Microsoft Confirms Vista Editions

Microsoft has officially verified the editions for Windows Vista a week after the information leaked when it prematurely appeared on the company’s Web site.

Vista will have six core editions, four aimed at consumers and two aimed at the enterprise, says Neil Charney, Microsoft’s director of Windows product management. The consumer editions are Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, and Windows Vista Ultimate; the business editions are Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Enterprise.

The editions confirmed by Charney are the same ones listed on a Microsoft Web site last week, one the company said was being used for testing and offered “incomplete” information. The only difference between editions reported last week and the ones confirmed by Microsoft is that the starter edition–a stripped-down, low-priced version of the OS aimed at emerging markets–is branded with the “Vista” label. The Web site, which Microsoft shut down after its information appeared in published reports, said Starter would not have the Vista brand.

As expected, Microsoft plans to do away with the Windows Media Center Edition OS when it ships Vista. Instead, functionality that now is in Media Center–such as DVD playback, authoring, and burning and other multimedia features–will be included in the consumer editions Home Premium and Ultimate, Charney says. Those versions also will include TabletPC functionality, he says.

In addition, the next-generation Aero user interface will not appear in Windows Vista Starter and Home Basic. Home Premium and Ultimate are the only consumer editions with the interface, which allows users to view and flip windows three dimensionally.

Sidebar Included

All Vista editions will ship with the new Sidebar feature. Sidebar is a bar that appears on the desktop that allows user to view information–such as news, stock prices, and weather — through mini-applications Microsoft calls Gadgets. In public demonstrations of the Gadgets feature, it appears similar to the Widgets feature in Apple Computer’s Mac OS X Tiger release.

All of the mainstream consumer editions also will include the new parental controls security feature that allows parents to monitor their children’s computer and Internet use, Charney says. However, most of Vista’s enhanced security features will appear in the business editions.

Both business editions will include enhanced group policy and management features, he says. Windows Vista Enterprise will include Windows BitLocker drive and encryption, a feature that encrypts a computer’s hard drive so if a notebook is lost the data will be kept private, Charney says.

In addition, the business editions will have a new Vista peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration feature called ShareView, which allows users to connect their computers via P2P technology to share control of PowerPoint presentations.

As posted on Microsoft’s Web site and reported last week, some editions of Vista will be released in “N” versions that do not include Windows Media Player 11, a move in compliance with European antitrust provisions. However, Charney would not confirm which editions those will be.

Microsoft plans to make Windows Vista generally available in November or December of this year.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124873,tk,dn022706X,00.asp

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Spam Mutates

Peter Shinbach recently threw in the towel and shut down Bach Door, his online-communications blog.The public relations executive from Birmingham, Michigan, was fed up with so-called comment spam. Returning from a weeklong vacation, he found a slew of comments on his blog that had nothing to do with communications: They were posts from spammers promoting gambling sites and prescription drugs.

“I’m not in this to spend hours a week cleaning up the mess spammers leave behind,” Shinbach says. Ironically, the surge in spam to his blog coincides with a decrease in spam to his inbox: Shinbach says that his desktop antispam software and his ISP’s spam filters together block about 95 percent of junk e-mail sent to his account.

Shinbach is one of many who are starting to fret more about spam on blogs, instant messages, and cell phones than about traditional unsolicited e-mail–at least in part because old-style spam appears to be losing some momentum. While the volume of junk e-mail continues to mount, it stopped growing at double-digit rates last year. Many ISPs and e-mail providers claim that they blocked more than 90 percent of unsolicited commercial e-mail.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124822,tk,dn022706X,00.asp

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Internet Explorer 7 Adds New Security

A new preview version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with tabbed browsing, an integrated search box, and RSS support–all features long taken for granted by Firefox users–is now available. The Beta 2 preview of version 7 also sports a much more compact and streamlined interface than that of the current IE, with a strong emphasis on dedicating as much of the window as possible to the displayed Web site.

If you use Windows XP with Service Pack 2, you can download the new beta. Like any still-in-development program, this preview release has bugs and rough edges: You will encounter some display problems and program crashes.

In this edition of IE, only two slim toolbars sit up top, with the navigation buttons back, forward, refresh, and home split up between them.

Tabs, new to version 7, appear on the second toolbar. Although you can’t move the tabs around, you do get a nice feature called “Quick Tabs”: Clicking a gridlike icon next to the tabs brings up a convenient thumbnail display of all your currently open pages.

New security features include an antiphishing filter that warns you if you happen across a known phishing site, better ActiveX management, and programming changes that try to reduce the number of avenues for attack. Also offered is a one-click option to clear your personal browsing data, including the history, cookies, and the cache.

A more polished Beta 2 release is due to come out in the coming months, and the final IE 7 release is planned for the second half of 2006.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124825,tk,dn022406X,00.asp

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Fake F-Secure E-Mail Contains Malware

A Trojan horse has been sent to e-mail addresses disguised as a message from Helsinki, Finland, antivirus software vendor F-Secure, the company said in a statement.

F-Secure said that an unknown attacker sent out thousands of infected e-mail messages crafted so that they appear to be from a nonexistent F-Secure employee, “David Adams, Dept. Research, F-Secure Development.”

The addresses used in the attack include [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected], F-Secure said. The messages were not sent from the company’s network but were spoofed to look like they were coming from an F-Secure address, the company said.

Worm Included

The e-mail contains a new variant of the Breplibot worm, which F-Secure Anti-Virus detects as W32/Breplibot.ae.

F-Secure said it has taken measures to inform network users about the attack. You can go to the company’s site to see the text of the e-mail.

What It Does

Analysts at antivirus software company Sophos also warned of the Trojan horse spam.

“The Troj/Stinx-U Trojan horse has been seen attached to e-mail messages pretending to come from Helsinki-based F-Secure, and can have a subject line chosen from ‘Firefox Browsing Problem,’ ‘Mozilla Browsing Problem’ or ‘Website Browsing Problem,'” Sophos said in the statement.

Sophos said that if the attached file is executed, it will trigger the Trojan horse, disabling antivirus and other security software and opening a back door through which hackers can gain access to infected systems.

“It’s important to stress that the guys at F-Secure have done nothing wrong,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “They are just the unfortunate victims of Internet criminals using their name as a disguise in an attempt to spread malware. Running the file attached to the e-mail will lower security on the PC and allow hackers to gain access to spy, steal, and cause havoc.”

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124604,tk,dn020306X,00.asp

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Surf The Web In COMPLETE Safety

Stop cleaning your glasses – you read that title right. There is a way now to surf the web with absolute, unbreakable safety. It is very simple to do.

A few months ago, VMware Inc. decided to release a free virtual machine player. What this program does is pretend to be a computer. The program emulates the hardware of a regular computer, inside of a window. Inside that window, you can run any operating system supported by the player. I have been using a similar product, VMware Workstation, to test spyware and spyware removal tools.

VMware also released a free Browser Appliance. The Browser Appliance is a virtual computer, running the Ubuntu Linux operating system and includes a copy of the Firefox web browser.

You download and install the virtual machine player, then download the Browser Appliance. After you download the Browser Appliance, be sure to save the zip file somewhere, in case you need an unaltered copy of it.

Both of these are very large downloads. If you connect to the internet over dialup, it is going to take hours to download them. Trust me, it is worth the wait.

The Browser Appliance is set to use 256MB of RAM by default. If you don’t have at least twice that amount of memory in your computer, then you need to reduce the memory setting. You can change the amount of memory it uses by clicking on the “Player” button and going to the “Troubleshooting” menu. There is a slider where you can change the setting.

You also can open the Browser-Appliance.vmx file in Notepad to adjust the memory that way. The line you want to change is memsize = “256”. Whatever number you put must be a multiple of “4” and cannot be lower than “32”. I would suggest setting it to no higher than half the amount of memory installed in your computer. There is no performance gain to be had by increasing the memory setting beyond 256MB, so don’t waste the RAM.

The Browser Appliance comes in a zip file. Unzip the folder that is inside and save it somewhere. Open the vm player, navigate to where you saved the unzipped folder and load the Browser Appliance. Ubuntu Linux boots up and the VMware player automatically connects it to the internet, assuming your real computer also is online.

Surfing the web with the Browser Appliance, you have absolute and total safety from any browser-based spyware installer. First of all, it is Linux. To my knowledge, no malware infects Linux through any sort of browser exploit.

More importantly, even if, by some miracle, something bad did infect the Browser Appliance, you can just delete it and start over. Your computer is not effected by what goes on with the virtual machine. The Browser Appliance also can be made to discard all changes made between sessions. If you screw it up, just turn it off and back on.

The first time you run the Browser Appliance, it will take a few minutes for Ubuntu to boot up. After that, you can just click the VMware player’s X button to close the window. It will minimize itself long enough to suspend Ubuntu, then close. The next time you open the Browser Appliance, it will start much faster.

The only real drawback is that it takes a little work to share files between the virtual machine and the real machine. The virtual computer and the real computer are completely separate from each other, by design. There are some ways around that problem. I don’t have space enough to go into that here, so I will save it for an article that I plan to write about the Browser Appliance.

Since you have the player anyway, go ahead and download some more virtual machines. VMware has put together several virtual machines for free. They also link to several other VMs, put together by members of their online community. My favorite was the one labeled “KDE on SUSE”. If you ever wanted to play around with Linux but were too scared to install it, this is your chance to take a look at it without risking anything.

http://www.spywareinfo.net/jan17,2006#vmplayer

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