Antivirus developer, Symantec, has filed lawsuits for fraud, unfair competition, trafficking, and other offences to different firms in the US and Canada.

The firms are:
1. Acortech
2. mPlus
3. Rowcal Distribution
4. Logical Plus
5. SoftwareOutlets
6. Global Impact
7. Directron
8. eDirect Software

The first 7 firms are located in either California, New York, Florida, or Texas. The eight firm is located in Canada.

The software that are affected are:
1. Norton SystemWorks
2. Norton AntiVirus
3. Norton Internet Security
4. pcAnywhere
5. Symantec AntiVirus Small Business Edition

The article at The Register did not mention if the stores were selling counterfeit versions of software other than Symantec’s.

Source: The Register

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The official name for the next Windows Server operating system will be announce very soon. It will be called ‘Windows Server 2008′. An event is scheduled to take place at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference at L.A. where this operating system will be officially unveiled to the public.

The codename of this OS was Longhorn which was the same name that Microsoft gave when they were developing Microsoft Vista.

Hopefully, this will not get as much negative feedback that Vista has been receiving for the past few weeks.

The logo was posted in Microsoft France but Microsoft has removed all references about this software.

It will replace the ‘Windows Server 2003′ brand.

Source: PCAUTHORITY

The Register has posted an article about the problem that users are still having in their computers that has a Windows Vista operating system.

The problem is, when deleting, transferring, or copying files, it takes a much longer time than it should be. It’s very slow compared to how the processing is done with Windows XP.

Two examples were given in the article. First, a user wanted to delete 23 GB of data and when he did it using Windows Vista, it took twenty-five minutes to complete the process. In a Windows XP Pro Virtual Machine that he has installed on top of Vista, the result is only eight seconds.

The other example is based on copying 3.8 GB of data in Windows 2003. When the same operating was done in XP, it is exponentially faster.

Source: The Register

Treesize Free is a free utility to view the space usage on your harddrive folder by folder (and its subfolders) which is something Windows is seriously lacking. Its a little bit hard to explain and a picture tells a thousand words, check out the screenshot for more information.

Works for Windows 9x/2000/XP/Vista.
Read the rest of this entry »

Another news has been released about the Windows Update feature in Microsoft’s Windows operating systems. The new problem is that some users are noticing that their processor usage goes up to nearly 100% when their computers are processing the updates.

This problem has something to do with the svchost.exe file.

Microsoft has released a patch to fix this specific problem but some users responded that they are still experiencing this problem.

If you are one of those people that still has this problem, the popular method of fixing this is to disable the automatic updates.

There’s a link to Microsoft’s patch at Vista.Blorge’s article and they also noted that you may need to install another package if the patch did not work.

Source: Vista.Blorge.com

A report has been released by Google that approximately, one in ten web pages contain malware.

Their research team sampled 4.5 million pages and they have found that 450,000 pages contain a script which installs malicious codes. The codes include trojans and spyware. 700,000 more pages are thought to have malicious codes in it too.

The researchers hope that these results will help developers on making safe surfing tools to prevent users from landing into one of the malicious web pages.

The Google team said that malware can be inserted in legitimate sites by using a variety of ruses.

Source: The Register

Computerworlduk has published an article about a hack that bypasses firewalls in Windows’ Update feature.

The technology named (BITS) Background Intelligent Transfer Service made its debut in Windows XP operating system and it is also included in Windows Server 2003 and the new Windows Vista.

“It’s a very nice component and if you consider that it supports HTTP and can be programmed via COM API, it’s the perfect tool to make Windows download anything you want. Unfortunately, this can also include malicious files,” said Elia Florio who is one of the researchers at Symantec’s security response team.

“It is novel. Attackers are leveraging a component of the operating system itself to update their content. But the idea of bypassing firewalls isn’t new,” added Oliver Friedrichs who is the director of the team.

Source: COMPUTERWORLDUK

A news has been released about Microsoft’s removal of some features which are supposed to be included in their Server virtualization software.

The features that were removed are
1. Live migration .
2. Letting users to add computer parts such as processors, memory, and storage on the fly.
3. The number of cores - it is now limited to a maximum of 16 cores which are either four quad-core or eight dual-core processors.

“We had some really tough decisions to make. We adjusted the feature set so that we can deliver a compelling solution for core virtualization scenarios while holding true to desired timelines,” said Mike Neil who is the GM of Microsoft’s virtualization strategy.

He also said that the beta version of this software will be released when Microsoft Longhorn Server is in its manufacturing stage.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

A software update has finally been released to the public which fixes the flaw of corrupting iPods when using either the Safely Remove Hardware function or ejecting them in Windows Explorer.

When version 7.1 of iTunes was released, it was more compatible with Vista than its previous versions. However, it did not include a patch which fixes a flaw that many people had experienced after connecting their iPods to their computers.

Now, users may finally enjoy on using iTunes again without worrying whether their iPod will be corrupted by downloading the new patch.

Source: Engadget