Not a day has passed since the most anticipated release of the 6th’ book in the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince�? found its way to the peer to peer networks.

Although J.K. Rowling have declined to publish any of the Harry Potter books as an E-Book, fearing illegal copies, the audio book versions are very popular in the file sharing networks and illegal scaned and OCRed copies of the last book in the series already been downloaded thousands of times.

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During Windows XP installation, the setup program prompts you to enter your user name and a company name. This this information will later be displayed on the General tab of the System Properties dialog box.

Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn’t provide you with an easy to use tool for changing this information. However, you can alter the registration information by editing the registry.

Launch the Registry Editor Start->Run Type Regedit.exe

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\Current Version.

Locate and double-click the RegisteredOwner value. Change the Value Data setting to the new user name.

Locate and double-click the RegisteredOrganization value. Change the Value Data setting to the company name you want to appear, and click OK.

Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows XP.

A newly discovered and as-of-yet unpatched security vulnerability in Windows XP could let an attacker remotely crash computers.

The flaw affects the Windows Remote Desktop Service, which lets users access their Windows PC from a remote location. An attacker could remotely exploit the problem to crash a victim’s PC in what’s known as a denial-of-service attack, according to a posting on the Security Protocols Web site earlier this week. The user would then see the Windows “blue screen of death.”

Microsoft knows of the security flaw and is working on a patch, a company representative said on Friday.

Source: ZDNet

Concerns about “phishing” e-mail scams will likely delay the expansion of domain names beyond non-English characters, the chairman of the Internet’s key oversight agency said Friday.

Vint Cerf, head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, would not speculate on when such characters might appear but said Internet engineers must now spend time “trying to winnow down, frankly, the number of character (sets) that are allowed to be registered.”

Demand for non-English domain names is high outside the United States and a U.N. panel studying Internet governance said in a report Thursday that “insufficient progress has been made toward multilingualization.” It cited the lack of international coordination and technical hurdles as among the problems.

Officially, the Internet’s Domain Name System supports only 37 characters — the letters of the Latin alphabet, 10 numerals and a hyphen.

But in recent years, in response to a growing Internet population worldwide, engineers have been working on ways to trick the system into understanding other languages, such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.

Source: AP