TechThisOut!

Microsoft is considering releasing a fix for a bug in Internet Explorer, as malicious hackers are actively exploiting the bug online. The bug could be deemed serious enough that waiting for the usual monthly patches would put too many users at risk.

The bug means that “hackers” can take over Windows machines and install ad/spyware which could not only annoy alot of users, but compromise the security of online activities such as online banking.

It was discovered by anti-spyware firm Sunbelt Software on 21 September, and can be exploited by using the weaknesses found in the way Internet Explorer handles vector graphics.

Sites found by Sunbelt used this vulnerability to install huge amounts of spyware and adware on a PC, hijack it for other malicious reasons, or install keyloggers, despite the machine being patched with the latest updates.

According to Microsoft, who are monitoring the situation, attacks are not yet widespread or too critical, which could be why they have not yet released a patch. With their blog stating that :”The primary driver here is quality and protecting customers, not adherence to the monthly schedule”.

Many unofficial patches are being released, but Microsoft is not endorsing them in any way.

Update (27/09/2006): Microsoft released a fix for the above earlier today which can be downloaded via Windows Update.

According to the BBC, the launch of Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation 3 games console in Europe has been delayed until March 2007.

Ken Kutaragi, head of Sony’s global computer entertainment division, said the machine would still be launched in November in the US and in Japan.

Mr Kutaragi blamed the European delay on problems in mass producing elements of the high-definition Blu-ray disc drives in the machines.

Sony said it still aimed to ship six million new PlayStations by March.

But it halved its forecast for the end of 2006, saying just two million units would be shipped worldwide before the end of December.

Production problems meant that fewer machines than anticipated would be available for the launch in Japan and the US, Mr Kutaragi said.

Speaking at Sony’s global headquarters in Tokyo, Mr Kutaragi apologised for the delays to the PlayStation 3 launch.

But he said Sony had decided to focus on the US and Japan in the run-up to Christmas.

“I am so sorry not to be able to answer all the expectations,” he said.

The delay is due to a problem with the mass production of the blue laser diodes needed for the Blu-ray DVD player in the machine Sony said.

This is not the first time the next-generation console has been hit by delays.

In March Sony were forced to postpone the original launch date, scheduled for spring 2006, because of problems with the Blu-ray disc copy protection technology.

Normally Sony staggers the release of a new console, releasing in Japan and America, with Europe coming a belated third.

The initial delays meant that Sony revised its schedule, saying that the console would be released in all three markets at the same time.

David Reeves, head of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe said at the time: “This is an exciting first for Europe, and is a huge endorsement and vote of confidence in the strength of the European market and its importance globally.”

The latest delay means that European gamers will have to wait a further 4 months to get their hands on the next generation console.

Christmas disappointment

It also means Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which was launched last year, will enjoy another Christmas without facing a challenge from Sony in Europe.

Nintendo’s Wii console is also scheduled for a worldwide release this autumn, although no firm date has been set.

Ray Maguire, senior vice president and managing director of Sony UK, said: “We are extremely disappointed at news of this delay, and can truly empathise with everyone who was looking forward to PS3’s imminent release.

“We will however be working tirelessly to ensure that the March 2007 launch, is the biggest and best in the company’s history.”

On Wednesday Sony began introducing UK retailers to the new games console.

Some were hoping to begin taking pre-orders for the console from the middle of September.

Tim Ellis, head of games for HMV, said the delay was a disappointment for gamers and for retailers, who had been waiting for the launch for much of 2006.

“It also presents a major opportunity to Microsoft to consolidate Xbox’s position in the market, while Nintendo have a great chance to launch and firmly establish Wii,” Mr Ellis added.

Guess we’ll all just have to wait that little bit longer

Click Here!

You’ll need a .net/windows live passport, and the answers are:

1. Vista
2. Clarity
3. November 2006
4. True
5. Aero
6. All the above
7. All the above
8. 512 MB

Now you can, as Microsoft is to offer a consumer version of professional tools used to develop videogames for the Xbox 360.

The software will let non-professionals develop titles and then share them via the Xbox Live online service.

Microsoft executive Peter Moore said: “It’s our first step of creating a YouTube for videogames.”

The program will seek to complement a trend that has seen videogames becoming more like film blockbusters, costing up to £20m to produce.

Users will need a PC running Windows XP - or Vista in the future - to operate the tools program, called XNA Game Studio Express.

The tools will be available in trial form from 20 August and there is a $99 (£55) annual subscription.

Mr Moore said the program was basic compared to the pro tools, which cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Some basic program skills were still going to be needed for the consumer version if successful titles were to be developed, he said.

Mr Moore said the games users would be able to make would be rudimentary.

He said future plans may include additional software packs that consumers could buy to tweak their games.

Microsoft would regulate the content for appropriateness and intellectual property issues, but users would own their work, Mr Moore said.

“I’d love to send a royalty cheque to a kid,” he said.

YouTube has become an enormously popular website for video clips - many of which are filmed by users themselves.

Last month YouTube reported that users watched more than 100 million videos per day.

Microsoft said more than 10 US universities, including the University of Southern California and Southern Methodist University, will include XNA Game Studio Express and Xbox 360 development in their curriculum.

Recently, the internet giant handed out to researchers, the serach terms that over 650,000 of its subcribers used, in what was apparently an “innocent attempt to reach out to the academic community with research tools”.

Whilst the terms could not be linked to specific individuals, they could have contained personally identifiable information. This has upset many subcribers as it has not yet been made public who the researchers were, and why they wanted the data.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, after AOL removed the file that contained “information on 19 million queries and included information on what search terms were used, when the search was conducted and whether the user clicked on any of the results”, copies started spreading about the internet for all to see!

AOL is said to be treating it as a very serious incident (although they did it on purpose!) so meanwhile, be careful what you search for!

Technology that transforms digital images into 3D models will be unveiled at a conference on Thursday.

Microsoft’s Photosynth takes collections of images, analyses them for similarities, and then displays them in a reconstructed 3D space.

The system, to be previewed at a computer graphics meeting in Boston, will allow users to walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.

Microsoft says Photosynth should be available for use later this year.

Richard Szeliski, principal researcher at Microsoft Research who developed the technology with Noah Snavely and Steven Seitz, of the University of Washington, said: “The system builds a 3D model just from a raw collection of photographs.”

Geometry problem

He said the technology works by scanning collections of photographs, which can be taken from different cameras at different times.

It picks out distinctive features in each image and cross-references them against the other photographs, checking for similarities.

This allows it to pinpoint a feature’s 3D position and to also calculate where the position of the camera would have been when the picture was taken.

“Then basically, it is just a geometry problem,” explained Dr Szeliski.

“You are simultaneously adjusting the position of the camera and where those little pieces of images are until everything basically snaps together.”

The prototype can use as few as two pictures, but, said Dr Szeliski, it becomes a lot more exciting when several dozen images are used.

The 3D model will enable people to move through a scene, looking at pictures from any angle, click on specific photos, zoom in or out of a feature, and see where snaps were taken in relation to other images.

Dr Szeliski said: “I think the photo-sharing websites will be early-adopters of this technology.

“Wherever people share photos, instead of just seeing a gallery of unorganised photos, now you can pull everyone else’s photos together and make a rational sense out of it.”

The other obvious application, he added, would be for tourism and property, where a city could provide a virtual tour or a hotel could potential visitors walk through its lobby.

The researchers will be presenting a research paper detailing the technology at this week’s Siggraph 2006 conference in Boston, which looks at the latest developments in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Microsoft have said they believe the technology will almost certainly be web-based, and people should be able to run the application later this year.

“Within the next year we hope to see this in wide usage,” added Dr Szeliski.

Source

Can’t wait for it to be released to the public! Sounds good, and very useful.

To the suprise of many, starting on 2nd August 2006 at 6pm (PDT), Microsoft will be charging users $1.50 (£0.80) per download of Office2007.

This move apparently came round after the Office beta was alot more popular than expected, and with 3million downloads, that was five hundred percent more than Microsoft thought it would be.

Existing users of the beta will be able to download updates for free, but many have been outraged that a multi-billion company like Microsoft has to charge for beta software (that will stop working sometime, just like most betas!) with the fee helping “offset the cost of downloading from the servers”.

You still have a few days to download it free, so go and get it quick!

Update: Stuffplug has now been released an is available here!

Yes that’s right! A techthisout.net exclusive preview of the newest pre-beta build of StuffPlug3, the very popular (now stand-alone!) add-on for Windows Live Messenger (which from now on will be reffered to as WLM).

It installed easily and quickly, but the installer isn’t the final one that will be “shipped” with StuffPlug3, so I won’t really say much about it.

The thing I noticed after the installation was the seamless incorporation into WLM. As you can see from the screenshot below, it adds an icon and a menu (very much like MsgPlus! does) to make it alot easier to get to the options. This is certainly a great improvement to the old method of going to the options via typing in a conversation window or going into the Plus! options.

I then decided to have a look around it, and after exploring the menu, had a look at the Welcome Screen:

Here we see everything nicely laid out, with a damn nice new interface! There’s not a whole lot to say about it, so I shall move swiftly on to the first options pages.

General Options:

There are 3 options, the first being to do with WLM add-ins, and the next two are pretty self explanatory.

The Content Stealer.

This steals Display Pictures, Emoticons, Dynamic Pictures and Winks. The thing that impressed me most, was its ability to steal the emoticon at it’s original size (before the other person’s WLM resized it), and contrary to the older versions of StuffPlug, it actually steals everything and not just a few display pictures and emoticons here and there.

New Mail Icon in the System Tray

Here’s a brand new feature for StuffPlug, and got to be one of my favourites. Now at a glance you can see if you have any emails, without having to check the main messenger window each time.

Now onto the “Conversation” options screen:

Here we see 7 features (a lot less disappointing than the first options page) consisting of:

Use a Chat Only Name

This feature was in most previous versions of StuffPlug, and for those who don’t know, this feature allows you to choose a different name to appear when you’re in a conversation. Very useful if you have a long name that you want people to see, but want a short and simple name to appear when you’re chatting to your buddies.

Action Text

As you can see from the screenshot, it allows you to send messages that look identical to what you see when you send/recieve a nudge.

Fake Invite

Allows you to send fake invites to contacts, which gets very confusing for them!

Obviously it doesn’t actually send anything, and if they accept, all they see is: “This activity or game is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”
Doesn’t make it any less fun though!

Allow Talking To Contacts You Blocked

Unfortunatly this feature isn’t quite working yet, but when it is, I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes! It’s obvious what it does though, and will be useful for all those people you don’t want to delete, don’t want them to start messaging you, but still might need to contact from time to time!

Boost Character Limit

This allows you to send as many as 5,000 characters per message in a conversation.

Make Window Icons Reflect Contact’s Status

Now this is another brand new feature, and another of my favourites!
Wheras before, you didn’t know if people had changed status without looking at the main WLM or conversation window, you can now see easily! The screenshot sums it up well:

Flash Keyboard LED when Fullscreen App

Useful for all you CounterStrike players out there. This feature makes one or more LED (”little light” or CapsLock/NumLock/ScrollLock light for all you PC illiterates out there!) flash when someone messages you when you have a fullscreen program open.

Again, this is a feature that’s not yet complete, but will certainly come in handy when it is!

Lastly, the “Contact List” options.

Allow Editing of Friendly Names in the Contact List

Allows you to change your WLM name without having to go into the options, the same way as you do your personal message.

Unfortunaly it isn’t 100% compatible with MsgPlus, but TheBlasphemer is working on getting it sorted.

Enable Ad Hider

I’ve been waiting for this, and although it doesn’t completely remove the advertisment at the bottom of the contact list, it does hide it (as the name suggests) and makes it alot less offensive to the eye.

And that’s it so far!

Well….. You’d think so, but I have a list of all the features that are yet to be added!

• Getting the contact’s emoticon keystroke when you Install an emoticon you are stealing from them. (Just like the existing “Add” in WLM)
• New Installer (not really a feature but still good!)
• An Auto-updater, so you’ll be able to get the newest versions without having to visit the website.
• Open all links in the default browser
• Auto complete commands (such as !fakeinvite). Also the old /[command] commands will probably be brought back to replace doing ![command]
• Give you the opion to auto-disable commands that did not load correctly
• Allowing over-sized emoticons
• Ignore Feature (they can talk to you, but you won’t see any of the messages. Saves you having to block them and risk them finding out!)
• Timestamps also might return, but this isn’t definite

As of yet, there is no timescale for beta-testing, or any release date, so you’ll just have to be patient! I shall keep you updated if and when I get new versions.

NOTE: I will not be giving ANYONE a download link, so please don’t bother asking.

Almost forgot:

The About Screen

As everyone seems to be asking, the theme I’m using is LonghornPro, and it’s for StyleXP

About the Window Opened/Closed Notifier

The Window Opened Notifier will not return due to the way MSN7.x (which is used by all pre-XP users) requests display pictures. The notifier used to work by detecting when your display pic was requested, which only happened when a convo window was opened.

MSN7.x now uses contact cards/display pics in the contacts window/display pics in the sign-in popup, so now when ANY of those happen, it would make the notifier popup (even if someone just opened your contact card) which makes it highly inaccurate and therefore pretty useless.

The Window Closed Notifier will no longer be included as current versions of WLM/MSN close the connection woth your contact when they have been inactive for so many minutes. The notifier worked by detecting when the connection had been closed, with the only way of it being closed being when the window was closed. As I previously said, the connection is now randomly closed, so you would recieve a notification not only when the window had been closed, but after your contact had been idle for so long, which makes it inaccurate.

Understandably, TheBlasphemer only wants to include fully functional features, as otherwise, when it pops up and someone hasn’t opened/closed a convo, everyone will moan and complain about it.

Regardless of how great/inaccurate you think the feature is, it WILL NOT BE PUT BACK IN, no matter how many times you ask, and no matter what you do or say.

Let that be the last that is said about them, and all future comments asking about them will be deleted.

Quoted from Plus.Net: 

This major incident occurred as a result of human error during work to resolve timeouts when collecting mails, which we reported via service status last week:
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1152295291.htm

Although this was noticed very quickly, over 700GB of live customer data was removed before the process could be halted.

I can’t begin to imagine what went through that poor technicians head when he realised he had wiped the wrong server. I often have several consoles open and run commands in both at the same time, but I always check which is which, especially when removing data!

Just when you thought the internet couldn’t get more bizzare, out comes: the first ever online operating system.

I decided to give it a go, first using a guest account, and then signing up to a members account. If you create your own personal account, anything you save whilst logged in, will still be there when you next log in, even if you’re on the other side of the world!

The main page boasts:

• Access from anywhere.
  Create a document at an office computer, drive home, continue right from where you left off.
• Built-in sharing.
  Instantly share music, documents and more with your buddies.
• An application community.
  Everyone from professional software engineers to highschool age programmers can participate at no cost. Choose from a growing list of over 150 applications developed by our users.

First, I tried out the Rich Text Editor (which took a little while to open but not too long) and it handled cyrillic/latin (that’s Russian and English to most people) fine and saving it (although you have to open it from within the RTE and can’t do as you would with Windows and double-click) but again, it took a little while to do this. Saying that, it is only an online OS, so is doing pretty well in my opinion so far!

Back to point number 3 above, I thought I would see what other applications there were besides what you’d expect, as the File Explorer/Trash Can worked as one would expect.

As it has only been around for 6 months, and is therefore relatively new, there isn’t a whole lot of choice when it comes to applications, and some are just a little strange!

There are 2 browsers:

• Bitty Browser, which is a simple text browser allowing you to go back. forwards, and search google. Very Useful for all you ad haters out there!
• YouBrowser, which works like any other browser, allowing you to veiw sites with pictures as you usually would. It does have one drawback however, and that is, it has a lack of navigation buttons. This does make it difficult when you’re browsing as you normally would.

Having said that, your normal browser is already open and showing you YouOS, so why not just open a new tab/window and use that?!

Now we come onto the chat application, which users of mIRC/any other IRC client will be familiar with. You have the following commands: /users - shows you all the users in the chat.
/quit - quits the chat (what a suprise!)
/join [channel] - Allows you to join a different channel, eg: “/join kangie” makes you join the channel “kangie”

FlickRSS basically is window that opens on the ‘desktop’ that shows you pictures from the popular site Flickr. (You have to specify a tag though.)

TubeRSS does what FlickRSS does, only this time it’s videos from YouTube.

YouBuddy allows you to add other users of YouOS (providing you know their name) for a bit of MSN Style chatting.

YouMail allows you to email people from within YouOS. Unfortunatly it currently only supports emailing other YouOS users, and not actual email addresses, but hopefully that will be implemented in the future.

YouShell looks like a mix between notepad and command prompt/DOS works like linux, and allows you to manage applications/processes, as well as changing the directory of files and changing the data structure. (Typing in Help gets you a nice list of all the commands and what each of them does.)

YouSticky makes a little resizable box appear on your ‘desktop’ which you can type into. Whatever you type stays there until you delete it or close the window, even if you log off. Very handy for those of you that, like me, have the memory of a goldfish!

Thats all the applications covered, so now on to how it looks. (You can sign in with a guest account on the main page and see for yourself!)

It does look pretty much like Windows, with the taskbar at the top instead of the bottom, there’s even a “Start” button, only it’s called “Stuff”.
By right-clicking the desktop, you can add shortcuts to the above applications, as well as arranging the desktop icons.
You can change the wallpaper (although if you wish to use your own, it has to be uploaded to a website first) although it does seem to change back to the default when you next log in.
There’s a taskmanager type application (the little screen on the taskbar at the right) which tells you what processes are running.
You can even (after specifying a mobile number in “My Account” in “Stuff”) text an address, and what you typed, will appear on your Notes on the desktop when you next log in.

That’s about it for now, it’s simple to use, and has potential! It does alot more that I expected it would when I first logged in, but still has a loooong way to go before it becomes any kind of competitor to Microsoft/Apple.

I must say, the biggest disadvantage is that you need an operating system in the first place to be able to use YouOS, but being able to save things without the need to use disks/CDs is deffinely very useful.

Try it here!.