Tech Thoughts Daily Net News – October 1, 2009

FCC: Broadband Up to 50% Slower Than Claimed – If you run around bragging about your cable or fiber broadband speeds, you might just stop after you read this report. According to the FCC, we’re not getting all that we pay for. This is not good. Read the story for more amazing findings.

Tsunami news used to hide rogueware – Cybercriminals are using news reports about the deadly tsunamis that have struck in the Pacific Ocean.

A Networking Primer: What’s a MAC Address? – When you think about networking, IP addresses are probably the first things that come to mind. But there’s another type of network address called a MAC address that actually forms the foundation upon which IP address communication is built, at least where local area networks are concerned.

Tech Thoughts Daily Tech News 2

New Trojan Evades Banks’ Anti-Fraud Systems ‘URLZone’ calculates how much money to steal from a victim’s account without raising suspicion – A next-generation Trojan recently discovered pilfering online bank accounts around the world kicks it up a notch by avoiding any behavior that would trigger a fraud alert and forging the victim’s bank statement to cover its tracks.

Five Reasons Why You Need a Wireless Router – I know that there are still some people out there who plug their broadband connection right into their PC. This is, of course, a mistake. There are also others who live with the wired-only modem their broadband provider gave them. This is also a mistake. Here are five ways you can improve your online experience with one single piece of hardware.

New botnet hides commands as JPEG images – Security researchers have stumbled on a new botnet that uses an interesting technique to mask its nefarious intentions. The Monkif/DIKhora botnet, which is pushing out Trojan downloaders to infected machines, is encoding the instructions to appear as if the command-and-control server is returning a JPEG image file, according to SecureWorks researcher Jason Milletary.

10 things you should do to a new PC before surfing the Web – A Microsoft Windows PC that has not been updated for security vulnerabilities will be compromised by some from of malware within minutes of connecting to the Internet. Take steps to protect yourself before you start Web surfing.

Windows SMB2 exploit now public; Expect in-the-wild attacks soon – Fully functional exploit code for the (still unpatched) Windows SMB v2 vulnerability has been released to the public domain via the freely available Metasploit point-and-click attack tool, raising the likelihood for remote in-the-wild code execution attacks.

Off Topic:

How Twitter may influence your next hiring decision – The supply and demand of the job market tilts in one direction or another. In tough times, individuals are scrambling to demonstrate their value to employers. In flush times, employers are scrambling to attract talent. Social media may help smooth out these extremes.

A netbook story or the failure of computers in education – One reason I’m a writer is because I can’t write. It’s called dysgraphia. My parents dealt with it by getting me a typewriter. Flash forward 35 years. My son is dysgraphic. But there are no typewriters.

Britain asks Schwarzenegger to close prostitute web site – A British government minister asked California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday to shut down a U.S. website that allows men to rate prostitutes, including many working in London.

Today’s Quote:

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”

G.K. Chesterton

Today’s Free Downloads:

MP3 Quality Modifier – MP3 Quality Modifier does one thing–change the bit rate of your MP3 file–and it does it quickly, well, and en masse. It’s the en masse part that makes this program very handy. Reducing the bit rate of files also reduces their size, so you can fit more files in the same amount of space.

USBDriveFresher – A lot of software, including Windows, writes temporary housekeeping or index files to your drives. A prime example is the thumbnail file Windows creates for images when you display them as such. This file can actually grow quite large. With today’s vast hard drives, the file system flotsam on your PC hardly matters, but your USB flash drive often doesn’t have space to waste on such temporary files. USBDriveFresher automatically deletes these files so you can maintain the maximum amount of free space on your thumb drive.

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2 Comments

Filed under Internet Security Alerts, Tech Net News

2 responses to “Tech Thoughts Daily Net News – October 1, 2009

  1. ‘Five Reasons Why You Need a Wireless Router – I know that there are still some people out there who plug their broadband connection right into their PC. This is, of course, a mistake. There are also others who live with the wired-only modem their broadband provider gave them. This is also a mistake. Here are five ways you can improve your online experience with one single piece of hardware.’

    Wow Bill,
    I didn’t know that this small thing is so important!
    Thanks.