Personal Guard 2009 – only guarding its malicious intent

The way of world these days, it seems, is to dupe and mislead every which way, in all aspects of life, and the Internet community is merely following suit.

Personal Guard 2009 is the latest in scams! Pretending to be a spyware remover, this application has one primary objective: to scare its victims into purchasing its licensed version.

Personal Guard 2009 also referred to as: PersonalGuard2009, Personal Guard2009 or PersonalGuard 2009, doesn’t deviate much from the typical and most widely practiced tactics of PC parasite infiltration.

Personal Guard 2009 tends to use affiliated backdoor Trojans, usually Trojan Vundo or Zlob, in order to ensure hidden penetration into the targeted machine is successful.

Once inside the designated system, Personal Guard 2009will obscurely create hundreds of fake malware entities in the infiltrated system.

Vista Experience delays Windows 7 Adoption

A Survey of Technology Professionals”, commissioned by systems management appliance company KACE and conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research, surveyed 1,100 IT professionals via e-mail.

This survey is likely to be demoralizing news for Microsoft that 84% of the respondents do not plan to upgrade their machines to Windows 7 in the next year. This could cause delays in the software giant’s strategy to get users off the eight year old Windows XP and the embattled Windows Vista and on to
Windows 7.

Diane Hagglund, Senior Research Analyst for Dimensional Research and author of the survey said that the leading reason for resistance to Windows 7 adoption is Vista compatibility problems as well as “a negative public perception of Vista that seems to have helped build the layer of distrust with Windows 7.

The IT professionals other concerns were also listed in the survey about moving to Windows 7 – software compatibility, cost of implementation and the economic downturn.

New and Useful Free Sites with unique File Hosting features

Easy Share
You can upload files from your PC or from a remote server. Upload via ftp, http, software or web embedded widgets.

Gazup
You will be able to upload files to multiple file hosts in one go. Simply upload a file to Gazup service and their servers utilizing gigabit speeds will rapidly mirror your files to 8 hosts, including RapidShare, MegaUpload, FileFactory zShare, etc.

rarhost
rarhost is a new file hosting site, only for winrar .rar archives. They offer more than just basic file hosting, their system has advanced information about each rar file, therefore they have decided to specialize in .rar files, for example you can see what the archive contains before you download, ensuring it contains the files you want.

Grouping and Messaging friends for Twitter with Tweetparty

Twitter is becoming a mainstream way of communicating with your friends.

Tweetparty fills the gaps when you only want to send a message to a group of people.

Tweetparty lets you organize your twitter friends into parties and sends direct messages to them.

With tweetparty, when you login, all of the people you are following are downloaded to tweetparty.

Microsoft to release Office 2007 this month

Microsoft is planning to release Office 2007 Service Pack 2 sometime soon.

Microsoft is scheduled to release the second service pack for Office 2007. We have only heard bits and pieces of what’s coming, but now we have something more official, courtesy of the WSUS Product Team Blog:

Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Office System will be made available to Windows Server Update Services in April, classified as a service pack.

Service Pack 2 includes some significant work, including: built-in ability to save as ODF & PDF formats, improvements to Outlook’s performance and calendar reliability, significant bug fixes for charts in core Office applications, the ability for client service packs to be removed using an uninstall tool, and a host of customer-requested improvements to the Office Server products.

Windows XP Mainstream Support Retired

Today Microsoft retired Mainstream Support for Windows XP and Office 2003. Both products are now under Extended Support and will continue to be until April 8, 2014.

If Redmond ends up releasing a fourth service pack for XP, it will retire support for SP3 (released April 2008) two years after SP4 is released, or in April 2014, whichever comes first. The same applies for Office 2003, which is also at SP3 (released in September 2007). In other words, most users don’t have to worry for almost five more years.

The difference between the two support packages is that Mainstream Support includes free and paid support as well as bug fixes for all those who purchase a retail copy. Both of these support packages include free security updates, so users will still receive security patches as Microsoft issues them. The company will also offer per-incident support via phone and Web for everyone.

83% of Businesses not planning on upgrading to Windows 7

Microsoft received alot of criticism from numerous sources following the Vista launch.

What really wounded Microsoft was the number of businesses, both small and large, that refused to upgrade to Vista.

The pattern didn’t change following compatibility updates and the service pack and at the beginning of this year Vista was still showing poor adoption rates in the enterprise. One recent study shows that a significant number of businesses are not planning on upgrading to Windows 7.

The figure is high, at an estimated of 83% of businesses planning not to upgrade – at least not right away, in the first year.

New Zune Hardware arriving this Year

Engadget is reporting that word has come from Microsoft that new Zune hardware will be available this year.

Microsoft’s Zune came out in November, 2006, with a couple of revisions in between.

They have sold over 3 million units so far.

Details so far are extremely slim on what will be released. We will just have to wait and see.

Add Windows Live Messenger to your Website

The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit is a new set of controls and libraries that let you chat with your Windows Live Messenger friends or other website visitors.

This automatically adds a social element to your site, without having to transform your site into a social network.

The easiest way to begin is to use this tool, which provides a step-by-step guide and sample code to get you started.

See a video demonstration for more information.

You can try it out now from dev.live.com/messenger.

How to Protect Computer Data

“How to Protect Computer Data” was published in The Hartford Courant on September 19, 2007, discusses the failure of the State of Connecticut to adequately protect information entrusted to its custody and measures it could have taken to significantly reduce the impact of the loss of a notebook computer containing personal information regarding more than 100,000 of its citizens.

Sufficient care must be taken by both the private and public sectors to protect all information with which they are entrusted.

The solutions offered in “How to Protect Computer Data”, are not meant to be the end all solutions but are intended to illustrate that not even the most basic of information security controls were implemented.