Have you ever seen large businesses hand out promotional material with their name on it such as calendars, mousepads, pens, notepads, hats, shirts etc..? I am sure most of us have at some point and there is a good reason why they do it. It is to try and always have their name in the front of the customers mind. To be “stuck” in their heads.
This works well for big business or printing businesses (since they can do it at cost), but this is type of marketing is probably too expensive for most computer businesses. However, there are some great ways you can also be sticky at a fraction of the cost. Read on.
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This was recommended by one of our helpful forum members, tkrabec; Dariks Boot and Nuke is a free bootable utility that will completely wipe a hard drive. A simple format will not protect the data left on a hard drive as it can be recovered with some easily available utilities. This program is ideal for people selling second hand computers, those retiring a hard drive or for returning faulty hard drives which had data on it to the manufacturer (thus the sledgehammer method cant be used).
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Microsoft has released a late patch last week for users of their Office suite software on Mac operating systems.

They released it last thursday which is two days after they released the latest security updates for Windows operating systems.

One of the update packages has a rating of “critical”. This fixes version 2004 of Microsoft Office. Overall, there are three vulnerabilities in Excel spreadsheet software and all have a rating of “important”. Microsoft mentioned in the bulletin that “These vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Excel file.”

The update has a file size of 15.4 MB.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

When you first had the dream of setting up your own computer store or workshop, you may have dreamt about some nice leather swivel chairs, big oak tables, lines of filing cabinets and having the whole place nicely wired for your LAN.
Sorry, but this is definitely the wrong sort of thinking for any new computer business.
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A patch has been released by Sun Microsystems for The Java Platform Standard Edition Version 6, Update 2. The Standard Edition of Java has four different versions and the other versions are already patched before they released this patch.

Security Vendor eEye Digital Security has found the bug over six months ago. The bug lets a hacker install unauthorized software by making a malicious web site which a user may visit.

SANS Internet Storm center has issued a warning on Friday about the processing of bitmap and jpeg images in Java. However, a patch was released for these two flaws back in March.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

Sophos.com has reported a new spam in their SophosLabs Blog. It is about a medical document which reminds the reader that his or her dosage is running low.

The subject is “New mail - Private”. The sender is named “Administrator”, and the body of the message says, “Your private and confidential message is attached.”

The PDF file contains three paragraphs. The first paragraph is the reminder. The second one tells that the company has a discount offer. The last paragraph warns the reader to be cautious on buying generic prescription offers.

The title in the document is “Viagra & Cialis”, followed below by “Joint Corporate Reminder of Re-Order.”

Source: Sophos

There’s often no easier target than a new business. Full of the joys of being the newly appointed senior executive managing director, with a few K behind you from one of your grandparents and maybe some of the business you’ve been doing for friends and family, there’s a great temptation to fall prey to the unscrupulous methods of wily sales teams.
Our commenter last week (in response to our Stock story), Bay Geeks Computer Repair shared these words of wisdom:
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The Register has reported that there are reports from many people who are having problems after they have installed one of the patches that was released on Tuesday by Microsoft.

There is no consensus on what the problem is. SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Centre said, “The reports we got so far seem not to lead to any specific thing that happens in many cases, just various things going haywire.”

Many computers of a component manufacturer in UK have been affected and their workers have problems on managing contacts and emails.

Microsoft has documented some of the problems under the “known issues” part of their bulletin.

Source: The Register

Computerworld has reported that researchers has started arguing about a bug which let hackers attack users who use Microsoft Internet Explorer. However, this bug only happens when the users also have Mozilla’s Firefox internet browser installed on their PCs. Therefore, it is not clear whether it’s Microsoft’s fault or Mozilla’s.

“There is an input validation flaw in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is to blame for not escaping ‘quote’ characters when passing on the input to the command line,” said Thor Larholm who is a Danish researcher.

A person who is on the other side of the argument said, “This is in fact not an IE issue, it is a Firefox issue.”

Window Snyder promised a fix for Firefox not because he sees Firefox is at fault, but to protect its users to this bug.

Source: Computerworld

Version 2.0 has been released for Windows Live OneCare in a beta state.

It is based on the feedback that Microsoft has received from the users of this security suite software. The previous version was 1.5.

The public beta version of this software is free and there is a link at Techspot’s article below where you download the installation from a particular Microsoft webpage.

In this new version, a few more features has been added for managing a user’s home network. The statement from Microsoft says, “Our research has shown that most homes now have approximately 2.5 computers. This means that in addition to securing and maintaining multiple PCs, consumers now need to do the extra work associated with connecting devices and securing networks.” Therefore, they have added new features to help users on having an easy way to manage their own network.

Source: Techspot