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 Name: Nyxem.E
Alias: Email-Worm.Win32.Nyxem.e
Size: 95744
Category: Virus
Platform: Win32
Date of Discovery: January 20, 2006

A new e-mail worm that spreads under the guise of pornographic content has jumped to the top of the worldwide virus charts.

When run on a Windows PC, the worm copies itself to shared network locations and sends itself to e-mail addresses found on the target computer. The pest includes a timed attack that attempts to disable antivirus and firewall software and delete certain files, including Office documents, on the third day of the month, according to antivirus software vendor F-Secure.

The worm, dubbed W32/Nyxem-E by F-Secure, arrives attached to an e-mail message. It uses a variety of subject lines, including “School girl fantasies gone bad.” The body text also varies, but it can include references to the Kama Sutra, the ancient Sanskrit book with pictures and explanations about different sexual positions.

“This worm feeds on people’s willingness to receive salacious content on their desktop computer,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for antivirus vendor Sophos, said in a statement.

Nyxem-E was the most commonly caught threat in the past 24 hours, according to both F-Secure and Trend Micro, which calls the worm Grew.A. The worm also has its own counting mechanism, and it showed 510,000 infected systems on Saturday, according to F-Secure.

“Our internal reporting system shows a steady stream of Nyxems being reported from all over the world, from USA to Australia,” F-Secure said in a statement on its corporate blog. “If the worm keeps this pace, Friday the 3rd of February might be nasty–that’s when the destructive payload is programmed to strike for the first time.”

To protect themselves, users should keep their antivirus software up to date and be wary when opening e-mail attachments, experts said.

It’s going to be an exciting year. Not since the run up to Firefox 1.0 have I been so excited about the content of a release. Firefox 2 is going to be great.

Firstly, Firefox 2 is based off the same Gecko branch that shipped Firefox 1.5, so they should be compatible from a web developer’s point of view. APIs might be added, but none should be changed.

From a development point of view, the idea of Firefox 2 is to deliver significant user experience enhancements on top of a relatively stable rendering engine as significant retooling is done on the main development trunk for what will become Firefox 3, and deliver them in a timely fashion. By being deliberately cautious with our goals for the rendering engine, we hope to avoid long cycles of shake and bake that delayed Firefox 1.5 (which had more substantial Gecko changes than user interface changes).

So, without further ado, some of the most important features from the planning brainstorming page:

New Bookmarks and History
Improve the browser’s Bookmarks and History systems to improve their effectiveness as renavigation aids while at the same time improving the back end for speed and extensibility.

Tabbed Browsing Enhancements
Make tabs behave more like windows in the operating system environment, making them behave more as users would expect.

Improved Basic Content Type Handling
For things like RSS/Atom feeds, mail links etc. Improve discovery and handling user interfaces.

Web Search
Improve the discoverability and adaptability of the search UI within Firefox.

Bug Fixing
Bug fixing at all levels where risk is low and yield high, e.g. the blank tab download bug, platform stability, etc.
Some additional things we would like to look at in the Firefox 2 timeframe include:

Visual Uplift
A freshen of the visual design of Firefox while maintaining high levels of system integration.

Inline Spell Check
The rise of applications like web mail, blogging etc highlight the weaknesses of HTML’s textarea widget. We should at the very least offer people the ability to spell check their submissions.

Exit Survey
We’d like to know why people leave Firefox. A survey on uninstall would help us find ways to make the software better in future versions.

UI Consolidation and Simplification
Consolidate and simplify user interface in the browser window tying together features in meaningful ways where possible.

There are many other ideas floating around, this is just a brief snapshot of some of the high priority items on our plates. If we get this done, we’ll be satisfied!

by ben | http://weblogs.mozillazine.org

BOTTOM LINE
Casual Mac users will love the new iMac (Intel Core Duo), but
professional users or anyone who uses graphics apps like Adobe Photoshop and video-editing software (such as Final Cut Pro) should wait until those tools are updated.

PROS
Intel Core Duo dual-core processor. Mini-DVI port for true dual-monitor usage. Front Row software is now peppier.

CONS
Many applications that are not optimized for Intel will run slower. Classic OS 9 environment no longer available.

TECH SPEC.
Type: All-in-one, General Purpose, Media, Business
Processor Family: Intel Core Duo
Installed RAM: 1024 MB
Hard Drive Capacity: 250 GB
RAID: No
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon x1600
Primary Optical Drive: Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW
Monitor Size: 20 inches

REVIEW
On the outside, the new Apple iMac (Intel Core Duo) ($1,699 direct, $1,799 as tested) looks no different than the previous PowerPC-based iMac G5 (iSight). The differences are all under the hood. The 20-inch new iMac combines a dual-core Intel Core Duo (formerly Pentium M or Yonah) processor with the Mac OS X experience. Casual Mac users, switchers from Microsoft Windows, and iPod aficionados will love the new iMac; however, professionals and people who use graphics apps such as Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro should hold off until the critical app is updated to work smoothly with the Intel processor. For these people, we recommend holding on to your current G5-powered Mac, at least for now.

Recently Google released a collection of free software for Windows called Google Pack. The big G made some good applications choices for the Pack and a couple of atrocious ones (RealPlayer *cough* Norton *cough*).

Productivity

• OpenOffice
  OpenOffice offers Word, Excel and PowerPoint equivalents that are fully compatible with the Microsoft file formats and make you wonder why you ever sweated not having M$ Office installed on your home computer.
• Google Desktop Search
  Search your hard drive like you search the Web. Google Desktop indexes song data and email and comes with a handy Sidebar great for wide-screeners sick of all the whitespace on the right side of Lifehacker.
• Google Earth
  Someday I want to be a licensed airplane pilot. Google Earth lets me pretend from my desk at home in between Lifehacker posts. Now available for Mac, too.

Communication

• Trillian
  I admit Google Talk’s turned my head a coupla times, but Trillian still has my heart. Tabbed multi-protocol mult-name instant messaging with Wikipedia integration is simply yummy.
• Thunderbird
  I know this web-based email thing is all the rage with the kids, but T-bird lets you manage email offline, spell-check inline as-you-type, and respond personally to hundreds of repetitive messages with a couple of clicks. Take that, Gmail.
• Skype
  It’s not just for talking to the computer with a headset anymore. Word on the street has it that with a Skype USB phone and some cheapy-cheap SkypeOut credits, VOIP can be yours.

Spyware Protection

• Ad-Aware
  If it weren’t for Ad-Aware, I’d be trying to stomp on the roach in a full-screen IE pop-up window right now while someone bought imported child porn from the Netherlands with my stolen credit card number and a Nigerian drained my checking account. Thank you, Ad-Aware.
• ZoneAlarm
  Every once in awhile for fun I check the number of high-risk intrusions that ZoneAlarm has blocked on my always-on broadband connection, and I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Media

• VLC
  Both Windows Media Player and Quicktime went “Buh?” when you tried to play that video file. Trust me – VLC will play it.
• iTunes
  Some quickly-addressed yet shady privacy issues with the new release aside, iTunes still handles my 55 gigabyte music collection like a champ.
• Picasa
  First thing I install for family members when they get their first digital camera.
• Audacity
  Wanna record a song being played on an Internet radio station? How about clip a tune down to 20 seconds to make it your cell phone’s ringtone? Audacity will do ya right.

Utilities

• FoxIt PDF Reader
  In the time it takes for Adobe Acrobat Reader to launch and then load up that PDF, you could download, install and open it with FoxIt with time to spare. Ditch Adobe for FoxIt’s leaner, meaner PDF browsing.
• 7-Zip
  When WinZip started refusing to open certain necessary file formats, I switched to 7-Zip and never looked back. ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM and DEB, oh my!
• SyncBack
  Protect your data with SyncBack, which supports backup and synchronization across local disks, network drives and FTP servers. Check out my recent bout of SyncBack love and backup scheme goodness here.

Web

• Firefox
  The “duh” choice, of course. But once you download, don’t forget to drive with the keyboard, set up 15 useful search shortcuts, get the Greasemonkey extension installed and running some great user scripts, and to check out the ever-growing list of our favorite extensions. Oh, and Mac users? Get yourself a Firefox build optimized for you.

I know y’all are serious about your free software, and that’s why I like you so much. Anything you’d include or exclude on this list? Let us know in the comments

A serious vulnerability has been found in the popular KDE open-source software bundle. The flaw, deemed “critical” by the research outfit the French Security Incident Response Team, could allow a remote attacker to gain control over vulnerable systems.

A serious vulnerability has been found in the popular KDE open-source software bundle. The flaw, deemed “critical” by the research outfit the French Security Incident Response Team, could allow a remote attacker to gain control over vulnerable systems. KDE is a desktop software package for Linux and Unix systems and includes the Konqueror Web browser and other applications.

The vulnerability lies in the JavaScript interpreter engine used by Konqueror and other parts of KDE, according to a security advisory posted Thursday. An attacker could craft a special UTF-8 encoded URI sequence to exploit the flaw, according to the advisory. For an attack to be successful, a person would have to visit the attacker’s Web page using Konqueror, the FrSIRT said in its alert. Affected are KDE 3.2.0 up to and including KDE 3.5.0. Fixes are available.

When my right earbud started making an annoying crackling sound I thought it was just the earbuds fault. But recently on iLounge it appears that a bunch of other iPod users have also had the problem, and with third party headphones as well! So, if you’re using an expensive pair of earbuds with your 5G — Check Out!