need to start swiping away your credit score!!) they agree with it, but some just don't care as long as they can download movies ("My Friends Hot Mom". "Milf Hunter", ETC) or music (from Gnutella, where the music is usually trojans or piggybacking some sort of virus) all day. Most will be back infected within the month as well.
The worst one so far is TDSS.F. It runs a rogue DCHP server across your network and tries to infect anyone that connects through it. It also adds autorun entries to infect across hard and flash drives and likes to install file fixer pro, which encrypts all your files. Luckily, Bradford Campus Manager detects the DHCP rogue and denies them access (That's why many campuses do this registration now.) but our virus scanner always misses it.
I doubt it.
One of the interesting factors I've found with Sonic is any time Sega uses the word "Adventure" in any sonic game, the quality goes towards the crapper.
For example, Sonic Rush was pretty good. although it added another friend, but Sonic Rush Adventure was a useless grindfest that made you play stages over and over and over. nowhere near the first Rush.
Also in original games, the word Adventure is almost never found. It's nowhere on Sonic 1 or 2 either on the box art of the manuals. It's on Sonic CD's box art but thats probably why the boss battles were so easy, and it's on Sonic 3's book and Sonic and Knuckes's book and box art, but they both sucked on their own unless you locked on (more like Glued on when it came to my copy) Sonic 3 and S&K.
Considering that the first trailer for this 2D game already says adventure in it, I'm not keeping my hopes up.
Ford Did.
I wonder if the test vehicle is a Mustang...
This article is flamebait. It's pretty much making up an assumption based on guesses.
I've had Vista on my work desktop going on 7 months and XP on my PC at home going on 7 years now. Both boxes are used all day.
Not once, Not one single time, not ever, did my default search program ever change. In fact the only time it was changed was after installing the Google toolbar by my choice. The only thing that remotely comes to mind when it comes to something changing my PC's settings is the stupid Google button that appears next to the start button every time the Google toolbar updates on my XP box at home. At least it's easy to remove but I've removed it twice now.
I got IE8, I watched my Search icon automatically change from MSN Search to Bing. I got all the MS updates and extras through Windows update. I've installed Windows search 4.0 on the Vista PC, Office Live, and Live Essentials. I use Bing. Hell I'm Beta testing Microsoft products. and Google is still the default. About the only thing I don't have is the MSN toolbar, which I don't need since I have the Google toolbar.
Am I doing something right to keep MS from changing my choice or does MS love me too much to screw with my settings?
this is the ".NET framework assistant" update for Firefox 3.5
I guess you can say its a good thing, since this version overwrites the old one, and is uninstallable unlike the old one.
How new is it? If it's very new and nothing is on it yet, then reinstall the OS without the installed software. This doesn't work on all systems, but most lenovo systems have this option.
It's different depending on Type. If it's Thinkpad, it's the blue Thinkvantage button at startup. On Ideapads it's usually F11 or enter. anyway, You want to boot into Thinkvantage rescue and recovery.
Once your in there, switch to advanced mode, select "Restore your system", from there, select if you want to back up files and such, but you want to do the factory install.
after that, click through the popup window and click through the eulas, after that you should see a menu or radio button that says custom install or advanced install (I don't remember offhand) from there, select that and a list should show up. select what you want (such as AV scanner, diagnostic, or remove everything) and proceed. It should then install the OS without all of the Thinkvantage stuff installed.
Again I want to stress that not all lenovo's have this feature. All the desktops I ran into have it. the S10e, R60 and R61 laptops have it, but I also know the newer T500 series does not have this custom install as an option. And there's no real way to tell if it's an option for you without doing a factory reinstall of the OS. If you're going to format the OS anyway, it's not going to hurt to give this a shot first.
Also consider looking into getting a factory restore disk set. You can get just about any windows version as well as a factory supported set of Suse available for just about every thinkpad out there. The Suse build is a very good distro oriented towards business installs and is fully supported by Lenovo's support staff. You'll have to zero out your entire drive to install the recovery partition, but if you want to Upgrade your OS or completely remove windows from the equasion it's a great way to go.
Good Luck.
As a marketing strategy, the Seinfield ads sucked but were interesting nonetheless.
First of all, people were talking about them. Not exactly in a good way, but I can remember Slashdot posting article after article about them.
The second thing was the subtle message in each one of them. Every one of them had something to do with Vista. for example:
1) Bill Gates needing a Size 10 shoe instead of a size 9 = Vista needing a high end PC instead of a stripped down one.
2) Family accusing Bill and Jerry of stealing a giraffe but later turned out to be framed by family sister = Internet accusing Vista of sucking but later turned out to be spreading from a few sites.
The problem with this is it was never explained in the commercials. They figured that if you knew anything about Vista you would get it and had Seinfield talk about cake computers and Gates doing the robot instead of explaining the message they were trying to get across.
Because in most other operating systems you do not have enough priviledges to be able to do enough to spread the malwear or do enable it to do anything useful
If you can write to a persistant area of a drive that can survive reboots, you can infect it. It may not be sosphicated, but it doesn't have to be to run a botnet, or spam, or trick you into coughing up a credit card, ETC.
On Windows it is getting harder for malwear to install itself but since most people still run XP/IE/Outlook they also mostly run as a user who can be tricked into doing what the malwear considers useful
Example. You run Linux as a user. You boot up Thunderbird. You get an e-mail that says you got a e-card from your grandma. You click on the link, Firefox starts up, and the website (after finding out which OS you run from the user agent string) wants you to download and run ecard on you box, you do so. the ecard program writes the payload into a directory called .virus in your profile and edits your .login to run (PROFILE LOCATION)/.virus/virusfile on login. Everytime you login, virusfile stats up, connects to a botnet, and waits for instructions to either DOS, wait for a kernel exploit to Pwn you, spam/spread your contact list, encrypt and ransom your data files, ETC.
If you beleive that you would never do that. swap the Roles. Grandma will most likely believe everything the mail says, After All, the mail came from you. Also, keep in mind that nowhere in this sceneario is MS ever mentioned, and you could replace the above apps/OS with any multitude of other apps or operating systems and result in the same outcome.
The biggest advantage Vista/Win 7 has is that it discourages (finally) you from running as Admin , but it is still a monoculture and so the malwear can exploit the bugs in the programs it can easily assume you are running ....
As much as Vista and 7 are improvements to security, it is not a solution, and changing the OS just makes it a different process to infect. Bugs in software exist, but all bugs do is automate the viral installation process. Virus Inc's have found it much MUCH MUCH EASIER to trick you into running the payload manually and infecting yourself instead of researching, testing, and exploiting bugs.
There's really only two solutions to this problem...
1) Blacklist solution - This is where most AV scanners sit. This is more mitigation rather than a solution. Definition based scanners are useless anymore since mose malware today are compiling on the fly and rotating MD5 hashes. Hierustic / HIPS scanning is better but prone to false positive, and give the (Idiot) user a choice rather than a definitive yes or no.
2) Whitelist solution - Think DRM, Palladium, WGA, Next Generation Secure Computing Base, IPhone Apps, Game Consoles, or whatever evil entity of Software management you can think of. You either have the OS vender sign it or your screwed. This won't fly at all with consumers.
Since #2 is pure evil, #1 is the best option left. At least at some point the AV scanner may be able to get rid of an infection if the virus can't disable it.
what bothers me most about this article is this line
'Consumers are hesitant to pay for a Microsoft security product that will remove problems in other Microsoft products,'
At this point, most malware doesn't hack Windows, it hacks your brain. It tricks you into executing it. The only vector that is even being used extensively anymore is Office, Acrobat, and Flash, MS has been phasing out older formats and patching up the holes and Adobe is finally waking up and doing something about their security issues. even in those programs, most of the time a Trojan file is involved.
On top of that, the most recent malware doesn't even need administrative privlages. It simply installs in your user account directory and starts up when you login. I see absoletly no reason why this method of execution wouldn't work in any other OS, Be it Linux, OSX, or BSD regardless of security settings.
I second this.
Blows AVG out of the water, and consistently scores high on virus software comparasions. Latest version seems to cause some performance issues on lower spec machines, but still scans like a champ.