The Bits 2.0

Microsoft Research’s Asira (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a human interactive proof that provides a rather viable alternative to classical CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) that use distorted/warped texts on colourful backgrounds.

Asira is inspired by Frozen Bear’s HotCaptcha, Carnegie Mellon’s PIX CAPTCHA, Oli Warner’s KittenAuth. However, the major difference is that Asira uses a 3 million picture database from Petfinder.com while the last two have relatively small collections of images.

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ESET, spol. s r.o., a Slovakian IT security company that produce one of the best antivirus solutions (NOD32) is now offering a free online web-browser based virus scanner + cleaner solution.

While the online scanner could identify and resolve threats, is not a resident antivirus unlike its desktop counterpart and therefore will NOT be able to protect you from threats 24×7.

The online scanner runs as an ActiveX control and therefore, will require Internet Explorer 5.0 and above running Microsoft Windows NT/98/ME/2000/XP and Vista. 

One of the most frequent complains about Windows Vista is the Multimedia Class Scheduler (MCS). The is an enabled-by-default component in Windows that prioritises multimedia applications and tasks such as video and music playback (hence, improving your multimedia experience).

However, when multimedia tasks are active (most notably if Windows Media Player is active), MCS will throttle down the global network bandwidth to around 10,000 packets per second to conserve CPU interrupts. On high speed links like Gigabit Ethernet (without Jumbo Packets), the throttling may yield a significant drop in network throughput.

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Many bloggers complained that their posts begin appearing in reversed orders after their webhost upgraded to MySQL 5.0.5x. This is caused by a bug in the MySQL database server affecting versions 5.0.50, 5.0.51 and 5.0.51a  (MySQL Bug #30596).

The bug can be reproduced by any SQL Select command that couples both GROUP BY and ORDER BY clauses and does not affect WordPress alone.

The work around for this problem is outlined below:

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In a rather embarassing incident, the main ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) server in Antioch University was broken in and about 60,000 students, former and current employers were compromised. The intrusion was due to the administrator’s failure to patch a critical flaw in the FTP daemon of the Sun Solaris server.

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