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[Link] The so-called “Storm Worm” swept into U.S. email systems on Friday, cutting a wider swath of American email systems than within Europe.

According to Finnish security analyst F-Secure, the “Small.DAM’ worm infected 20.3 of the American servers the company tracks, compared to only 15.7 percent of European systems. In both geographies, the firm ranked the worm as a “medium” threat.

Originally propagated on the heels of a killer European storm, the worm has been seen in the wild with the following subject lines: “230 dead as storm batters Europe,” “A killer at 11, he’s free at 21 and…”, “British Muslims Genocide,” “Naked teens attack home director,” and “U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has kicked German Chancellor Angela Merkel”.

When one of four attachments is opened — Full Clip.exe, Full Story.exe, Read More.exe, or Video.exe — the worm installs the “wincom32″ service, and injects a payload, passing on packets to destinations encoded within the worm itself.

“What makes this exceptional is the timely nature of the attack,” Mikko Hypponen, head of research at Finnish data security firm F-Secure, told the Reuters news service. Hypponen said thousands of computers, most in private use, had been affected.

As of Friday morning, the list of antivirus companies that had detected the worm included Authentium, BitDefender, clamAV, eSafe, FProt, Kaspersky, Norman, Sophos and Virusbuster, leaving off top names like Symantec, according to a blog entry posted by Johannes Ulrich, chief technical officer of the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center.

According to Symantec, however, the worm was picked up by its heuristic detection methodology. “The attachment is not a video clip, but a trojan horse program, which Symantec heuristic technology already detected as Trojan.Packed.8. Today’s LiveUpdate definitions detect it as Trojan.Peacomm. Users of Symantec’s Brightmail Anti-Spam are also protected from this spam email,” Amado Hidalgo, an employee of Symantec, reported in a Symantec security blog

Lately it seems like all the tech news is about the Apple’s iPhone. I think it’s great - but it’s going to be six months before anyone can get one, so enough already!

In the meantime, here’s two quick (and free) apps for the Mac.

Thumbscrew

Thumbscrew is one of those handy little photo tools that can make you look good, and fast!

Drop an image (or a folder of images!!!) on Thumbscrew, it will rotate the image, add a nice little border, and resize to your liking.

This is a great way to make a thumbnail if you are going to post photos online.

In preferences, control the amount of rotation (or none at all) the size and color of the border, the background, and the size of the image, among other things, without affecting your originals.

Before	Example 1	Example 2	Example 3

Get it here: http://www.urbanape.com/software/

MainMenu

Keeping your Mac running smoothly is one of those things we all have to do, but no one really has time for.

MainMenu makes these tasks quick and easy, right from your menu bar. With MainMenu, you can rebuild your Spotlight library for faster searching, repair permissions, clean caches to improve application performance, and more advanced settings — enable or disable the Dashboard.

MainMenu is full of powerful maintenance tools to keep your Mac running like new, within a slick, simple interface.

Get it here: http://www.santasw.com
[OS X 10.3.9 to 10.4.8 and is a Universal Binary ]

From News&Tech: In an atypical combination of new media embracing old, Yahoo Inc. and eight newspaper publishers aligned forces in a bid to grow papers’ online classified ad revenues and boost the amount of local information on yahoo.com.

The publishers, representing nearly 200 papers, are MediaNews Group Inc., Hearst Corp., Belo Corp., Cox Newspapers Inc., Journal Register Co., Lee Enterprises Inc., the E.W. Scripps Co. and Media General.

The group’s properties, ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle and the (Los Angeles) Daily News to the New Haven (Conn.) Register and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, will initially incorporate Yahoo HotJobs into their Web sites before they take other steps to share content and services. [Link]

Senior lawmakers have begun drafting legislation that would prevent high-speed Internet companies from charging content providers for priority access. [Link]

What is “Net Neutrality?”

In simple terms, net neutrality is the idea that all content is created (and accessable) equally - from the smallest blog to the largest corporation website. All that’s required is access to the Internet - from dial-up to the fastest broadband access to view this content.

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all.

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

Tim Berners-Lee
(inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium)

Tim Berners-Lee’s position is that different levels of service have always been available and doubtless always will be. He defines Network Neutrality as: “If I pay to connect to the net with a given quality of service, and you pay to connect to the net with the same or higher quality of service, then you and I can communicate across the net, with that quality of service,”.

Mac addicts everywhere will be waiting next week to see what the newest and coolest Mac products and technologies will be when Macworld Conference & Expo 2007 kicks off January 8 in San Francisco.

Perhaps in preparation, Apple.com’s website proclaims:

Rumors are rife; what will be announced? Last year’s keynote address unveiled the new Intel-based Macs. Rumors this year include a new iMac Quad Core, an iPhone, a true video iPod and more.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the Macworld Conference & Expo Keynote Address on January 9th, 2007 at 9AM Pacific time. There is no live video feed. Instead, a recorded quicktime stream is usually posted at Apple later in the same day.

ThinkSecret reports that iWork ‘07 will launch next week at Macworld and is expected as “one of the company’s more significant product launches of the year”.

Charles Wolf expects Apple will sell the iPhone as an unlocked device through Apple stores.

Sadly, I won’t be in attendance, but like many others, I’ll be watching to see what the newest geek gadgets are.

Two Alternatives for Editing Photos for Newspapers

Gimp and Photoshop CS3 offer different angles on editing photos. While not as powerful as Photoshop, Gimp includes many functions used by newspapers. Users of Photoshop, however, won’t want to miss the free download of Photoshop CS3.

Movement to New Workflow Systems Leads to Major Spending at Newspapers

Newspapers will be investing heavily in technology in coming months. Let me tell you how I know.

Kevin Slimp is a favorite speaker and trainer in the newspaper industry. He can be reached at kevin@kevinslimp.com.