How to prevent Windows Vista's green ribbon of death

Don't you just love it when something is so notorious for a particular shortcoming that a new term is invented to describe it? It happened with the Windows Blue Screen of Death. It happened with the Spinning Beach Ball of Death in Mac OS X. And it happened with the odd-number curse, referring to every other Star Trek film.

Now it has happened with Vista's own Green Ribbon of Death, shown below.

The green ribbon is basically a progress bar, a screen element Microsoft has sadly gone to great pains to excise from Windows Vista. But this particular progress bar is the harbinger of death for the active Windows Explorer window, which, unfortunately, is not uncommon in Vista.

Rapidshare To Be Forced to Shut Down Following Court Defeat?

Last week we reported on rumors that Rapidshare had, or was about to be, shut down, rumors that now look likely to resurface.

The company, one of the world’s largest ‘one-click’ file hosting services, has lost a copyright infringement case against German performing rights outfit, GEMA. Representing a claimed 60,000 members and more than 1 million rights owners worldwide, GEMA has taken an aggressive stance in pursuing legal action against Rapidshare, trying to force it to be accountable for the infringing actions of its users.

For its part, Rapidshare has always insisted that it cannot be held responsible for these actions, such as when users upload copyright works (in this case, music) to their servers for subsequent downloading by others.

On 23 January 2008, the district court in Düsseldorf (Landgericht) disagreed with this assertion after GEMA succeeded in convincing the court that Rapidshare should take responsibility for infringements carried out within its service.

GEMA are trying to imply that as a result of the decision, Rapidshare will be forced to take preventative action to stop GEMA works from even getting onto their servers, rather than a DMCA-style after-the-fact removal. GEMA says that if Rapidshare are forced to filter they will likely end up with a service that’s not worth operating, so they may decide to shut it down completely.

Firefox 3, Beta 3 has just been released.

Firefox 3, Beta 3 has just been released. Over 350 memory leaks have been fixed and reductions have been made in the memory footprint.

The shortlist of new features and changes in this milestone include:

* Improved security
* Improved ease of use
* Richer personalization
* Improved platform features
* Performance improvements

Beta software is not intended to be used by the general public but if you want to live dangerously then it is available for download.

The more complete list of new features and changes in this milestone include:

* Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security including support for Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager.

* Improved ease of use through: easier add-on discovery and installation, improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, resumable downloading, full page zoom, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.

* Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart bookmark folders, location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles

* Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, JavaScript 1.8, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.

* Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 350 memory leak fixes, a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks, and reductions in the memory footprint.

Download Beta

Beware of Fraud e-cards

The risk of getting a virus-laced Valentine's Day e-card is on the rise. The FBI has issued a warning about cards carrying the Storm Worm virus.

It may be due to the fact that Valentine's Day is a giant holiday for greeting cards, or it may be because people as a whole are getting very lazy and cheap, but the use of e-cards is on the rise. This provides a perfect opportunity to spread malware.

The Storm Worm is one of the big viruses that is eager to exploit your love, lust, and laziness to attack computers. It comes by way of an e-card that requires the recipient to download the card, which happens to be malware.

The Storm Worm is a botnet that turns your computer into a work horse for the controllers of said virus, allowing your machine's power and Internet connection to be utilized for spam, identity theft, denial of service attacks and more.

The general rule is do not open e-mail when you are not familiar with the sender. Then again, if you haven't been following this rule since the beginning of the Internet, then Valentine's Day greeting cards are the least of your concerns, and you should really get your PC checked out.

Happy Valentine Day..

Microsoft Dishes Up XP SP3 Release Candidate 2

Microsoft last week inched another step closer to releasing Windows XP service pack 3, offering up XP SP3 release candidate 2 to a cadre of private beta testers.

Released on Feb. 7, XP SP3 RC2 "catches the build up on previously released hotfixes and responds to critical feedback from previous betas," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email to ChannelWeb.

Microsoft plans to release XP SP3 to manufacturing in the first half of 2008, although the exact timing "will always be based on customer feedback as a first priority," said the spokesperson.

Originally slated for release in 2006, XP SP3 has been pushed back on numerous occasions. The previous XP service pack, SP2, launched in August 2004.

XP SP3 will include all of the fixes Microsoft has released since launching XP in 2001, as well as support for Microsoft's Network Access Protection (NAP); 'keyless activation', which lets IT administrators install SP3 without entering product keys for each copy; and detection of so-called 'black hole' network routers that can slow network performance.

Last November, researchers from Devil Mountain Software published test results that showed XP SP3 not only offered a performance boost of up to 10 percent over XP SP2, but was also faster than the Vista RC and Vista SP1.

Microsoft responded by claiming that testing of pre-RTM service packs doesn't offer much in the way of useful, accurate data.

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