Windows 7 Family Pack Returns

Good news for anybody who is thinking about upgrading to Windows 7, Microsoft announced that the Windows 7 family pack returns on October 3. The family pack allows you to upgrade 3 of your Windows Vista or Windows XP computers to Windows 7 Home Premium. (Please note, however, that Techs-on-Call does not recommend upgrading Windows XP computers to Windows 7.) The cost for 3 upgrade licenses is $149.99. Consider that one upgrade version costs $99.99 retail, this is a good deal if you have 2 or 3 computers. This is a limited time offer. If you are thinking about upgrading your computers to Windows 7, this is a great deal.

Because of this, Techs-on-Call is offering another Windows 7 deal. Techs-on-Call will upgrade 2 computers from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium for $300 and 3 computers from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium for $350. This is in addition to our current Windows 7 special running until the end of the year where we will upgrade Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium for $200.

0 comments - Posted by Wade Burchette at 9:30 AM - Categories: News

Intel Purchases McAfee

Intel announced today (August 19, 2010) that they are purchasing McAfee, which produces antivirus software, for $7.68 billion pending FTC approval. On the surface, these seems like a strange combination. Why would Intel want to purchase an antivirus software vendor? However, if you examine deeper it does make sense.

Computer security is a critical issue. Hackers are always looking to make a lot of money for little work or just want to be mean. While most of the time hackers exploit a weakness is software, sometimes they exploit weaknesses in the hardware. CPU's are complex little machines; nobody can make a perfect design without any vulnerabilities. The same applies to operating systems such as Windows. Since there is going to be a vulnerability, wouldn't it be nice to have a system designed to detect what black-hat hackers do and block such attacks while being completely transparent to the end-user? Intel purchased McAfee to help implement security and defense in the hardware so that future attacks on computer systems will be harder.

Short term, don't expect anything to change. Long term, I would expect McAfee antivirus to become very much inferior to the competition because I suspect Intel will have the company focus less on the software and more on the hardware.

0 comments - Posted by Wade Burchette at 12:17 PM - Categories: News | Security

Another Study Shows Antivirus Software Is Poor Against Malware

Earlier this year, the security software company Surfright published a study showing how even up-to-date antivirus programs fail to detect malicious software, or malware for short. Now Cyveilance, a cyber intelligence company, (whatever that is, I don't know) has shown that traditional signature based antivirus software detects on 19% of the malware. After the malware has been in-the-wild for 30 days, detection rates increased on to 61.7%.

One way antivirus software detects malware and viruses is by using a signature. What the antivirus software is doing is seeing if the file matches the signature the program has of known bad software. This study only considered the signature based portion of antivirus software. There are other techiques to detecting malware which the study did not consider.

Malware has become a great way to make a lot of money with little work. Malware creators make new variants weekly, perhaps daily, to stay ahead of signature based antivirus software. One criticism I have of the study is that it expected antivirus software to know a new strain of malware the day it was released. How can an antivirus program be ready to handle something totally different that was just put in-the-wild a few hours ago? I would give an antivirus program 2 days to detect a new strain of malware.

However, this study does remind me of how bad antivirus software really is. Antivirus companies get fat and lazy. They work hard at first, get a good reputation, get name recognition and a steady stream of renewals, and then they stop trying as hard. I don't want to name names because I don't want to worry about any legal issues. But I have seen firsthand how bad antivirus software is at detecting malware.

0 comments - Posted by Wade Burchette at 9:35 AM - Categories: Malware | News

Intel Settles With The FTC

Last year, the FTC announced they were suing Intel for anti-competitive practices. Now Intel has settled with the FTC and agreed to pay a $10 million fine and agree to certain conditions (which Intel should have always been following). The fine is so low because Intel already settled with AMD and as part of the settlement AMD could not testify against Intel for the FTC.

What was Intel doing that was so bad? In short, they were using their money and power to shut out competition. Some of the things Intel agreed to stop doing were still going on this year. Here is the breakdown of what Intel did wrong.

1) The price of an Intel CPU was not based on the number of CPU's purchased, but on other factors. In most businesses, when you buy in bulk the price per unit is lower. For example, suppose Bob's Factory makes widgets. If you buy 1 widget, the price is $10 for the widget. If you buy 100 widgets, you can buy them for $9 each. If you buy 1000 widgets, you can buy them for $8 each. That is normal business practice. Before 2007, Intel would sell CPU's based on how many CPU's you didn't buy from AMD. For example, if Joe's Computer Company bought only Intel CPU's, Joe would get the best price. If 10% of Joe's CPU order was AMD, Joe's price for Intel's CPU went up. The more AMD CPU's Joe bought, the higher his cost for Intel CPU's would be. Those actions are very much illegal. Intel stopped this action in 2007 when Intel finally had a product that could compete with AMD.

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0 comments - Posted by Wade Burchette at 8:45 PM - Categories: News

For Sale: Your Habits

The Wall Street Journal has published two interesting and informative articles about how your browsing habits are sold to advertisers. The two articles are The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets and Sites Feed Personal Details To New Tracking Industry. I highly recommend you read these articles.

The goal of advertisers is to get you to click on their ad. Chances are, you are more likely to click on an ad if it interests you. For instance, if you like dogs you are more likely to click on an ad for a pet store than on an ad about gym membership. On TV you are more likely to see certain ads at certain times a day. Why is it that many commercials during the evening news are about a drug? Because somebody found out that the people likely to be interested in a drug for a problem they have (or are made to think they have) watch the 6 pm news. The best TV can do is generalities; they hope the person interested in their product is watching. With the internet, advertisers can know the person watching is interested.

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0 comments - Posted by Wade Burchette at 7:45 PM - Categories: News | Privacy

Windows 8

Windows 7 isn't even a year old yet and already Microsoft is talking about a Windows 8. From what Microsoft is saying Windows 8 is more revolutionary than evolutionary. What does that mean? When the next version of a software package is evolutionary, that means the next version is just an improvement over the previous release. For example, Windows XP was Windows 2000 at its core, but with some performance tweaks and usability enhancements. Windows 2000, in turn, was Windows NT at its core, but with expanded capabilities. Windows 7 is really nothing more than Windows Vista optimized plus a few extra features. These are examples of something that is evolutionary. When the next version of a software package is revolutionary, that means it has major changes. For example, the core of Windows NT was revolutionary because it was so much different than the Windows 95/98/ME core. The Windows NT core was so good, that it was used until Windows XP; it was revolutionary. But the Windows XP core had major security holes. To fix that, Microsoft started from scratch and made the Windows Vista core; that also was revolutionary. Microsoft is proclaiming Windows 8 to be revolutionary.

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Posted by Wade Burchette at 8:10 PM - Categories: News | Windows

The War Between Apple and Adobe

There has been a lot of words exchanged between Adobe and Steve Jobs. At issue is Steve Jobs' ban on Adobe's Flash on the iPhone and iPad. There is a lot of obfuscation and confusion about this fight, mostly from Apple-land. Steve Jobs claims he is banning Flash on his i-Whatever because of security reasons. He also says that new web page designing standard, HTML5, does what Flash does and thus Flash is irrelevant. That is a misdirection.

Flash has been around for a long time. Flash enables you to play games, watch videos on YouTube, and do all sorts of neat tricks. Web pages are coded in a language called HTML, Hyper Text Markup Language, and managed by the W3C. The web page designing standards are purposefully kept simple. This is because a simple design ensures compatibility and consistency among a broad range of devices. The new standard, still being designed, is called HTML5. HTML5 supports video playback without Flash and provides some other visual improvements to web pages. One of the benefits of Flash is that it picks up where HTML leaves off by providing neat effects. Many internet games now use Flash. Of course, Flash has been used to deliver annoying ads that take a long time to load. But the benefits of Flash are worth the abuse by advertisers.

Flash does have many security problems. But that isn't the reason why Apple will not allow Flash, or Microsoft's version of Flash called Silverlight, on their i-Products. The real reason is if Flash was allowed, Apple could not control what is allowed to go on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod. There would millions of apps that will flood the marketplace that use Flash, and Apple won't see one cent of that money. In the current system, Apple makes a cut of all the apps sold. If there was Flash on the i-Something, Apple would lose millions each year. That is why Flash and Silverlight are banned.

Of course, Techs-on-Call does not have an iPad or an iPhone to play with, so we cannot give you an objective review of the products. We are planning to get an iPad soon so that we can help you with yours and make an objective opinion about it. We really are waiting for it to be out a while so some of the kinks will be ironed out. More information about our opinion when Techs-on-Call buys one.

Posted by Wade Burchette at 8:51 AM - Categories: Annoyances | News