Israel’s central Holocaust memorial said on Tuesday over 2,000 people in Iran and thousands of other people, including Iranians, had visited its new Farsi Web site documenting the mass murder of 6 million Jews.

The Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem launched a Farsi language version of its main site, at www.yadvashem.org, on Thursday which includes historical material and pictures.

A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said since then 11,000 people had visited the new section of its site, with 2,242 of them from Iran. She said the body logged around 3,500 visits to its main Web site from Iran in 2006.

The spokeswoman said the body planned to launch a similar site in Arabic shortly.

Source: Reuters

Two South Korean computer programmers have been arrested on suspicion of sending out 1.6 billion spam e-mail messages in violation of the country’s commerce laws, police said on Tuesday.

The two men, one aged 20 and the other 26, are suspected of sending out the unsolicited e-mail messages between September and December last year in what police describe as one of the biggest spam blasts in the country’s history.

The two are suspected of obtaining personal and financial data from 12,000 South Koreans who responded to their spam messages. The pair then sold information on those people to lending services firms in return for 100 million won ($106,400), police said.

Source: Reuters

Retailers across the country stayed open through the wee hours of Tuesday morning to sell the long-awaited Windows Vista operating system, even though most knew customers wouldn’t be lining up out the door for the midnight launch of Microsoft Corp.’s latest product.

At a CompUSA store in Raleigh, only about a dozen people waited around to be among the first to get Vista. The store reopened at 10 p.m., offering customers coffee and discounts on other items including printers and recordable DVDs, and planned to stay open until at least 2 a.m.

The low turnout wasn’t surprising, especially after Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said the company wasn’t pushing the midnight sales events.

Source: AP

Some TomTom satellite navigational devices used to keep drivers on the right road shipped with malicious code that tries to install onto any Windows PC the gizmo is connected to, the Amsterdam-based company confirmed Monday.

A “small, isolated number of TomTom GO 910’s” manufactured during the fourth quarter of 2006 “may be infected by a virus,” TomTom said in a statement. Althouth the TomTom GO 910 runs Linux and so is not affected by the malware, when the hardware is connected to a PC to back up its data, the virus tries to infect the computer.

TomTom pooh-poohed the risk, calling it “low” and telling users to update their PC’s antivirus scanning software or, if they don’t have the defense installed, to add it. “The Internet offers many free online virus scanners like Symantec and Kaspersky that will remove the virus safely from the TomTom GO 910 as soon as it is detected,” the company said.

Security vendors didn’t take such a laissez-faire attitude. Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, for instance, disputed TomTom’s claim that the malware risk was low.

Source: InformationWeek

Security researcher Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista, called ‘Protected Media Path’ (PMP), which is designed to seriously degrade the playback quality of any video and audio running on systems with hardware components not explicitly approved by Microsoft.

The bypass of the DRM protection was in turn performed by breaking the Driver Signing / PatchGuard protection in the new operating system.

Photoshop Lightroom, the photo file manager from Adobe Systems, is now available for preorder, the company announced Monday.

Adobe’s photo management software, which has been in beta for months for Windows users and since 2005 for Mac OS users, is scheduled to begin shipping in mid-February.

Lightroom is a file management tool intended to complement photo-editing software such as Adobe’s Photoshop. It enables photographers to import, minimally edit, manage and output batches of large digital photo files rather than having to deal with each file individually.

It is a direct competitor to Apple’s Aperture 1.5 software, which currently sells for $299.

Lightroom will sell at the Adobe store for US$199 in the United States and Canada through April 30, according to Adobe. After that, it will be sold for about US$299. The public beta version is set to expire February 28.

Source: News.com

Ars Technica is reporting that upgrade versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition cannot be installed on a PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already installed. This is a change from previous versions of Windows, which only required a valid license key. This change has the potential to make disaster recovery very tedious.

The article says: ‘For its part, Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.

Source: Slashdot

News Corp.’s popular Web network MySpace said on Monday it will donate a database on U.S. sex offenders to a center that tracks missing children, though state legal authorities warn the company has not done enough to protect youngsters on its site.

MySpace will donate use of its database, which combines close to 50 U.S. state registries on convicted sex offenders, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). The center will use the database to help law enforcement in their investigations.

Source: Reuters

Microsoft Officially launched the the new operating system, Windows Vista, in Israel a day early than the rest of the world. In addition to Vista, Microsoft also released Office 2007.

Israel is the first country to get the official release of Vista. Microsoft will launch Vista in the rest of the tomorrow, January 30th’ 2007 with the official kick off by Steve Ballmer scheduled to be in New York city at 10:00 am EST

Adobe Systems on Monday is expected to detail plans to submit its Portable Document Format specifications to the International Organization for Standardization, a body of particular importance to governments and large corporations.

Subsets of the PDF format have already been standardized, including one for archiving documents. But Adobe customers, particularly governments, have told Adobe that making PDF an ISO-approved standard would raise their level of confidence that the format would be around in the long term, said Kevin Lynch, Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect.

Source: News.com

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: ZDNet

BlueJ is a popular academic IDE which lets students have a visual programming interface. Microsoft copied the design in their ‘Object Test Bench’ feature in Visual Studio 2005 and even admitted it. Now, a patent application has come to light which patents the very same feature, blatantly ignoring prior art.

Source: Slashdot