Various tech sites have reported that Best Buy digital picture frames were “contaminated with a computer virus during the manufacturing process.” The products were sold under the name ‘Insignia’ which is an in-house brand of Best Buy.

The company said, “We apologise for the inconvenience that has been caused as a result of this incident.”

This is not the first time that this kind of news was released. Just a few weeks ago, a report was also released about a different retail company.

The particular product that was affected had a model number of NS-DPF10A. That particular model had been pulled from the store locations.

Source: The Register

An update has been released for Java 6 by Sun today. The newest update has 370 bug fixes which improves performance, fixes glitches and security flaws.

The offline installation of the Java Standard Edition Runtime Environment 6 Update 4 has a size of 15 MB while the online version package is a couple of megabytes smaller.

Those who want to upgrade do not need to delete the previous versions that are installed on their computers since if they are using 5.0 Update 6 or a later version, then all applets be executed using the latest version of Java environment.

The Register has the links on where to download the offline version and a link to the explanation on which bugs have been fixed.

Source: The Register

There is a new rootkit that was discovered by researchers. Unlike other rootkits, this one hides on the hard drive’s boot sector.

“A traditional rootkit installs as a driver, just as when you install any hardware or software. Those drivers are loaded at or after the boot process. But this new rootkit installs itself before the operating system loads. It starts executing before the main operating system has a chance to execute,” said Oliver Friedrichs of Symantec.

It infected several thousand computers since last month.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

Gamershell.com has reported that if NVIDIA has released a new set of drivers which fixes some experience issues for the first-person shooting game, Unreal Tournament 3. They note that users only need to download and install the drivers if they are experiencing any problems for that game.

It is available for the 32-bit version of Windows XP and both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.

These three versions can downloaded on their website too.

Source: Gamers Hell

A new flaw has been discovered by a security firm and researchers from Google that exists in contents of Adobe Flash files. They are the files that end with .swf.

They can be attacked by injecting malicious strings through cross-side scripting.

“Lots of people are vulnerable, and right now there are no protections available other than to remove those SWFs and wait for the authoring tools and/or Flash player to be updated,” says one fo the authors of the book, Hacking Exposed Web 2.0: Web 2.0 Security Secrets and Solutions.

Over 500,000 applets are affected according to a web search which return results from media, government, and corporate sites.

Source: The Register

Ars Technica has posted an article about a discovery that future versions of Mac operating systems may run Windows applications along with Mac applications without any additional things to download or install.

A man named Steven Edwards notes in a mailing list message that Leopard contains a loader for portable executables. The loader was undocumented. He added that the loader tries to find Windows DLL files when loading a Windows binary.

If Apple plans to use this function one day, then it means that people no longer have to buy additional software such as Boot Camp to run a Windows program that they want on their Apple computer.

Source: Ars Technica

The Times has released a news that more than half of the people who answered a survey about stealing Wi-Fi connections answered that they stole bandwidth from Wi-Fi routers that were insecure.

The Register notes that people who make this offense can be fined up to $1,000.

The data was collected on Sophos’ website in their “Have Your Say” survey.

Serious Organised Crime Agency told The Times, “…if the hacker has used your broadband to log on to an illegal site, this will be traced back to your wireless router. Then it is your job to persuade the police that you are innocent.”

Source: The Register

The Register has posted a news article that the latest Macintosh operating system does not support the latest version of Java.

“This is a show stopper for me, and I will have to revert to 10.4, since my job as a software engineer for Sun requires Java 6–this will likely prevent a lot of people from upgrading, and there’s a well represented Mac userbase at Sun,” said one of the users.

Java 1.6 has new functionalities and it fixed some bugs. There is no comment yet about this story from Apple. Moderators on Apple’s support forum has deleted topics about Java 1.6. according to The Register’s article.

Source: The Register

NumannH of Sophos reported that he came across a fake spyware/malware cleaner. Two screen shots were included in the blog entry of what the program looks like.

Here are some of the things that happened to his computer:
1. His desktop wallpaper was changed. It changed to a message which read: “WARNING! YOUR PC IS INFECTED!
2. It prevented him to start any new programs.
3. His PC will not let him run command line tools.

The software basically forced him to purchase the full version of the software in a secure webpage.

Source: Sophos

Adobe has warned their users that there was glitch that was recently discovered on their Acrobat and Reader softwares. This warning was given less than a day after Adobe released a patch for another vulnerability in those two softwares.

Users can patch up the glitch by applying the patches that were outlined in Adobe’s Advisory APSB07-18. The glitch exploits the ‘mailto’ command of the softwares.

The flaw lets someone seize a computer and implant a malware into it. The ones who are vulnerable are those who use Internet Explorer 7 in Windows XP or Server 2003 operating systems.

Source: Tgdaily