Asia Pacific and MEA Cup 2011- IT Security for the Next Generation

Conference Objective

This conference brings together students, experts, scientists and researchers in a collaborative environment to present and discuss issues relating to cybercrime. It provides a platform for the next generation to be able to share their respective knowledge and experiences and to develop new ideas to improve the level of security in information technology.
The best submissions will be given awards and valuable prizes from Kaspersky Lab and the authors will be invited to attend the MEA and Asia Pacific Conference for Young Professionals to be hosted at the University of Technology MARA in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) on February 25 - 28, 2011. The authors will be given a certificate of participation.

Meet The New Fox

Mozilla is getting ready for the new version of the hugely popular web browser that will be called Firefox 4 and has released the first beta version for the new edition of the browser. There are a few aesthetic changes in the new version of the browser such as the tabs that have been pushed up where the Menu bar originally was, much like in Opera and Chrome browsers.  The Menu bar instead been transformed into a drop-down menu on the upper left corner of the user interface (UI) labeled as ‘Firefox’. This feature was first seen with Chrome having a single button for their drop-down menu and later Opera used this feature and put up their Opera button on upper left hand corner, an idea which the newest edition of Firefox has borrowed. These changes will surely help by neatly arranging the menu items in one place for quicker access, thereby reducing the clutter in UI and make the new version more visually enhancing.

Pirate Party to run The Pirate Bay from Swedish Parliament

After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.

Hard Drive Prices Dropping Again

Hard drive prices, about a year ago, had stabilized down after a period of sharp fall, due to shortage of hard drives. The depreciation in the price was very less or even negligible in some cases. A couple of months ago, I had gone to the wholesale market to get a few things and I noticed that the prices of hard drives had actually shot up by about 15-20 $. I certainly had expected the prices to come down but was surprised with the sudden rise in the prices.

Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech(2005)

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower," Steve Jobs.
And how well these words describe the man himself. For a man who takes home an annual salary of $1, it is surprising that Jobs regularly is in the list of the world's rich and powerful.
In his resume, Jobs says his objective is to look for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. "Am willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy, a bit of that "vision thing" and I'm not afraid to start from the beginning."

Using HijackThis to remove malware

HijackThis, a hijacker detector and remover was originally created by Merijn Bellekom and then later sold off to Trend Micro. HijackThis is a very popular browser hijacker detector used by majority of security analysers to identify the possible malware infections on a computer.

The problem with today’s malware is that they are very difficult to detect due to the advanced protective mechanisms used by them. Because of this, even a thorough scan by the latest updated anti virus or an anti spyware/malware  may miss out on the latest variants of a particular malware. In such cases, to make sure even the last traces of the malware is weeded out, security analysts suggest using HijackThis logfile through which they can analyse the registry and other program settings on a computer and based on the log, they can pinpoint towards the malware entry (and thereby their removal too) with greater accuracy.

Download GTA game for free

Grand Theft Auto (commonly abbreviated as GTA) fans have something to cheer about. Rockstar Games, the developer of the famous game series has decided to offer the classic GTA , GTA 2 and Wild Metal games for free download on their website. "These games, each available free of charge and optimized for play on modern PCs, offer a nostalgic trip back in time to the early days of the Rockstar legacy."

One can download the games from this link - Rockstar Classics

Note that, after clicking on the icon of the game one wants, he is required to fill up a small form and then the download link will be sent to their email address.

P.S. : for people who loved GTA Vice City and its sequels, I suggest you give these classic games a try. They are the real basis for these popular games that we have today. I had played GTA 2 when I was a kid and I had loved it even then!

Things you didn’t know VLC media player can do

For most people, VLC is the favorite media player because it plays everything they throw at it without hiccups. No hunting for codec. But VLC can do a lot of other things as well. Find out how many of these listed below you knew, and how many you did not.

1. Rip DVDs: VLC includes a basic DVD ripper. You probably would never use it when there are better DVD rippers available, but it helps to know that you can in fact, get a decent quality DVD rip with VLC. To rip a movie follow these steps:

Hollywood says NO to Steve Jobs

 The Apple vs Adobe fight drags on with several large media companies going Adobe’s way by not relenting to Apple’s directives on changing their Flash based media content to the ones supported by Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

According to a report by New York Times, “several large media companies, including Time Warner and NBC Universal, told Apple they won’t retool their extensive video libraries to accommodate the iPad, arguing that such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web.

IObit Advanced SystemCare PRO Free Giveaway

IObit is giving away their popular system maintenance software Advanced System Care PRO free as a part of limited time giveaway to commemorate their 5th anniversary of Advanced System Care.

The Chinese find use for cigarette butts

HONG KONG, May 13 (Reuters) - Chemical extracts from cigarette butts -- so toxic they kill fish -- can be used to protect steel pipes from rusting, a study in China has found.

In a paper published in the American Chemical Society's bi-weekly journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, the scientists in China said they identified nine chemicals after immersing cigarette butts in water.

Infinite USB Ports ?

Yes, that's right. A Chinese designer and inventor has made something that most of us would think, "why didn't someone think of this before!" Gonglue Jiang, the man behind this innovation has made this attractive little contraption that may be of great use to computer users.

These days, we see a lot of USB devices and for a person like me who uses too many devices at once (2 external drives, a pen drive, a USB mouse, laptop cooler and a USB mobile phone charger), such a thing could be a boon. At the moment, I use a 4 port USB hub on one of my USB ports on my laptop (out of the total three) and that's how I manage my USB devices. But most of the times this becomes messy and irritates me a lot. A good alternative could be such a device as shown in the picture which would allow me to add any number of USB devices I would want to use.