While The Inquirer reports that 10 people were sending almost 80% of the world spam, GMail’s filters seem to be weakened. I got today almost 30 spam messages, when on a regular day i used to get as much as 5 or 6. Are they hiding better or are we weaker?

One of my friends asked me to check his computer for some weird facts. I did and i noticed a few unwanted processes. I went to sysinternals.com to download ProcessExplorer, but i noticed i got redirected to http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx, the new place for Sysinternals great utilities.

For those of you who don’t know, Sysinternals was bought by Microsoft some months ago.
I saved all those great freeware proggies, fearing they will be removed to make room for Microsoft ones. This did not happen. Yet.

Rupert Murdoch recently said that myspace.com is worth not 6 billion dollars. A lot more that the buying price, some months ago. A lot of money, if you ask me.
MySpace is nice. A lot of traffic, a lot of people. But not really that good of a site. Lots of sex scandals, lots of pervers, lots of pr0n, lots of copyrighted work. The only good thing that myspace did, after being bought, was to offer users an embed player. Why go to YouTube to upload videos when you can do that here? they said. Aside that, nothing.
I have a gloom feeling about all these bubbles, i fear that some day they will crash.

On his personal blog, Mark Russinovich announced today that Sysinternals, a leading in repair software has been acquired by Microsoft.

I?m very pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired Winternals Softwareand Sysinternals. Bryce Cogswell and I founded both Winternals and Sysinternals (originally NTInternals) back in 1996 with the goal of developing advanced technologies for Windows. We?ve had an incredible amount of fun over the last ten years working on a wide range of diverse products such as Winternals Administrator?s Pak, Protection Manager, Defrag Manager, and Recovery Manager, and the dozens of Sysinternals tools, including Filemon, Regmon and Process Explorer, that millions of people use every day for systems troubleshooting and management. There?s nothing more satisfying for me than to see our ideas and their implementation have a positive impact.

In Sysinternals portofolio are award-products such as Administrator?s Pak, Protection Manager, Defrag Manager and Recovery Manager and lots of free tools such as Filemon, Regmon and Process Explorer, used by many system administrators around the world.

That?s what makes being acquired by Microsoft especially exciting and rewarding. I?m joining Microsoft as a technical fellow in the Platform and Services Division, which is the division that includes the Core Operating Systems Division, Windows Client and Windows Live, and Windows Server and Tools. I?ll therefore be working on challenging projects that span the entire Windows product line and directly influence subsequent generations of the most important operating system on the planet. From security to virtualization to performance to a more manageable application model, there?s no end of interesting areas to explore and innovate.

Mark, known lately as the one who found and fought against Sony’s spyware, will be joining Microsoft as a Platform and Services Division tehnician.

More on his personal blog here.

eefoof.com prides itself as being a new service that offers money to those that upload content.
I registered myseld and I did a little test.
I uploaded a 2 minute video on it a few hours ago. Altought 4 hours have passed, the video is still not available. I was curios to test the site’s other options, but this little experiment kinda let me down.
I know they are new, but wainting four hours for a video to be processed is not acceptable for someone who wants to beat youtube and other famous sites at video content. What are they doing with it? Scanning every single frame for 20 minutes? C’mon already!

5 hours and counting…

With a total of 4 million people connected to the Internet (out of a 22 million population), Romania is not so well educated computer-related. Of course, we have folks at Microsoft and Google, we do a lot of online crime, but that’s not what this story is about.
Browsers are a fun tool to use. We hate Internet Explorer, we pride on Opera and Firefox, we feel good as we use Safari.
In Romania, figures are close to the world trend. Internet Explorer is on a permanent downfall (although reports and articles speculate that version 7 will get back some users), while Mozilla Firefox and Opera are gaining ground.
We conducted a little study in the past month, analyzing the data provided by trafic.ro on top sites in Romania and these numbers came up. IE is at the top, with 80% of the market share. Firefox is gaining, slow and sure, more and more users, this month reaching 13%. We teamed Opera versions 8 and 9 to a single value, 4%, which we consider being low for a fast and capable browser.
We are hoping to see changes in the following months, mainly in Firefox’s favor.

Browser market share in Romania
Internet Explorer 6.x 11.314.000 80%
Firefox 1.0 1.964.000 13%
Opera 560.000 4%
Others 162.000 3%
Total 14.000.000 100%

I was reading Bob Parson’s lament on domain kitting and I was a bit surprised to see the CEO of the biggest registrar in the world complaining that other registrars are making money in a dishonest way.
Well, Bob, if you and others would pay more attention, maybe you wouldn’t complain. Domain kitting happen because YOU are greedy. The fee for a domain has gotten at an all time low with godaddy selling domains for 9$ and registerfly to 3$.
But greed goes further when you have a 30 days money back guarantee.
Google spam, link farms, adsense, all comes back to money for the wise.

I read magazines and i watch online at a lot of new mobile phones. Most of them have video cameras. You can take pictures, make videos, is an useful option to have on your mobile phone. Easy access to a tool that can record a moment of our life they way it was. You get the picture.
Is this good? yes, you may say.
And then picture yourself as a cheated girlfriend with a mad boyfriend. You thought it was fun to take those private pictures? Well, wait to see them online. Mobile fun, indeed. I had to give the sad news to a friend, that a site displays intimate moments of her and her boyfriend. It was not a good moment. She suffered a depression.
I got hold of a site that displays up-skirt pics of women. Most of them of young girls, pictures taken in school classrooms or in places or situations you didn’t have a digital camera at hand. Again, a bad moment with a digital camera inside a phone.
Are we guilty for misusing the technology? Are the makers guilty for making it accessible for everybody?

The word goes from the Inquirer that 80% of the search request from Microsoft’s domain are to Google. In other companies, the proportion is 64 % of Yahoo and 100% from Google’s own stuff.
Now, how much time will M$ take before blacklists Google and be before @microsoft.com discovers Qmail:)

Not so long ago the announcement of the Undiluted Platinum mod-chip for the PSP console shook my world. It was only one year after the release of the PSP. One week after that, a team of programers announced the first bios for the new chip which should permit booting any version of the firmware, running backup of games and by-passing any hardware protection of the PSP leaving the console open for homebrew applications.
Now, with the mod-chip diagrams here, I wonder how long will it be before the first Hong Kong bundles with the chip integrated?
In other matter of speaking, how long will the first PS3 mod-chip take to be released?

In recente studii, spyware-ul si adware-ul au ajuns sa depaseasca virusii in topul pagubelor si enervarea utilizatorilor.

Spywareul este definit ca program ce se instaleaza fara voia utilizatorului si inregistreaza activitatea acestuia de pe anumite situri (plati online, banci) pentru a trimite apoi acste informatii creatorului sau. Aceste informatii sunt folosite apoi pentru a goli conturile posesorilor. Rari in Europa de Est, acesti “virusi” au mare raspandire in tarile unde cumparaturile online sunt ceva obisnuit.
Read more »

BoingBoing reported on friday that EMI is using very popular brazilian singer Marisa Monte’s new CDs to install malware on user’s computer. The rootkit blocks playing on Linux, MacOs and iPod, just as the brazilian government launched a project aiming to distribute 1 million linux PCs to the brazilian people.
We’ve seen this a few months ago, when Sony did the same thing, and then apologise when the whole thing blew way over proportions.

Am I the only one that noticed that 2 days after new builds of Windows Vista were released to the public, Bill Gates announced it will be delayed?
In other news, all Microsoft partners drop a few points at the stock market, because of this announce.
There’s something wrong in Denmark!

There are news all over the place about what’s going on in France with the DRM laws.
But, what do the french really want?
What we all want, actually.

The issue is simple. If I paid for this product, it legally belongs to me and I am free to use it the way i find it fit. If I want to see movies on it, I will. If I want to run other content on a standalone dvd player I own, i should not be stopped to do that. Because it’s mine. If it breaks, Steve Jobs don’t pay for it, I do.

The logic of what Apple and others are doing escapes me. I can’t copy a song i bought more than a few times. I can’t run home-made dvds on my standalone player. If the ideea behind this, stoping piracy, is ok, the results are limiting/breaking my civil liberties. What if next time the press sais we can’t read they newspaper only on the 16th bus? Or the tv stations ask us to watch them wearing red socks?

The same thing goes for the dvd players. I captured a party on my camera and i want to put it on DVD. Does my dvd writer know to write the informations that the player recognizes as original dvd and plays it?
If it does, there goes the copy protection.
If it doesn’t, then it’s kinda useless, because I can’t play my home made dvds.

At the base of DECSS (dvd copy protections remover) were the same principles. I want to be able to copy my own dvds, that I paid for. I want to put them on my hard-drive. I want to run them from linux. I want to add more subtitles to them.

It is mine and I should be able to do whatever I want with it.

You have to download and install the free software TMPGenc

Open TMGENC et add black “zone” on your movie by modifying it to the MPEG 2 format (DVD format):

• launch TEMPGSNC
• Select your DivX
• Click on “read” (depending on the freeware version) and choose DVD (PAL).mcf
• Then, you have to modify the size of the picture
• In the next step, you have to choose the masks (depending on the freeware version)
• Select”Position” et modify the output size
• Finally, start encoding

Then, to make sure that the file MPEG2 can be used on a DVD player, you can use the shareware TMPGenc DVD Author (DVD Authoring) and burn it.