The cake is a lie: IE team bakes a treat for Mozilla

In honor of tuesday’s Firefox 3 release, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team gave a cake to Mozilla. The tasty treat, which prominently displays IE’s blue “e” icon, arrived at Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View.

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Call of Lebanese Duty

My first post in a while now, been keeping busy…

Lebanon, my home, is a country well known for the ability to go skiing in the morning, and be on the beach in the afternoon. The weather is wonderful, and there is a lot of scenery and history to the country. Although located in the middle east, where countries are stereotyped for their conservativeness, the country is quite liberal, and with the tourism it was attracting, should have been the country Dubai is now. The civil war stopped that from being a reality.

On the technological side, Lebanon is not well known for it’s rigid laws on Data Rights Management. This is most probably because none of these laws are enforced, and it is very easy to find a copy of any software imaginable for around 5,000 Lebanese Liras (Just over $3). Indeed, I was offered the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection – worth $2500 – for only 50,000 LL, and I remember declining the offer thinking it was a rip off.

Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is full of Internet Cafés called “networks”, in which teenagers play large LAN games. Admittedly, the games are a lot of fun, with sometimes over 30 people sitting on adjacent computers playing Battlefield 2 with you. It is very popular, and the networks themselves usually sell pirated games and movies and sometimes even software.

I am not an advocate of piracy, but I don’t have anything against it either. No, I’m not one of those people that buys a pirated game and then can’t sleep at night worrying that the staff at Crytek won’t be able to feed their kids. But there are disadvantages to pirated software, and I know this out of experience. First of all, Operating Systems are the one thing I would never buy pirated. It’s not worth the hassle of getting around all the updates, warnings, errors, support, and the rest of the problems caused by purchasing a pirated operating system. With the hours you are to spend avoiding getting caught, you might as well buy the real thing. Productivity Suites like Microsoft Office or iWork should also be purchased because they both get valuable updates and fixes from the net, and even some features like templates. I can see why someone would buy CS3 pirated however; some software is simply way too expensive.

When it comes to gaming, if you’re not going to play online, then buying fake games is understandable. But I do want to play online. I really do. In fact, I have been wanting to play online for quite some time now. So I decided this morning to make that dream a reality, and to go out and buy the original Call of Duty 4. So I called Virgin Megastore and it took me about 10 minutes to hear anything other than a menu or the piano piece, the entertainer. Once through to Customer Service I told the lady I wanted to know how much Call of Duty 4 would cost me. She told me that they didn’t have Call of Duty 4. I didn’t believe her. It was simply impossible that Virgin Megastore didn’t have a single copy of Call of Duty 4 for the PC. She put me through to the Multimedia section, as the strength of my disbelief made her doubt herself. The guy there, a gamer himself, told me that Virgin didn’t bother bringing any original games into the country because people didn’t buy them – they only bought fakes. The game was available for games consoles if I wanted them, but not for the PC. I was stumped. The young chap then proceeded to tell me that he sincerely doubted I’d find the game anywhere else in the country. So if I wanted to play Call of Duty 4, i could find a pirated copy on every street corner, but it was near impossible to find a legit version. Do the people at Activision know this? If I produced a game, and it was selling tens of thousands of copies fake in a country, and original copies weren’t even an option, I wouldn’t be too chuffed to be honest.

In the end, I am forced to play the only game I can online – Worms:Armageddon. Don’t judge me by it, it’s actually a very good game, with quite challenging roping games which make the game quite fun. I guess I won’t be able to play Call of Duty 4 online until I purchase it abroad – which is exactly what I’m planning on doing.

Malware

There are a bunch of lonely people with no social life whatsoever who have nothing better to do than make other people’s lives miserable. They are called malware writers. They have advanced programming skills and are very well-educated in networking and therefore decide to infiltrate other people’s computers with malicious programs “just for fun”. Well, that’s how it used to be.Our bored losers have realized that they are losers and have no money, no jobs and instead are exploiting the growth of online finance. Now you have malware that comes in all shapes and forms, but you rarely get viruses by themselves any more. In fact, malware is the new robbery. You want to make money fast? Learn how to program in Java. There are several different methods of exploiting people and by far the most frustrating are the flash-drive infections. They spread from computer to computer infecting people by the seconds. There are many different types, but all of them can be removed using this tool. Make sure all your flash drives are plugged in and run the tool.

The trojan horse is named after the trojan horse of Troy, for those of you who have read the iliad or seen the motion picture. The greeks failed to enter the walls of the city of Troy and tricked thetrojans into thinking they gave up and left them a gift. The gift was a giant horse. Little did the trojans know that the horse was stuffed full of Greeks. They therefore brought the horse within the city and in the middle of the night the Greeks burned down the city. The trojan horse is an application which pretends to be a software which a naive user might willingly install, and then damages the system by either providing a way for the hacker to access the victim’s files or take control of the computer.

Phishing is a method of gaining victims’ financial information using an e-mail which looks almost identical to one sent from a bank or paypal which requests that you verify your user information. It is a relatively new form of online fraud but one which has gained sky-high popularity and had been extremely successful.

Spyware is a general term for anything such as a trojan horse or a keylogger (an application that stores everything you type into your keyboard and therefore can determine your passwords) or anything which stores information about the victim.

Adware is a general term for a program which generates pop-ups and advertisements on your computers. You can imagine how much a corporation would pay to have their logo pop-up on victims’ monitors every 5 minutes. Also very frustrating.

So there’s a lot of stuff out there. But how can you stay immune? Well, there is a very wonderful program called HijackThis. Recently purchased by the security company Trend Micro, HijackThis is a diagnostic application which tells you what runs on your PC when you turn it on, what attaches itself to your browser and basically looks in every place an infection would hide. HijackThis reports are not easy to read, and there are experianced experts out there in the online community who are more than happy to help you solve your problems using HijackThis. Do not attempt to fix your computer using HijackThis yourself! You can very easily cause substantial damage to your PC.

The best thing to do is to download HijackThis from here and save it to your desktop. Extract it from the compressed folder and run it. Click on “Do a system scan and save a logfile”. Remember; don’t fix any entries. Copy and paste everything in the text file into a forum online giving details about any problems you are experiencing and wait for a reply.

I recommend any of the following forums:

• Tech Support Guy
• Bleeping Computer
• Castlecops
• Spyware Info
• Tech Support Forum

You can also learn how to remove malware from other people’s computers and become part of the online community against malware. If you want to learn how to remove malware and fight for the good side, Click Here. But bear in mind that training will take a couple of years and is not easy, so only join if you really feel dedicated.

Awesome Music Made from Windows Sounds

Hello everybody. This is my first post on Danny’s blog Tek Babble . My name’s Jim Khoury and I’m a good friend of Danny’s, and my first post on this blog is a bit on the lighter side of things. I was browsing the web and stumbled upon this interesting video on YouTube. Apparently, this guy got creative with some of the system sounds in Windows XP and 98, and the result is pretty darn cool. Anyway here’s the video:

Video Link

Look out for more posts on other matters,

Jim