The Great Geek Manual News

A new report is predicting a slow market for enterprise adoption of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 release.

In a recent survey of 1100 IT professionals, 83 per cent of IT departments are not planning on adopting the new Windows operating system in the next year.

The study was carried out by research firm Dimensional Research with the backing of IT management vendor KACE.

According to the researchers, economic hardships and lingering doubts from Windows Vista were the main causes for apprehension.

Overall 83 per cent of those surveyed said that their companies would be skipping Vista altogether and moving from Windows XP straight to Windows 7.

Of the 17 per cent of respondents who did plan on upgrading to Windows 7 in the next twelve year, more than half said that a desire to avoid Vista was the main reason for the move.

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Source: iT News

Twitter has been given the all clear after a worm infected “tens of thousands of users”. But experts say the attack could have been much worse.

Over the weekend, a self-replicating computer program, or worm, began to infect profiles on the social network.

The worm was set up to promote a Twitter rival site, showing unwanted messages on infected user accounts.

Michael Mooney, a 17-year-old US student, told the Associated Press he created the worm to promote his site.

Mooney, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, said he wanted to expose vulnerabilities in Twitter. He told AP: “I really didn’t think it was going to get that much attention, but then I started to see all these stories about it and thought, ‘Oh, my God’.”

The worm worked by encouraging users to click on a link to the rival Twitter site, called StalkDaily.com.

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Source: The BBC

Ubuntu distributor Canonical has attacked Microsoft’s claims that Windows is now the dominant force on netbooks as “absolute nonsense”.

Microsoft claimed victory in the netbook market earlier this week, reporting that 96% of netbooks sold in the US now come with Windows.

The software giant also claimed return rates of Linux netbooks were four times higher than Windows, citing Canonical itself as a source.

Speaking exclusively to PC Pro this afternoon, Canonical’s head of platform marketing Gerry Carr has rubbished Microsoft’s claims.

“There’s no evidence that we or anyone can point to of higher return rates on Linux versus XP,” he said. “There is some evidence of poorly engineered products where there was little thought given to the operating system put on there… of higher return rates in some circumstances.”

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Source: PC Pro

Microsoft’s chest thumping last week over its 96% share of the U.S. netbook market for February doesn’t appear to be just its normal bravado as the company also is charging toward dominance on a global front.

According to statistics from IDC, Microsoft owned 76% of the global netbook market in 2008 and that number will only get bigger in the coming years.

In 2008, Linux came in with a share of 24% and IDC predicts that number will be in the single digits come the end of this year.

Globally, IDC says 10 million netbooks shipped in 2008. That number is expected to double this year and grow by 25% in 2010.

The result would seem to be another market where Microsoft dominates.

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Source: Network World

Microsoft might be betting big on Windows 7, the next version of its flagship operating system, but to Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth, the upcoming release is really an opportunity for Linux to shine.

Granted, Linux on the desktop has not made as much of a dent against Windows as it has in the datacenter. But Shuttleworth, who is also CEO of Ubuntu’s commercial backer Canonical, figures the desktop itself and the applications that people are using are changing in ways that make the coming desktop battle different than it has ever been before.

“The principals of diversity in the desktop space are well established,” Shuttleworth told InternetNews.com. “The benefits to consumers and industry of having an alternative are very substantial. Any change in the status quo is an opportunity.”

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Source: Internet News

The chaos predicted by some as the Conficker worm updates itself have so far failed to materialise.

There had been concerns that the worm could trigger poisoned machines to access personal files, send spam, clog networks or crash sites.

Many of the infected machines are based in Asia where there have been no reports of unusual PC behaviour.

Conficker is believed to have infected up to 15 million computers to date.

Those monitoring the progress of the worm as 1 April dawned around the globe said there was no evidence it was doing anything other than modifying itself to be harder to exterminate.

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Source: The BBC

Microsoft has revealed that it will be shutting down the Encarta online encyclopedia.

The company’s notice page says that the site will be shut down on October 31 for most of the world.

The Japanese version of the site will carry on until December 31.

Users who subscribed to premium features will have their accounts credited for fees paid beyond April 30.

Additionally, the company will cease with the distribution of the Encarta Student and Encarta Premium software by the end of June.

Emerging in the early 90’s, Encarta was one of the first encyclopedias to be offered in electronic form on CD-Rom discs. The collection was later taken online, but has since struggled in the face of sites such as Wikipedia and other online news and history collections.

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Source: iT News

Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser has made impressive market share gains in Europe over the past few years. In the latest marketshare report released by StatCounter, Firefox 3 has finally surpassed Internet Explorer 7 as the most popular browser in Europe in a breakdown by version number.

Firefox 3 holds 35 percent and IE 7 has 34 percent in that region. The recent decline of IE 7 in the past week can largely be attributed to the release of IE 8, Microsoft’s new browser. According to StatCounter, IE 8 has grown to 2.3 percent in Europe, with most of those users upgrading from IE 7. This change was enough to put Firefox 3 on top. IE 6, however, still has 11 percent marketshare, which means that all users of Microsoft’s browser across all versions still outnumber the total number of Firefox users.

“The move is partly explained by a small switch from IE 7.0 usage to IE 8.0 but also by growing market share overall by Firefox 3.0,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen in a statement. “The data shows that Firefox is closing the gap and is now just 10 percent behind all IE versions in Europe.”

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Source: Ars Technica

Against the backdrop of humming computers in the underground lab in Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, a screen flickered, and the most politically explosive cyber-spy network in the world began to reveal itself.

It was March 6, 12:33 p.m., and Nart Villeneuve was getting frustrated. The 34-year-old international relations student and part-time tech geek had tried everything to track down a piece of malicious software that had infected computers around the world, including those in the offices of the Dalai Lama.

Finally, he turned to the ultimate hacker’s tool: He entered some of the code from those infected computers into Google. Just like that, he found one of the cyber-spy network’s control servers, then another, and another. From that Eureka moment came a flood of information, almost all of it suggesting the ring originated in China.

A team of Canadian researchers revealed this weekend a network, dubbed GhostNet, of more than 1,200 infected computers worldwide that includes such “high-value targets” as Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Indian Embassy in Kuwait, as well as a dozen computers in Canada.

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Source: The Globe and Mail

Canadian researchers have uncovered a vast electronic spying operation that infiltrated computers and stole documents from government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

In a report provided to the newspaper, a team from the Munk Center for International Studies in Toronto said at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries had been breached in less than two years by the spy system, which it dubbed GhostNet.

Embassies, foreign ministries, government offices and the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York were among those infiltrated, said the researchers, who have detected computer espionage in the past.

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Source: Reuters

Mozilla has announced a limited beta release of its new mobile browser, code-named Fennec. Testing will be limited to people using the Nokia N810 tablet, although emulators have been written to allow people to test the application on desktop computers running Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

“I’m super-happy to announce the first beta release of Fennec for the Maemo platform,” wrote Stuart Parmenter, mobile architect for Mozilla, on his Pavlov.net blog. “We’ve done heavy optimizations to our front-end code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve start-up performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work.”

Other improvements, according to the Mozilla release notes, include tabbed browsing, integrated Web search (built into the address, or “awesome” bar), access to multiple search engines, and both bookmarks and tags.

One of the more interesting features of Fennec is the inclusion of TraceMonkey, an engine for JavaScript support. Parmenter said the inclusion of TraceMonkey will enable Fennec to take advantage of the JavaScript speed improvements built into Firefox 3.1.

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Source: News Factor

Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions’ (formerly Diebold’s) electronic voting and tabulating systems — used in some 34 states across the nation — fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That’s the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier’s Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier’s tabulator system, GEMS v. 1.18.19.

An election system’s audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system’s actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold’s software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards.

The problems may lead to decertification of the company’s voting systems, as well as an examination of voting systems made by other companies to determine if they too may have been able to sneak such violations past both federal and state testers…

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Source: Brad Blog

The Conficker worm is scheduled to activate on April 1, and the unanswered question is: Will it prove to be the world’s biggest April Fool’s joke or is it the Information Age equivalent of Herman Kahn’s legendary 1962 treatise about nuclear war, “Thinking About the Unthinkable”?

Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software have spread widely around the globe since October, mostly outside the United States because there are more unpatched, pirated Windows computers overseas. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based computers.)

An estimated 12 million or more machines have been infected. However, many have also been disinfected, so a precise census is difficult to obtain.

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Source: New York Times Bit Blog

Google has unleashed a beta version of its next Chrome upgrade to generate some early user feedback. The search giant has also opened a new developer channel that gives more accomplished PC users the ability to access a rough sneak preview of what is likely to be in Google’s next-generation browser.

Early adopters of Google’s new Chrome beta release will receive regular updates featuring the latest speed enhancements, features and bug fixes, noted Chrome Product Manager Brian Rakowski. “We’re doing our best to quickly churn out new features as they are available rather than saving them up for occasional major releases,” Rakowski said.

Perhaps the best thing about Google’s new download is speed. According to Rakowski, Chrome beta is “35 percent faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.”

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Source: News Factor