Microsoft will release an update for their Hotmail service in a few days according to various tech sites.

One of the features that will be included in the update is an increased performance. According to techspot.com’s article, it can run as much as 70 percent faster on slower machines. Users would also be able to view the body of an email without clicking into it such as the functionality in Microsoft Outlook. More storage, auto-complete functionality when typing an email address in the “To” field, and easier calendar sharing options are some of the other features for the update.

Source: Techspot

Mark Harris of Sophos posted his predictions about the headlines that malware authors will use in order to lure computer users to their message.

The main theme in his predictions is about the US Presidential elections and all four important figures (Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin) are included.

He notes that the company is holding a contest that anyone can enter. The people have to send their own predictions and if their predictions entry was selected as the best by an expert panel, the person would win a prize. Click the source link below and read the bottom part of the article for complete details.

Source: Sophos

When you go onsite to fix a computer, you should obviously fix the problem that you were sent there to do but I am sure you could always find something else to do such as updating their antivirus, patch their Windows, update applications, empty temporary folders and clean out dusty computers. This all takes extra time that the client may not want to pay for and can be potentially risky. So how far should you go? Read on.
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A blog entry was posted at Sophos two days ago about a spam that was truthful to its claims.

Sophos included a screen shot of the message which consists of a few sentences which includes profanity, different text sizes, and text colors. It instructs the recipient to forward the message to five people. The blog entry notes that the size of the email is 90 kb.

The Sophos researchers verified that nothing will happen if a user sends the chain letter to his or her friends.

Source: Sophos

Sophos has posted a blog entry about an email that they receive which is about a bank email that contain a link to a .su domain.

The email has four paragraphs and the link is located on the last word of the second paragraph. The second paragraph notifies the user that his or her Firstbanks banking account is about to expire so he or she need to update it immediately. In order to do this, they must click the ‘here’ word.

Zoe Markham of SophosLabs notes that Soviet Union ceased to exist almost 20 years ago and jokes that maybe this is a surprise comeback.

Source: Sophos

Vnunet.com has posted an article about an iPhone game that can inject malware to the computers of Windows users.

The author of the article, Shaun Nichols, notes that this game has been available for the Apple handset before Apple opened their iPhone App store and people have played them on “jailbroken” handsets.

The spammers sent messages with titles such as “take a break” and “virtual iPhone games.” The attachment in these messages is a file called “penguin.panic.zip”.

Nichols also mentioned in the article that this does not affect iPhone users nor Mac OS X operating systems. Sophos has classified the trojan as a low-level threat.

Source: Vnunet

NetSetMan is a small freeware tool designed to allow you to change your computers network settings quickly and easily. Lets say you take a laptop onsite for network related jobs but at home you have a special setup. Then you go onsite and have to keep changing it to “Obtain Automatically” so it works on the clients network. Once you return home, you have to set it all back to the way it was.

This is where NetSetMan comes in, it allows you to make network setting profiles which you can activate based on your location. For example, you may have one setup for your home, one for work and one for when you are on a public wireless access point.
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Google’s web browser, Chrome, is now available for Mac users. The company who made the port of the Windows version to the Mac version is CodeWeavers. They made a software called CrossOver for Mac which is a program that let users run some Windows applications on Macs with an Intel processor.

CodeWeavers mentioned that this is a proof-of-concept than anything else according to Dan Moren of Macworld. Moren said that it took three to four minutes to start the software on his Macbook. It feels like a Windows application and he included a screen shot of what it looks like.

Google is working on a native version for the Mac.

Source: Macworld

Cray has launched an affordable supercomputer which starts at $25,000 and it is available to be purchased at Amazon.com.

The model of the supercomputer is CX1 and it is a blade server that can take up to 8 blades according to the report at guardian.co.uk. These blades could have one or two Intel Xeon processors. Those who want more power could link three CX1s together.

Richard Dracott of Intel said, “Cray’s CX1 system will bring many HPC capabilities to the office that were previously confined to the datacenter, enabling more users to employ supercomputing to help them solve some of their most difficult computational problems.”

Source: Guardian.co.uk

A few days ago, Zoe Markham of Sophos posted an article on the blog section at Sophos.com about postcard spam.

The spam contains two links. One of the links says “Click Here” which will take the user to a malicious site. The other link shows “http://www.postcards.org” which is a legit site.

Markham notes that when readers click the “Click Here” link, they will be redirected to a site that requires them to donate money before they could view the postcard and he included a screen shot which shows this message. He also notes that the site do not include https which means that the site is not secure to send payment information.

Source: Sophos