The production of three different USB stick models from Sony has been halted according to a recent report by Tom Sanders at vnunet.com

This is related to the recent news about rootkits that were included in the the products which can pose a potential security risk. However, the company said that they halted the USM-128C, USM-256F and USM-512FL products because of modest sales rather than security concerns.

They also mentioned that they are investigating the security issues about these three products. They did not make a comment whether they will make a recall for these products.

Two years ago, Sony was also involved in a rootkit scandal.

Source: VNUNET.com

Clients; a business wouldnt be in business without them. We love them but they often drive us mad. Once again we are digging into our archives for those of you who may have missed certain articles or not been a visitor to Technibble at the time. In this blast from the past we’ll show you some of our most popular articles about clients.
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Five patches has been released by Microsoft this week. Two of those updates were rated “important”, two were rated “recommended”, while the other was rated as “optional”.

The statement from Microsoft said, “On Tuesday, Microsoft released new reliability/compatibility hotfixes (KB938194 and KB938979) via Windows Update. The updates are a collection of fixes made to address a small set of reliability and performance issues. These updates provide incremental improvements (or fixes) to the most common issues—but in general, these improvements or fixes are very narrow in scope. For more information, please go to the Windows Update home page.”

These updates were classified as “incremental fixes” according to the message from Microsoft to The Register.

The optional patch is about AMD’s Catalyst installer component.

Source: The Register

An update has been released today by various websites about the Windows Genuine Advantage meltdown that occurred last weekend.

Microsoft said that the failure is due to “human error.”

“Nothing more than human error started it all. Preproduction code was sent to production servers. The production servers had not yet been upgraded with a recent change to enable stronger encryption/decryption of product keys during the activation and validation processes. The result of this is that the production servers declined activation and validation requests that should have passed,” said Alex Kochis who is the program manager of the WGA blog.

He also said that this event should not be classified as an outage.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

It happens to all the time to onsite computer technicians. You have to install some software or have to wait for a antivirus scan to finish which can take up to an hour. You have done everything else you could possibly do to the computer while its scanning such as cleaning out any temp folders and disabling unneeded programs in MSConfig. So what can you do during this time?
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Your client comes to you saying they cant play certain videos. You take a look at the computer and see the error message saying “Error loading codec..”. You instantly know the problem. You tell the client that the computer simply hasn’t got the right codec installed to play that video. Now, you just have to figure out what codec that video actually needs.

This is where GSpot comes in. GSpot is a free utility that analyzes any video and can determine what codec its video and audio was encoded in. GSpot can also show you a wealth of other information such as the bitrate, frames, width and height etc..

Once you know what codec the video was encoded in using GSpot, you can download the appropriate codec and the video should work.
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According to a slashdot reader, F-Secure has identified that the Sony Microvault USB sticks products hides a directory from the API of Windows.

The negative thing about this is that it is technically possible for malware to hide in the hidden directory which the USB sticks created.

The directory is located under “c:\windows\”. In this hidden directory, the files are also hidden that some antivirus scanners cannot scan this area of a user’s PC. Users can use the Command Prompt and they can create new hidden files within this directory. The reader also notes that there are ways to run files from this directory.

Source: Slashdot

The latest beta version of Windows Vista’s Service Pack 1 has been leaked out to BitTorrent websites according to various tech websites.

The file is compressed in a 200 MB size and when it is uncompressed, it will be 684 MB in a .exe file format.

Screen shots have been posted by a blogger about this service pack and there’s a link in the source article below where you can view them.

“Unpacked this Service Pack is enormous, just over 1,7GB. The installation process involves no less than 3 restarts before it’s done,” said Odd-Magne Kristoffersen who wrote the blog.

Source: Vista.Blorge.com

Most businesses have one. A bread-and-butter client is one who makes up a large portion of your business. Its not entirely uncommon for some businesses to have a bread and butter client that generates 50% of your work. When I first started out back when I was 17, my mother introduced me to one of her art students who was looking for someone to fix her computer. I went out to her place for the first time and after that, this person became my bread-and-butter client.
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Did you know there was a way to test anti-virus/anti-malware applications to make sure they are working correctly? Well, there is. “Eicar” is a string of code which most antivirus applications detect as a virus, typically with an obvious name like EICAR-AV-Test. In the past, each antivirus vendor had their own test code to set off their product. However in recent years the Eicar test file has become somewhat of an industry standard and most major antivirus software will spot it. In this article, we’ll tell you what it can test and show you how to make a test file.
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