No, I’m not a fortune teller or someone with psychic powers and such but security experts at PC Tools have pinpointed November 24 as the potential peak of malicious software activity for 2008.
Expects at PC tools (who own Spyware doctor) have analyzed information on viruses and internet worms taken from over 500,000 machines around the world and advised users to be alert while surfing or shopping online during the holiday season.
Data from 2007 showed that the high point of action from viruses, worms and other internet-based attacks came three days before America’s Thanksgiving holiday, leading them to suggest that the same day could prove the bleakest 24 hours of this year.
The company says the increase in virus activity could be the result of internet shopping in the run-up to Christmas, as millions of users begin going online to purchase gifts for their friends and family. With the chance for criminals to access financial details, online shoppers make an attractive target for the writers of malware.
Technology is playing an increasingly important role in our daily life. More and more mechanical devices are turning digital as the day goes by, and guess what? Even tombstones are digitalized nowadays. A German carpenter has designed the digital tombstone that allows you to play slideshow of photographs of the deceased person while they are still alive.
“With tombstones, it’s not like we are selling coffee machines. There has to be a demand for what we are offering. People won’t just buy it because they think it’s a good product. I have to say the feedback is very positive,” said the German carpenter, creator of the digital tombstone.
The battery-operated monitor is protected by a wooden lid and it can display slideshows or pictures of the lost one. However, it will not play music or the voice of lost one because it is against the German cemetery regulation. The digital tombstone is selling for almost USD 6500 each.
You might be aware that similar project such as virtual-reality cooking has been achieved before but researchers in Birmingham are ready to take this a step further. They are planning to develop new technology to add smells to the virtual world of video games.
“What we are experiencing from reports coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq is that when the troops get there, they are overwhelmed by not just by the culture but by the sights, the sound and indeed the smells. So what we are trying to do is to investigate the new technology, see if it’s credible enough to add to our serious games simulation,” said Professor Bob Stone, University of Birmingham.
Aviation fuel, garbage, body odor, burning rubber, new sewage and hospital smell are some of the smells that appeared in the BBC video interview. “These smells are created by an American company and what’s interesting is the hospital smell that I have here,” said one of the observer while referencing to the hospital smell palette. “It is apparently very definitely an American hospital, and a British hospital for example or definitely an Iraqi hospital for example would smell completely different. So, there’s a lot of fine tuning you could do with all these scents.”
Apple fans can really do some crazy things sometimes. Things such as getting an apple tattoo and getting an apple haircut were not as amazed as it used to be anymore. However, this apple on apple sure is something we have never seen before.
The idea can be dated back to 3 years ago according the Japanese blogger at Blog Nobon but not until the beginning of last month did they decided to take the action.
The whole procedure actually wasn’t that hard at all. In the beginning of October, the sticker seals such as apple logo and ipod were designed and handcraft by penknife.
The stickers were then placed on the still growing apples to make sure the covered area is not exposed to sunlight.
After patiently waiting for one month, these are the results they obtained.
You can now travel back in time and see Ancient Rome as it was in 320 A.D. Google has added a 3-D simulation new layer in Google earth that enables you to fly over more than 6,000 buildings of ancient Rome, including the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and the Forum of Julius Caesar.
Other than the astonishing exterior of nearly 7,000 buildings, some of the monuments will feature full interior view. You are also able to find out more historical information on a particular monument when you click on the yellow place mark icon on top of the building.
Using laser scans of today’s ruined monuments and advice from archaeologists, experts worked for about a decade to reconstruct ancient Rome within its 13-mile-long (21-kilometer-long) walls, said Bernard Frischer, who heads Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.
More ancient sites may be available in the future on the Web, and Frischer said his team is already working on a reconstruction of colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
If you still remember the gesture control from Mgestyk I posted few days ago, here’s another Minority-report-like system in real life. Oblong Industries, the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment (SOE) brought the astonishing effect that we see in the popular Steven Spielberg film into reality.
The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.
Some of the SOE’s core ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong’s founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT. Other foundational components are less directly visible but as crucially transformative.
Compared to the Mgestyk gesture control, it is noticeable that Oblong g-speak runs much smoother and have fewer lag issues. But to utilize and maximize the system performance, one needs to have large amount of space to set up and use the system efficiently. Maybe it is less practical to use it in normal household but I sure can see the system being put into use in some larger work area such as company presentation and seminars.
Hello, you have a long lost relative that needs your help. You will be promised $[Insert your big number here] within mintues if you first transfer xx amount of money to xxx account. By the way, please transfer the funds though an untraceable wire service because we think that this operation should be kept confidential. Please also note that the transaction you have with the Central Bank of Nigeria is noting but legal. ps: please ignore any spelling mistakes you see because I do not have a spell checker.
I’m sure all of you have seen this kind of email scam before and you may wonder who would fall for this popular-known Nigerian scam anyway. Well, here’s one such person and the sum she sent out to the Nigerian con artist is not small too. Janella Spears, a nursing administrator from Oregon has finally decided to go public with her story in hopes that her story will warn others to listen to reason and not to fall for these scams.
Spears received just such an e-mail, promising her that she’d get $20.5 million if she would only help out a long-lost relative – identified in the e-mail as J.B. Spears – with a little money up front. “That’s what got me to believe it,” Spears said. It turned out to be a lot of money up front, but it started with just $100.
While not completely foolproof, Visa Europe has unveiled their new card that features input buttons and a display screen that goes one step beyond by generating a unique security code each time you planned to use the card.
The card will have built in alpha-numeric display and keypad. When customer wants to make a transaction online, all they need to do is to key in their PIN into the card and the card will then create a one-time security code. The security code will function like the fixed ccv you have at the back of your credit card. Having this feature built in means that those who stole your card will not be able to use your card because they do not know your pin to generate the security code.
AVG Antivirus is popular for its simplicity and user-friendliness, and the best thing about it is probably because it is free. However, the most recent update (Nov 8, 2008) of AVG 8 suggested that a Windows system file “user32.dll” is a Trojan horse. Users who went one step further by deleting the file will have their system endlessly rebooting or unable to reboot at all.
Here’s the original wording by a representative of AVG.
AVG is actively working to remedy the problem some users are experiencing related to the most recent update to commercial and free versions of AVG 7.5 and AVG 8.0 in some languages. A number of users who installed the update mistakenly received a warning that the Windows system file user32.dll product version 5.1.2600.3099 was infected with a Trojan virus and were prompted to delete a file essential to the operation of Windows XP.
The problem appeared to only affect users of AVG 8 products running the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language and have Windows XP as their operating system. AVG had immediately corrected the virus signatures when the case was reported. AVG also offered guide and utility that will fix the problem for those who are unfortunate enough to have deleted the file. So, if your friends are facing this problem, help’em out because they will need you to access the information and download some files for them.
The end-of-year holiday is coming up and what has Target got for you? Yep, it’s a special holiday gift card with mini digital camera capability (Yea, the gift card itself is a camera as well, they are not separated). The gift card comes in increments from $50 to $1,000 and the digital camera that is on the gift card will be available at no additional charge. So, if you planned to keep the gift card/camera for some reason and you would also like to spend money on other goodies, then you might want to buy the gift card first and then turn around and spend the gift card yourself.
The digital camera on the gift card runs on two AAA batteries and it comes with 8MB onboard memory with a 1.2 megapixel chip. This probably is not too satisfying for you but look on the better side. Other than the extra camera capability, the combo comes with a USB cord, driver disk, instruction manual and a voucher for 40 free prints from the Target photo center. To top that, this special holiday gift card is like all Target standard gift card too. This means that the gift card will not expire and they can be reloaded in value to be used over and over again.
So what are you waiting for? You won’t be insulted by your loved one or friends that you lack the creativity when it comes to present this time. You may head over to target store and pick up one or you may also purchase one of these gift cards online at Target’s official website. Do note that there’s a $1.95 shipping fee applied for each shipping address receiving a card(s) via standard shipping if you chose to purchase it online.
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