Twirling galaxies, exotic nebulae and exploding stars are now just a mouse click away for amateur astronomers. Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes. Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the planets, and trace their locations in the night sky.
Japanese scientists say they have successfully tested a super fast broadband internet connection via satellite with speeds capable of reaching 1.2 gigabits per second. The speed is a record for satellite communications, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, and is significantly faster than many terrestrial broadband connections. The fastest speed available to residential customers in Canada, through Videotron in Quebec for example, is 50 megabits per second, or about 24 times slower.
Check Point Offers Consumers 'New Level' of Security
Check Point Technologies says "browser virtualization" could be the next hot security technology for the consumer market. Check Point, which helped popularize the firewall a decade ago, yesterday introduced ZoneAlarm Forcefield, a browser tool and service that creates a mirror environment, sometimes called a "sandbox", where users can surf safely without fear that their systems will be permanently damaged by hackers or malware. ForceField is Check Point's implementation of the browser virtualization concept, in which all of the operating system elements that interface with the browser, including the registry, are duplicated during a Web session. If malware or some other infection is introduced, they interact only with the duplicate, leaving the core operating system unharmed.
Windows Vista More Secure Than XP, says Security Company
Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista is 37% more secure than its Windows XP ancestor, a security vendor claimed today, a rate it hinted was disappointing. Using different data collection techniques, Microsoft has recently asserted that Vista is 60% more secure than XP. For every 1,000 machines running Vista, security company PC Tools counted 639 unique threats over a six-month period, said Michael Greene, the firm's vice president of product strategy, on Friday. "A threat is actually when [malicious code] has penetrated the machine," Greene said. "The malware has to be on the machine to be counted by our ThreatFire community." Vista's number is lower than the one for Windows XP. Users of PC Tool's ThreatFire behavioral-based anti-malware software who run the nearly seven-year-old XP reported 1,021 unique threats per 1,000 machines in the same six-month period.
Almost 500,000 people have been caught out by a booby-trapped media file, says security firm McAfee. The fake file poses as a music track, short video or movie and has been widely seeded on file-sharing networks to snare victims. McAfee said the fake media file outbreak was the largest it had seen for about three years. Those running the fake file get bombarded with pop-up ads and risk compromising the safety of their PC. The fake file or trojan has been widely distributed on the eDonkey and Limewire file-sharing networks. The file has many names and is written in different languages to trick people into downloading it. The titles make the file appear to be music tracks, pornography and full versions of popular movies. Anyone downloading the trojan and trying to run it is asked to install a codec that will play the supposed media.
Researcher David Vorel mapped interconnected, bot-infected IP addresses and created this geometric representation; former CSO editor Scott Berinato annotated the map and added interactive controls so you can zoom in and explore botnets' inner workings.
The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC, a now-defunct computer-maker. The message was sent via Arpanet, the internet's forerunner, and won its sender much criticism from recipients. Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day. Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (£121m).
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