Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

We recently wrote about the free firewall being offered by PC Tools, and they have yet another free security application for those of you who want all the protection you can get. It’s called ThreatFire, and it runs alongside your existing antivirus software. With it your computer will be more able to detect malware before it has a chance to harm your computer.

PC Magazine put ThreatFire through its paces to see how it stacked up, and to find out how well it could detect the potentially dangerous malware, spyware, rootkits, keyloggers, and more. Here are their results:

After the required reboot at the end of installation, I got out my arsenal of malware samples, including adware, spyware, rootkits, Trojans, and rogue antispyware products … I wasn’t too surprised when [ThreatFire] let all but one of the rogue antispyware samples install and run …

When I compiled all of the malware-blocking test results, [ThreatFire] came out with 8.6 out of 10 possible points. If I omitted the rogue antispyware programs, however, that score zoomed to a perfect 10 out of 10. Tested against the same collection of threats, [Norton AntiBot] scored 7.1, and removing the rogues from the mix brought its score only up to 7.6. In fact, [ThreatFire’s] 8.6 score beats out the 8.1 points garnered by Spy Sweeper 5.2 with AntiVirus, our current Editors’ Choice for signature-based antispyware. That’s pretty impressive.

I did run a separate test using commercial keyloggers … [ThreatFire] detected every single one and successfully blocked almost all of them, scoring 9.5 out of 10. [Norton AntiBot] scored 7.1 against this same collection.

… For a sanity check, I rounded up a dozen-plus PC Magazine utilities that might look suspicious. KeyTick monitors keystrokes the way a keylogger might, BHOcop disables other BHOs, Startup Cop Pro puts itself in the start-up sequence—that sort of thing. Like [Norton AntiBot], [ThreatFire] didn’t make any erroneous accusations. It didn’t throw a single false positive alert on the PC Magazine utilities.

Looking through the stats from the PC Magazine article I have to say that the software looks rather impressive, and the free version of ThreatFire offers everything most users need. If you’re all about computer security this is one app you may want to throw on your system!

Download PC Tools ThreatFire
Thanks for the tip “S”!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 11, 2008 by CyberNet.

Finally! Well over a year ago I wrote about how a Microsoft blog was outlining how to make a Vista “PowerToy” gadget. The gadget that they were using for their demonstration was a Vista Search Index controller where you could pause or start indexing on-demand. For one reason or another the gadget was never actually released… until now!

The gadget, which is pictured to the right, is pretty conservative in the amount of space it consumes. It will show how many items are currently being indexed, and has several features that Vista power users will surely love:

• Monitor the current state of the indexer
• See how many items need to be processed
• View the total count of indexed items
• Stop and start the indexing service
• Open the Indexing Options control panel
• View the installed Windows Search version number
• Multiple backgrounds / color combinations
• Windows Search 4 Preview only (review): “Index Now” functionality.  This disables the “Back Off” functionality of the indexer for faster indexing.

I highly recommend using this gadget for any of the Vista users out there. Being able to pause the indexing is really nice for when you’re doing something computer-intensive like playing a game.

Windows Search Index Gadget Homepage [via Vista Blog]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

We mentioned the Jedi Concentrate application a few days ago from the App-A-Day blog and it is a really clever concept. It lets you dim everything except for the current application that you have open so that you can focus on it a little better. Someone decided to take it a step further by combining it with the Words Per Minute (WPM) program that App-A-Day also created.

By bringing those two together the new program will automatically dim the background as soon as you are typing more than 40 words per minute. It is pretty cool but I think a lot of people probably don’t type that fast and if you constantly pause while you type then it could get annoying. I think that once you hit the 40 words per minute it should lock-in the setting until the user disables it. Otherwise it starts to feel like you are on a website with one of those annoying flashing ad banners.

Don’t hesitate to download and try the program because there is no installation required. You simply extract the ZIP file and run the program…and if you don’t like it you can delete it with no harm done.

Download Jedi Concentrate WPM
News Source: App-A-Day Blog

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

I think Apple needs to start taking some of their cues from hackers because they are truly demonstrating what the masses want. When the iPhone was originally released hackers were forced to find a way to get real third-party applications onto the device, and it didn’t take long for that to happen. Now Apple is trying to make amends by releasing a true SDK in February for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

And then Microsoft announced that the original Zune will be getting the same firmware update that the Zune 2 will have, and many people were angry that Apple didn’t do the same thing with the iPod Classic. Hackers went at it again and were able to port over the firmware to 5G and 5.5G iPods!

Information on the hacked firmware can be found here, and here is the page that you’ll need to download it from. If after installation your iPod doesn’t get past the Apple logo you’ll need to press and hold the center and play buttons at the same time until “Disk Mode” appears on the screen. From there you can restore your iPod’s firmware back to the original. The developer claims that this firmware update “cannot, and will not brick your iPod.”

Here’s a video demonstration that shows what the new firmware looks like on a 5G iPod:

[via iLounge]
Thanks for the tip Pieter!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mac only
Interestingly enough Microsoft has released Office 2008 Service Pack 1 today for Macs. What’s interesting about that? Well, it is one of the fastest turnarounds for a Service Pack that I’ve ever seen. The suite of applications was just released back in January 2008, and here we are four months later with a Service Pack. Office 2007 for Windows didn’t see it’s first Service Pack for nearly a year after the consumer launch.

The press release issued by Microsoft said that the “velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what [they] saw after the launch of Office 2004.” To help celebrate they decided to give us a glimpse of what the future holds for the next version of Mac Office. Drumroll please… VBA support! That’s right, but you’ll likely be waiting a few years before we see a new Mac Office pop out of the Microsoft bat cave.

What’s really interesting is the timing of the VBA announcement. It was just last week that OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta was released with some early stages of VBA support, and it’s almost as if Microsoft was afraid that users might start looking to OpenOffice.org to pick up where Microsoft left off. That might not be the case, but that was the first thing that popped into my mind.

At any rate Office 2008 SP1 is out, and ready for you to download. The list of features and improvements can be found below, but the 180MB download doesn’t bring anything too earth shattering.

Get Office 2008 SP1 for Mac (180MB)

Microsoft Office Excel

• Compatibility. Improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows
• Custom Error Bars. Restored formatting option on the Error Bars panel for data series
• Printing. More reliable printing for elements on Excel 2008 workbooks

Microsoft Entourage

• Calendar. Significant enhancements to improve calendar view and all-day reminders with reoccurrence
• Exchange Server support. Overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server
• E-mail images. Ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools

Microsoft Office Word

• Printing. Improved accuracy when orienting tables with cell shading
• Document map. Improved reliability and responsiveness to select items
• Notebook layout. Updated formatting, recording status and a variety of display options

Microsoft Office PowerPoint

• Printing. Improvements to eliminate crashing when printing documents to high-dpi printers and increased overall printing speed by 10 times on some large presentations
• Mobile viewing. Ability to view Mac .PPTX files on Windows Mobile phones
• AppleScript. Ability to use the PowerPoint selection object in AppleScript to implement custom scripts that operate on the current selection in PowerPoint

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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