Apple® today introduced iPod® Photo, the newest member of the iPod family that lets you take your entire music and photo library with you wherever you go. iPod Photo holds up to 25,000 digital photos alongside your music library and displays them on its stunning high-resolution color screen, allowing you to scroll through your photo library almost instantly using iPod’s patent pending Click Wheel. iPod Photo lets you combine your music and your favorite photos to create magical slideshows on your iPod, and features TV-out for sharing your slideshows on big screen televisions and projectors. iPod Photo comes in 40GB or 60GB models which hold up to 10,000 or 15,000 songs, and its extended battery life gives users up to 15 hours of music playback or up to 5 hours of slideshows.

Featuring Apple’s patent pending Auto-Sync technology, iPod Photo makes it easy to automatically download your entire digital music and digital photo library onto iPod and keep it up-to-date whenever it is plugged into a Mac® or Windows computer using FireWire® or USB. Mac users can Auto-Sync their iPod with their photo library in iPhoto™ and Windows users can Auto-Sync their iPod with their photo collection in Adobe Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Album or their My Pictures folder. iPod Photo works with iTunes® 4.7, released today, providing music fans with digital jukebox on either a Mac or Windows computer and access to the iTunes Music Store, the number one digital music service in the world.

Pricing & Availability The new 40GB and 60GB iPod Photo models will begin shipping today for a suggested retail price of $499 (US) and $599 (US) respectively, through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. iPod Photo includes a dock with audio and video out, earbud headphones, 1.4m AV cable, 1.2m 30-pin to FireWire cable, a 1.2m 30-pin to USB cable, AC adapter, black carrying case and a CD with iTunes 4.7 for Mac and Windows computers.

iPod Photo requires a Mac with a FireWire or USB 2.0 port and Mac OS® X version 10.2.8 or later (v10.3.4 or later required for USB 2.0); or a Windows PC with a FireWire or USB 2.0 port or FireWire or USB 2.0 card and Windows 2000 (with Service Pack 4 or later), XP Home or Professional.

Security experts have discovered a worm that targets Apple’s Macintosh OS X operating system.

While not in the wild, the SH/Renopo worm is still fairly malicious as it attempts to turn off firewall and other security software, says Brett Myroff, CEO of local Sophos distributor Netxactics..

“The worm, also known as Opener, can turn off the Mac OS X firewall and other security software; will download and install hacker tools for password-sniffing and cracking; will make key system directories world write-able; and will create an admin-level user for later system abuse.�?

Renepo also turns off accounting and logging to help hide its presence, adds Myroff. “You do not want the Renepo worm anywhere near your Mac OS X network, as it makes so many security-related changes to your systems that all bets are off once you have been compromised.�?

Internet users at home are not nearly as safe online as they believe, according to a nationwide inspection by researchers. They found most consumers have no firewall protection, outdated antivirus software and dozens of spyware programs secretly running on their computers.

One beleaguered home user in the government-backed study had more than 1,000 spyware programs running on his sluggish computer when researchers examined it.

The study being released Monday by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance found that 77 percent of 326 adults in 12 states assured researchers in a telephone poll they were safe from online threats. Nearly as many people felt confident they were already protected specifically from viruses and hackers.

When experts visited those same homes to examine computers, they found two-thirds of adults using antivirus software that was not updated in at least seven days.

Two-thirds of the computer users also were not using any type of protective firewall program, and spyware was found on the computers of 80 percent of those in the study.

Read Full Article at MSNBC

Stepping up the heated battle of online search and services, Yahoo Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. have joined forces to tap each others’ customers and put Web search features into Adobe’s popular Acrobat Reader software.

For San Jose-based Adobe, the partnership will add online features to one of the software maker’s core products, Acrobat. The program is used by more than 500 million people and has become a common format for viewing documents over the Web and in e-mail attachments.

Under the deal, Adobe will first introduce a cobranded Yahoo browser toolbar that users can choose to install on their computers when prompted to download an update of Acrobat Reader.

The toolbar will feature links to Yahoo products and services as well as Adobe’s Web-based subscription service that lets people convert documents into the Adobe PDF file format.

Later, the companies said, the toolbar will add features such as the ability to quickly convert Web-based content into Adobe PDF files. Yahoo search will also be built into a future version of the Acrobat Reader, allowing users to search for more information from within the document without goiing through the extra steps of launching a Web browser.

If you want to disable the Log Off and Turn Off Computer buttons on the Start menu.

Follow these steps:

Open the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
Under HKEY_CURRENT_USER Navigate to:
\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.
Right-click the Explorer key, and select New | DWORD value.
Name the value StartMenuLogoff, and press [Enter] twice to access the Edit DWORD Value dialog box.
Type 1 in the Value Data text box, and click OK.
Right-click the Explorer key, and select New | DWORD value.
Name the value NoClose, and press [Enter] twice to access the Edit DWORD Value dialog box.
Type 1 in the Value Data text box, and click OK.
Close the Registry Editor.

Borland Software announced Borland® Delphi™ 2005, previously codenamed “Diamondback” and the newest version of Borland’s Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for Windows® and .NET applications. Delphi 2005 combines Win32, .NET, Delphi and C# support all within one environment, significantly advances developer and team productivity and integrates with Borland’s leading Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions.

Below are some of the most significant Delphi 2005 enhancements:
(more…)

Hyperlinks are the basic building blocks of the web. Almost any web page contains hyperlinks, and with the browser’s help the users can navigate the web by clicking on a link.

Most users use their mouse to find and click the hyperlinks, but most browsers also allowing users to use their keyboard to navigate the hyperlinks.

Pressing the TAB key on a web page jumps from one link to the next, and pressing the Enter key will trigger a hyperlink action which then takes the user to another page. This functionality is built in many browsers and used by many people.

In May 12, 2004 Microsoft filed for a patent (20040210830) called “Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs” which does exactly that.

The patent abstract say “A user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document. The first hyperlink is, in response, given focus and a focus shape is drawn around the text or graphics for the hot region of the hyperlink. If the user again presses the tab key, the next hyperlink is given focus and a focus shape (i.e., an outline that surrounds the next hyperlink) is drawn around the next hyperlink. A user may also tab to a placeholder for an image in order to make a decision whether the image should be downloaded or not.”

If Microsoft gets this patent they can potentially ask all browsers manufacturers to pay license fees for this navigation feature, which is being widely used by almost all major browsers.

Yahoo has quietly purchased e-mail software company Stata Labs, in what could be an investment in a coming PC search tool to rival Google and Microsoft.

Stata Labs, a privately held company based in San Mateo, Calif., sells an e-mail application called Bloomba that lets people search message text and attachments. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo apparently bought the underlying technology of Stata Labs and does not intend to continue sales of Bloomba.

The acquisition comes only a week after Yahoo rival Google unveiled new technology that allows people to search data in e-mail, Word documents and Web pages. Microsoft also has designs to integrate desktop, e-mail and Web search from the operating system, and toward that end it recently bought a small e-mail search company called Lookup.

Yahoo executives have said previously that the company plans to introduce a desktop search tool.

Lycos is upping the amount of storage available to its free email subscribers to 300MB while those paying for its premier service will get a whopping 10GB. Subscribers pay £3.49 a month for 10GB storage. This beats Yahoo which offers 100MB and Hotmail which is still offering just 2MB, depsite promising an expanded service this summer. Google’s Gmail service offers 1GB.

Wessel van Rensburg, Lycos Email and Mobile Product Manager, said: “People’s use of data has changed considerably with the growth of digital media such as music and photography. The LYCOS UK FreeMail 300MB service means there is a free webmail product on the market with sufficient storage for medium email users to be able to share images and documents - something they would struggle to do on Hotmail’s paltry 2MB service.”

The service is branded the “Online Drive” - it can be synched with Outlook to make appointments, contacts and other documents available online from any computer.

Nvidia has become the first to release a motherboard controller that makes it possible to build a hardware firewall within a PC itself.

The catch is that the new PCI-based chip set will only work with AMD Athlon 64, 64 FX, and Sempron processors. Consequently, the company expects that NForce 4 will be aimed at higher-end applications such as gaming in its initial roll-out. It is not clear whether the chip set will be made to work in Intel systems at a later date.

Although software firewalls are effective on PCs, the NForce 4 “ActiveArmor” protection engine claims to carry out its security routines without hindering the performance of the PC, acting as an “accelerated” co-processor. This should improve system performance by unburdening the main CPU from having to process network traffic.

ActiveArmor’s firewall functions look fairly standard, and include packet inspection, port filtering, and other anti-hacking features as well as remote administration which is a must for IT departments.

More interesting to businesses in the light of recent history will be the application filtering features of what Nvidia has dubbed “Intelligent Application Manager” (IAM). This, it is claimed, will stop Trojans hijacking the PC to use it as a server and will perform sophisticated monitoring of outbound as well as inbound application traffic.

Source: Yahoo

The FBI is investigating the penetration of a university research system that housed sensitive personal data on a staggering 1.4 million Californians who participated in a state social program, officials said Tuesday.

The compromised system had the names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers and dates of birth of everyone who provided or received care under California’s In-Home Supportive Services program since 2001, says Carlos Ramos, assistant secretary of the state’s Health and Human Services Agency. The program pays a modest hourly wage to workers who provide in-home care for hundred of thousands of low-income elderly, blind and disabled people.

Officials say they have not determined whether or not the intruder actually downloaded the database, which had been made available to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley under a confidentiality agreement. “We don’t know whether or not the information was accessed,” says Ramos. “Since it is sensitive data we figured it would be best to get word out to people so they can take preventive measures just in case.”

The agency is recommending that anyone who participated in the program since 2001 contact the three major credit reporting agencies to place a fraud alert on their credit profiles, and start monitoring their credit reports for signs of identity theft.

Source: Security Focus

Secunia Research has discovered two vulnerabilities in browsers that support tabbed browsing, which can be exploited by malicious web sites to obtain sensitive information and spoof dialog boxes.

1). Inactive tabs can launch dialog boxes so they appear to be displayed by a web site in another tab. This can be exploited by a malicious web site to show a dialog box, which seems to originate from a trusted web site. Successful exploitation would normally require that a user is tricked into opening a link from a malicious web site to a trusted web site in a new tab.

Browsers: (Test your browser here)

* Konqueror
* Mozilla / Mozilla Firefox
* Opera
* Netscape
* Avant
* Maxthon
* Safari

2). Inactive tabs can gain focus from form fields on web sites in another tab. This can potentially be exploited to collect sensitive data entered in form fields on other web sites. Successful exploitation would normally require that a user is tricked into opening a link from a malicious web site to a trusted web site in a new tab.

Browsers: (Test your browser here)

* Mozilla / Mozilla Firefox
* Netscape
* Avant Browser
* Maxthon

Source: Neowin

In addition to the above vulnerabilities, Intenet Explorer (SP1 and SP2) suffers two new vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system.