

Webmasters who find an annoying error message on their sites may have caught a big break, thanks to a slip-up by the authors of the Gumblar botnet. Tens of thousands of Web sites, many of them small sites running the WordPress blogging software, have been broken, returning a "fatal error" message in recent weeks. According to security experts those messages are actually generated by some buggy malicious code sneaked onto them by Gumblar's authors.
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After months of often bitter debate, European Union lawmakers reached agreement on how to preserve citizen's rights to Internet access in a meeting that ended in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The issue, which pits citizens' civil liberties against the rights of content owners such as record and movie companies to protect creative works on the Internet, has blocked the passage of a wide range of laws collectively dubbed the telecoms package.
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Microsoft has announced the final release of its Platform Update for Windows Vista. The Platform Update consists of runtime libraries that provide a common platform for developers, so that applications making use of new Windows 7 technologies will work correctly with Vista and Windows Server 2008.
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We like Windows 7: it's faster than Vista, makes better use of your system resources, is packed with interesting features, and looks great, too. But that doesn't mean it's perfect, of course. If you've moved to Windows 7 recently then you might have noticed various upgrade problems, interface issues and features that seem to have disappeared entirely, among many other complications with the new system.
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A hacker this week released a new exploit that allows users to circumvent Apple's preventative measures that have blocked unauthorized code from being run on the new iPhone 3GS.
In October, Apple unexpectedly began shipping new iPhone 3GS models to ward off hackers who run unauthorized software in a practice known as "jailbreaking." In addition to unlocking the handset for use on other carriers, the practice can also be used to run unsigned code.
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Intel is investigating a flaw that affects people trying to sync their iPhone with a PC that has an Intel P55-based motherboard and the 64-bit version of Windows 7. The inability to synchronise iTunes with iPhones on such configurations was first flagged up on an Apple support forum in mid-September. Some posters said they had been able to mitigate the issue by downgrading iTunes from version 9.0.2 to version 9.0.0.
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Yesterday Microsoft's Jeff Williams, the principal group program manager for the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, said that there is a direct correlation between the current malware infection rate and software piracy. To be more specific, he said that countries with high piracy rates are more likely to be infected by malicious code because they're reluctant to apply updates.
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Windows 7 is already a big hit for Microsoft, according to market-share tracker Net Applications, which shows it rising past all the extant versions of Linux and Windows except Vista and XP and into fourth place hot on the heels of the Mac OS X 10.5.
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An automated solution to help upgrade problem machines to Windows 7 has been released by Microsoft. If you have machines that hang while upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7, Microsoft has released a FixIt solution - so long as the particular failure involves the upgrade process stopping responding at 62% completed and hanging indefinitely. The problem can additionally be identified by Windows having created a file called system_drive:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setupact.log.
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Microsoft offers many ways to buy Windows 7. You can buy the operating system preinstalled on a new PC, upgrade an existing PC using a shrink-wrapped retail package, purchase an upgrade online, or build a PC from scratch and install Windows yourself. In each of these cases, you can also take your pick of multiple Windows editions The price you pay will vary, depending on the edition and the sales channel.
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Everyone loves a killer feature: that must-have capability or technology that prompts you to plunk down your hard-earned cash in an effort to upgrade your computing experience. In the case of Windows, there have been precious few versions that included a truly killer feature. Windows 3.1 was a killer version because it allowed PCs to finally break (or at least reduce the impact of) the dreaded 640K barrier.
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This security update resolves three privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
Firefox users who are running the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) plug-in and do not have it disabled should also apply this security update. For more information regarding this issue, please see the FAQ section for HTML Component Handling Vulnerability – CVE-2009-2529.
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As promised, the latest version of Windows Server 2008 R2 is the first Windows Server to fully support DNSSEC. DNSSEC is a security protocol that helps to verify that a Web address hasn't been hacked and redirected to a pretender. Better still, Windows 7 also supports DNSSEC, which Microsoft claims is a first among client operating systems.
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Some users trying to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 have seen their PCs crippled by an endless series of reboots, according to reports on Microsoft's support forum. A Microsoft engineer writing on the same forum said the company was investigating users' problems, but he downplayed them as "isolated issues."
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Rumours are circulating about the first Windows 7 service pack, just ten days after the operating system's official release. As with any Windows release, Microsoft engineers start tackling bugs as soon as the OS becomes available, so reports detailing plans for Windows 7 SP1 aren't surprising.
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