Another previously undocumented, yet-to-be-patched security vulnerability in Microsoft Word is actively being exploited in cyberattacks, Microsoft said Thursday.

The vulnerability is the fourth zero-day vulnerability to arise in the Microsoft application in two months. Microsoft hasn’t provided patches for any of the flaws, despite acknowledging that the holes are being used in attacks on its customers.

“There have been very limited attacks reported that are attempting to use the reported vulnerability at this time,” a Microsoft representative said Thursday in a statement about the latest problem. The company is investigating this latest report and may issue a patch, if needed, the representative said.

The newest problem allows an attacker to hijack systems running Word 2000 and causes a crash of Word 2003 and Word XP, Symantec said in an alert Thursday. “An attacker could exploit this issue by enticing a victim to open a malicious Word file,” the Cupertino, Calif.-based security company said.

Source: News.com

After many months, even years, of promising an e-mail push technology equivalent to what the RIM Blackberry service offers, it looks like Palm has finally done it.

At least it has come close, with a management component still missing.

Available next week, The Treo 680 and Treo 700p Smartphones will update Palm’s VersaMail to include Microsoft Direct Push technology.

Although the push capability was promised via the next Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync Update, the push component of ActiveSync was delayed.

The benefits of push over push-like are in battery life and real-time immediacy of e-mail.

Source: InfoWorld

About half of the downloads claiming to be free versions of Microsoft’s Vista operating system are actually malicious Trojan horse software, security vendor DriveSentry warned Thursday.

With Vista’s consumer launch just days away, hackers have been bombarding discussion boards with offers of “cracked” versions of Windows Vista, which are typically being distributed on peer-to-peer networks, said John Lynch, vice president of sales and marketing for DriveSentry.

These posts offer downloads of the operating system that skip Vista’s activation process, created by Microsoft to prevent users from running illegal copies.

Users who fall for the scam can end up with some pretty nasty problems, according to Lynch. DriveSentry researchers have found malicious key-logging software and spyware on about half of the downloads it has examined recently, he said.

Source: Yahoo

The latest update is that Pirate Bay broken the $20.000 barrier! Also, the pirates officially telling you all that they have to go for plan B - buying their own island and trying to claim it as their own nation. The Sealand goverment has not been answering e-mails lately and we take that as a sign of not being willing to discuss this venture.

So far The Pirate Bay have a couple of islands they have set their eyes on. In a few days the new target island will be announced and the price for it.

Google says its YouTube viral video-sharing site, acquired last year for $1.65 billion in stock, will remain an independent subsidiary of Google and continue to operate separately.

So, status quo for now. Except now there is a tad more integration. As of Thursday, when you type in “cats dancing” in Google Video’s search box you will get relevant video from YouTube too. YouTube’s results were already being included in the main Google search box.

Source: News.com

After a five-year wait, and repeated delays, Microsoft Corp. will release the new Windows Vista operating system next week. And based on early signs, it may be tough to escape it on your television — even if you don’t plan to put it on your computer.

Comedy Central confirmed Wednesday that Gates will be the guest on the popular “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on Monday night, the eve of Windows Vista’s launch. Tony Fox, executive vice president with the network, said Gates would no doubt discuss Vista, but the segment probably won’t be limited to it.

“Jon is a very curious guy … and so I’m sure he’ll ask him about a lot of things,” Fox said. “I expect it’ll be a great interview.”

Multicore processor specialist Plurality Ltd. is starting to ship evaluation boards and associated development kits for its HyperCore Processor, the first designs to emerge from the work on its HyperCore Architecture Line. Commercial 64-core chips are scheduled for the third quarter of this year.

Plurality (Netanya, Israel), a privately owned company established in 2004 by a group of academic engineers and industrialists, says its architecture is one of the most scalable general purpose multicore processors yet announced, and has demonstrated HyperCore blocks reaching up to 256 cores.

The initial design was implemented on an Altera Stratix II-180 FPGA and incorporates sixteen 32-bit RISC cores managed by a high flow rate synchronizer/scheduler, sharing a common memory. The FPGA design comprises a 4-Mbit data cache, a 2-Mbit instruction cache, 4 32-bit multipliers and 4 64-bit dividers.

The first version of the device to be made in volume will be done on eASIC’s Nextreme 90-nm Structured ASIC family, with 64 32-bit RISC cores running at 150MHz.

“The success of our proof of concept shows that Plurality’s unique, patented technology is able to provide the much expected performance promised by parallel processors, while offering the programmability of a serial processor,” said Moshe Serfaty, Chairman and CEO

Source: InformationWeek

20th Century Fox served YouTube with a subpoena Wednesday demanding the Google-owned viral video site disclose the identity of a user who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of primetime series “24″ and “The Simpsons.”

The subpoena, which first came to light on the blog Google Watch , was granted by a judge in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after being filed by the News Corp.-owned studio on January 18. It is not yet known whether YouTube has complied with the request.

In addition, a second, lesser-known video site, LiveDigital, was also served with a similar subpoena.

Source: Reuters