Microsoft on Monday warned of a vulnerability in its Video ActiveX Control that could allow an attacker to take control of a PC if the user visits a malicious Web site.
There have been limited attacks exploiting the hole, which affects Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Microsoft said on its Security Response Center blog.
This is the second DirectShow security hole Microsoft has announced in the past few months. The company has yet to provide a security update for a vulnerability announced in May that involves the way DirectX handles QuickTime files.
Since there are no by-design uses for the ActiveX Control within Internet Explorer, Microsoft is recommending that users implement a workaround outlined in the security advisory. Customers can automatically implement the workaround by following the instructions under "Fix It For Me" in the Knowledge Base article for advisory number 972890 on the Microsoft support site.
Asked to explain what is meant by "no by-design uses," Christopher Budd, Security Response Communications lead, said: "In older operating systems like Windows XP that were originally developed under older programming methodologies, this ActiveX control was enabled for use within Internet Explorer by default to allow for possible future uses. These uses never materialized and as part of the more stringent security requirements that Windows Vista was developed under, this control was later disabled for use within Internet Explorer."
Even though Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are not affected by the vulnerability, Microsoft is recommending that users of those products also use the workaround.
Microsoft is working on a security update and will release it when the quality is at the appropriate level for broad distribution, the company said.
The Microsoft Video Control object is an ActiveX control that connects Microsoft DirectShow filters for use in capturing, recording, and playing video. The control is the main component used in Windows Media Center for building filter graphs for recording and playing television video.
When it is used in IE, the control can corrupt the system state in such a way that arbitrary code could be run by an attacker. If the user is logged in with administrative rights, the attacker could take complete control of the system.
Antivirus vendor Symantec said it was seeing the flaw being exploited in China and other parts of Asia and cited reports that indicate thousands of Web sites are hosting the exploit.
Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 are at risk, but people running IE 8 are not vulnerable, Symantec said.
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10280141-83.html?tag=mncol;posts
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Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Microsoft warns of hole in Video ActiveX control
Monday, July 6, 2009
10 humor sites sure to make you LOL
(CNN) -- Bored with Pearl, the cursing toddler landlord demanding rent money? Not amused by those cutesy pictures of cats with the baby-speak captions?
The Web is full of clever blogs and funny sites, including many that find comedy in real life.
Maybe you need some fresh sources of Internet humor. The Web is full of clever blogs and funny sites, including many that collect amusing gags from users and find comedy in real life.
Click away from the cats and replenish your list of favorite bookmarks with these 10 new or lesser-known humor sites:
Snapping the perfect family photo creates stress for anyone involved. Should we go casual and wear blue jeans with polo shirts on a beach or be a bit crazy, wear matching outfits and -- wait for it -- lean toward the camera? Ah, choices. This user-powered blog highlights the most well, awkward, family photos submitted by its contributors. Just don't show this to your mom for portrait suggestions.
Breaking news: Your life is most likely mundane and not glamorous or melodramatic like "Gossip Girl." Thankfully, someone has finally created a Web site for average people to commiserate about their average-ness. For a taste, here is a recent posting: "Today, I ate a "Fun Size" Snickers bar. I think that the regular size is more fun. MLIA (My life is average)."
Logging on to Facebook, one is bombarded these days with pointless quizzes, embarrassing photos and a friend request from ... Mom? The inevitable has happened -- your parents are on Facebook. Using submissions from users, this site highlights just what a foreign place Facebook is to parents. If you think associating with them in person is uncomfortable, this blog highlights the awkwardness that comes when your mom takes a "What porn star are you?" quiz.
Don't Miss
Someone has found a way to make the Garfield cat comic strip funny: edit out Garfield. The author, who recently released a book of these comic strips, digitally edits out Garfield for a less-than-flattering portrayal of Garfield's owner, Jon Arbuckle. Without his lasagna-loving cat, he looks like a lonely man who talks to himself -- and whose life resembles that of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin." Remember, if you are having a bad day, it could be worse -- you could be Jon.
The 1980s brought great advancements in the photography world, such as the first SLR camera, the BetaCam and ... laser backgrounds. It was a magical world back then, where little Jimmy posed for his school picture not against a typical light-blue background but a "Tron"-like video game gone awry. Looking at these pictures, one has to wonder if the use of those dangerous lasers injured any kids.
Who needs high school when history can be explained in 140 characters? Did you know the origin of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech? @martinlkjr tweets: "Bought a sleep journal. I keep having dreams but forget to write them down."
Safety signs are supposed to protect us from the dangers of big, scary machines and equipment. But most of the time, the signs turn out to be a parody of themselves. This blog gathers photos of actual safety signs with symbols of people being electrocuted, crushed by garage doors and so on. The "No Weapons Allowed" sign would not deter any killer from shooting the place up.
These electronic greeting cards offer wry commentary on everything from birthdays to topical events such as swine flu and the death of Michael Jackson. A recent Father's Day card said, "You're the best father I can imagine unless you lost my inheritance in the economic meltdown in which case I can imagine better."
The task of illustrating a depressing point, like a company's plunging profits, always lands on the poor graph. But no one said the lowly graph always has to be bleak -- or boring. This Web site displays the best user-submitted graphs on a variety of oddball topics, from the percentage of people who dislike Michael Jackson to things people want to do in New Jersey (No. 1 option: Leave). Although GraphJam has been around for awhile, it remains one of the cleverest sites on the Internet.
Feeling regretful about those French fries you had with lunch? Here is a site that makes those greasy treats look healthy. Witness the chicken finger bacon pizza, which is drenched in Thousand Island dressing and baked to golden perfection, or the Pattie LaBurger, a triple-bacon cheeseburger that uses deep-fried burger patties as buns. If you dare to eat any of these, make sure you have a cardiologist on speed dial.Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/03/funny.websites/index.html
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Friday, July 3, 2009
Gaming is good for brain
Remember training your brain through games? Since bursting onto the scene a few years ago in Nintendo's hit Brain Training games, the concept of gaming our way to bigger, better cortexes has flamed out a bit, due largely to a flood of poorly-made, copycat titles and the dwindling of the belief that this sort of thing actually makes you smarter.
Food for thought
But while consumers have shifted away from the pseudo-educational genre, scientists have dropped it under a microscope in the hope of gleaning some insight into exactly how games affect the mind.
And according to some recent studies, it turns out that playing video games not only stimulates those synapses, but might actually make you a sharper thinker after all.
Courtesy of a $1.2 million grant, researchers from North Carolina State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology are hard at work studying whether or not video game playing can boost thinking skills and memory in the elderly. Rather than simply determining if certain games increase certain brain functions, the team is hoping to first identify the qualities that make a game good for the brain, then use that information to build a prototype brain game from the ground up.
The game best suited for the job? Oddly enough, it's EA's critically-acclaimed Boom Blox games. Dr. Anne McLaughlin, assistant professor of psychology at NC State, believes the Wii puzzle-party franchise contains three fundamental brain-strengthening qualities -- attentional demand, novelty and social interaction -- key to making a great brain game.
"For example, if we find that novelty and attentional demand improve cognition, we'll then develop a game that focuses on that," she said.
While McLaughlin and her crew aim to help grandparents stay sharp, other are examining what effects gaming will have on the next generation. A recent article in Scientific American targets "plasticity," or the brain's ability to dynamically change in response to experiences. Children are more susceptible to this kind of change, which means that the kinds of games they play could have different effects on their adult skill sets.
So which games are best for kids? That depends on what they want to be when they grow up. A study at the University of Rochester indicates that playing action games can increase hand-eye coordination and sharpen vision, while playing games like The Sims 2 might improve social interactions and even make people more empathetic. So if Johnny wants to be a fighter pilot, he might want to play some Wii Sports Resort instead of Wii Music.
Plus, you know, it's just a better game. And it doesn't take a big brain to figure that out.
Source: http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/is-gaming-good-for-the-mind-/1331945
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Nielsen: Teens spend barely a third as much time online as adults
Worried that the youth of America is wasting away in front of a computer screen? Well, consider this: according to a new survey, U.S. adults actually spend way more time surfing than teenagers do.In a report titled "How Teens Use Media," Nielsen found that the average teen (ages 12-17, for the purposes of the survey) spends about 11 hours, 32 minutes a month online, versus about 29 hours for the average American, or a whopping 42 hours, 35 minutes for adults aged 35-44.
Now, I'd imagine we could chalk up much of the difference to the fact that many working adults have a broadband-connected PC sitting on their desk, whereas teens are often busy going to school, hitting the mall, going to band practice, or tapping out texts. Lots of texts. (More on that in a second.)
But even as time spent online tapers off as the average American gets older, folks aged 65 and older are still surfing an average of 28 hours, 34 minutes each month, nearly triple the amount of time spent by teens, according to Nielsen.
Teens are also watching less online video than most adults, Nielsen claims, with kids aged 12-17 streaming a little more than three hours of online video a month. Compare that to about five-and-a-half hours a month for young adults between 18 and 24, or four hours, 44 minutes for grown-ups aged 25-34.
Then again, maybe part of the reason teens spend so little time online (well, on average, anyway) is that they're so mobile—and by mobile, I mean cell phones. The Nielsen survey found that 77 percent of teens have their own cell phone, and that they're sending and/or receiving an impressive 96 SMS messages a day, or nearly 2,900 a month—a figure that's nearly double the average from early 2008. Amazing.
Meanwhile, the average numbers of call that teens make or receive each month has actually dipped to 191, compared to 286 in mid-2007, Nielsen says.
A few other interesting teen statistics from the Nielsen report: They're watching an average of three hours, 20 minutes of TV a day, they get a 25-minute daily dose of console gaming, and (in a bit of good news for print publishers) one in four reads the newspaper.
So, teens: About how long do you spend online each day? Use your phone more than your PC? Ever have to remind your parents to shut down the browser and, like, go outside or something?
Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/54157
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Thursday, July 2, 2009
EU Slashes Mobile-Phone Roaming Rates
The European Union has dramatically slashed the rates that wireless carriers can charge consumers roaming across the EU's member states.
Previous rate reductions introduced in 2007 cut the cost of voice roaming calls within the EU by 70 percent. Under the new rules that went into effect Wednesday, noted EU Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding, EU roaming charges have been reduced by a further 60 percent.
"The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end, thanks to the determined action of the European Commission, the European Parliament, and all 27 EU member states," Reding said. "From today, all Europeans making calls or sending texts with their mobiles can experience the EU's single market without borders."
The Downside for Carriers
Though the new EU rules are limited to reducing the rates that wireless operators charge each other, Reding expects the changes will make it much cheaper for roaming consumers to place and receive calls, send text messages, and surf the Web on mobile phones.
"I call on the mobile industry to pass these savings on to data roaming customers swiftly," Reding said. "The commission and national regulators will monitor data roaming charges very carefully and assess next year whether the roaming market is finally becoming competitive."
The new rules come at an inopportune time for the region's wireless carriers. The EU's earlier roaming cuts have already had a negative impact on the carriers, which previously had "made margins on inter-country calls, and particularly on data roaming," said Jessica Ekholm, a Gartner principal research analyst. T-Mobile said earlier this year that "lower roaming revenues and newly introduced regulation on roaming and termination charges had a negative impact on revenues."
Due to foreign-exchange fluctuations, the recession, and higher unemployment, there has been a decrease in the number of people traveling, which has led to lower roaming revenues as well, Ekholm observed. However, the carriers are likely responsible for at least some of the revenue shortfall.
"I just recently saw research saying that consumers avoid calling and using data while being abroad, as they do not know the cost of calling and using data," Ekholm explained. "They would consider increasing their voice and data usage if operators make billing more transparent to the customers."
Avoiding 'Bill Shock'
Beginning Wednesday, holiday travelers and road warriors roaming the European Union will be able to surf the Web, download movies, or send photos without fear of receiving future "bill shocks," thanks to the EU's wholesale download cap price of EU1 (US$1.41) per megabyte. By contrast, the previous average wholesale download price was EU1.68 (US$2.38) per megabyte, with price peaks of EU5.10, EU5.30 or even EU6.82 (US$7.22, $7.50 or $9.66) in countries such as Estonia, Greece and Ireland.
The new roaming rules also introduce a cutoff mechanism once a consumer's wireless bill reaches EU50 (US$70.87), unless the user establishes a different cutoff limit. The goal is to eliminate cellular horror stories such as the EU46,000 (US$65,149) bill recently incurred by a German downloading a TV program while roaming in France.
EU-wide text-messaging costs are now almost three times cheaper than the previous EU average. What's more, outgoing call charges are now capped at EU0.43 (US$0.60) per minute when roaming, with billing incurred by the second after the first 30 seconds instead of by the minute. Additionally, received calls are being charged at a maximum rate of EU0.19 (US$0.27) per minute.
Source: www.newsfactor.com
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