Cricket - Event in Riyadh

WATCH T20I CRICKET MATCH 09

LIVE TELECAST FROM DUBAI STADIUM
ON 12TH NOVEMBER 2009 AT 6:00 PM

LIVE ON BIG CINEMA PROJECTION SCREEN!
“Join the heat!”

PAKISTAN VS NEW ZEALAND!

VENUE: RAIBON ISTARAH - AZIZIYAH EXIT 20,
BEHIND AL ADREES GAS STATION (SAPTCO)

ALL RESPECTED SPECTATORS ARE WARMLY
WELCOME TO WATCH LIVE CRICKET MATCH

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For more details call: 0562383593 - 0596980450

SCAM : Someone calling you at home to help you clean off a virus!

SCAM : Someone calling you at home to help you clean off a virus

by Terry Cutler (www.terrycutler.com)

Hi Everyone, I try hard not to send so many emails but this is an important one too.

It was reported to me from an executive co-worker who's source was from a gentleman during a CNET podcast.

I literally heard about this latest scam today. A gentleman was sitting at home when the telephone rang and a person identified as having an Indian accent informed the person that a virus had been detected on his computer and that he was calling to help clear it off. The recipient was security aware and asked the caller how they had determined his computer had a virus. The caller advised him that his company had learned this by scanning his router. The recipient said thank you very much and asked what IP address they had found. The caller said that he would need to transfer the call to technical support but to help properly the call recipient would need to go to his computer and click the start button and select the remote control function and enable external access.

The recipient of the call very fortunately understood what was going on, that the caller was trying to get him to open his PC to the Internet and allow the caller direct access to his machine. He hung up.

Windows Remote Control can be extremely powerful in a support capacity but unless you are very careful and know who is connecting to you, it opens your machine wide. If you are a reader of this site, I'm guessing you are smart enough to know better so please do take a moment to share this latest scam with your friends and family. Once an intruder has access to your system, he or she has near godlike power, particularly since over 99% of Windows users have administrator authority.

Points to keep in mind regarding Privacy & Security

Some points to always keep in mind regarding your privacy & security;

- Always use Genuine Operating Systems

Reason: Malicious hackers who decode & crack OS always keep a back door in that copy of OS, which looks & feel normal to the end-user of that pirated version but is vulnerable to all kinds of attacks anytime or whenever desired by any malicious hacker. The “zombie” computers, which are used by malicious hackers are such pirated versions which can be controlled whenever desired.

“Zombie” in security language, is a vulnerable computer which is used by a malicious hacker for DoS & DDoS attack.


- Always keep your Firewall on

People often turn off their computer’s firewall without keeping in mind the risk factors involved in it. Firewall helps filter In-going & Out-going internet traffic of your computer, it blocks all kinds of unknown & malicious connections to your system. Thus it should be kept on all the time. MS Windows Vista users often complain that they don’t like the firewall pop-ups, note that you can turn of those pop-ups from advanced settings, but it’s always recommended that you keep it on so that you know what thing is being run & what applications are being connected to internet, vice versa.

- Do not use pirated Software & Applications

I’ve researched and I saw people even using pirated Anti-Virus & Internet Security Suites which are available for download at torrents’ websites. These pirated versions are totally NOT RECOMMENDED & are too dangerous for your privacy. Novice users don’t care about what back-doors their PC have or what tasks are being run in stealth mode. If you cannot afford a paid version, you can still have best ever awarded solutions such as Avast Home Edition from Avast.com.

Cracked versions of applications usually don’t update which makes them more & more vulnerable to attacks. Attack can be of any type. You never know what’s going on in stealth or cryptographic way, thus keep it clean & safe for yourself. Use open source apps. if you cannot afford the others.

- Stay away from Web Browser tool bars

These toolbars are high vulnerability to your system, all contents based upon ActiveX technology are always at great risks. Microsoft itself has announced the dangers involved in using ActiveX based tools. They quoted it as, “..one of the most insecure technology ever created..”

I’ll be sharing more with time.

While using computer at work...

Well, businesses these days but LCD monitors as they take less space & look good as well, but it’s too boring if you’re looking at the same screen everyday. The best way is to customize your desktop in a way that it looks different than usual. If you’re a windows user, try changing colors, themes, and yeah especially the wallpaper. A cool wallpaper can really change your mood. There are a lot of resources from where you can get really awesome wallpapers, for instance; wallpaperstock.net, and many more, just google it.

All that end users care is the User Interface. IT departments never bother about it. But what ever place I worked, I really cared about user interface for every pc. Of course it makes people happy!

Earlier posted at: http://fdilbar.tumblr.com/

Little about Yoono - The Firefox Add-on

Since last February when I just joined Twitter.com, which that time was totally a weird thing to me, but with time like every other twitter addict, I felt that it's the best social network ever created in this era, "The Communication Era".

Well now I'm tweeting everyday regularly, twitter not only connected me to all the major brands directly but so many professionals which I would never hear or talk in next 5 years without twitter. It's just a click of a button & there you go!

I've been testing beta versions for a lot of tools, software & applications officially with several companies & as an end-user too. Last week was great working out with specifically Twitter desktop clients, browser add-ons & so on.

I've been using TweetDeck, Seesmic & a lot of other famous desktop clients for daily tweeting & I'm still analyzing them for later reviews. Well everyone has different views toward these twitter clients but I'll let you know some technical issues in next post soon.

So let's talk about this thing called "Yoono" as you can see in the heading of this post. In simple words Yoono turns your internet browser into a full fledged social & browsing mania! I've been testing couple of add-ons which my friends thought are really wonderful, one of them is Kunato, which I personally don't like much, because it sucks up all my system's memory (I checked it on a Quad-core & a Dual-core based system), it turns my system slow, but yeah, it provides a unique feature that you can tweet on every page in any website around the internet, good for a normal computer user, but what about the professionals who're having 50+ windows opened & they're multi-tasking immensely every day? In that case I don't recommend Konato because it still has some issues, we'll see in later versions of course. Yoono till now, is the best add-on ever made for social networking embedded in Firefox browser. It's having Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo, Gmail & much more of Widgets which we use individually every day. Few advantages I can count are:

- It saves time, you can update your status in real time in all networks.
- It's fast, light add-on, your system won't die, if you're using it.
- It does not really conflict with other applications.
- Provides an eye-catching beautiful interface (with different color schemes).
- Let you share media on all networks in real time.
- Let you comment, reply, chat & everything you really need!

All I can say is that, Yoono is totally AWESOME! Try it. Don't say you hate it just because you can't use it. But you're free to share any draw backs. Cheers!

Links: Download Firefox - Download Yoono

Security Tip - Toolbars & IE

Toolbars & IE (Tips for Novice computer users):

Never install ActiveX based Internet Explorer or any other browser compatible TOOLBARS, these toolbars are one of the biggest Vulnerabilities & main cause of littering most of the Windows based Operating Systems which exist until now. Download & install toolbars from trustworthy sources only. Microsoft themselves agreed & warned Windows users about ActiveX, ActiveX was one of the most insecure technology ever created.

This was one of the reasons that Microsoft split Internet Explorer from Windows Explorer in Windows Vista, Windows 7 & other future Windows versions, which makes these OS more secure than previous OS versions.

Keep your IE (Internet Explorer) up-to-date, if you're using a pirated version of OS you better start saving & get yourself a genuine licensed OS. Every pirated OS has a backdoor which helps malicious hackers to steal your PC's processing speed (at least) or steal your data.

Note: Even MAC based systems are not secure from web vulnerabilities, thus think before you download or click a link.

- Faisal Mohammad

Comments sent by me to Zawya.com Members

ABOUT DELL & RELATED SERVICES IN RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA

Well, as far dell is concerned, I've a good experience with Dell, I'm an IT consultant and worked in many Saudi organizations until now in the IT sector itself, where ever I placed dell desktops I never heard any complains, even for my own use I prefer dell computers, as far the cost is concerned, I think it's a lot cheaper and affordable if you compare to competitive brands. The problem we sometimes face in Saudi (especially in Riyadh) is that, if something goes wrong, for instance, if a notebook's charger is damaged and not working we've to spin ourselves in whole city in all major computer related sites and if we get a charger we'll be in doubt that whether it's original or second quality, there is a huge impact of brands like Dell in the market, until now I didn't find any specified and dedicated maintenance center or some kind of regional show case with maintenance opportunities in Riyadh from Dell's side, if you see HP, you'll find too many authorized maintenance center right in the city center with other computer shops, consumers are smarter than before, people buy that product which has the best service available (regional). Now technical people always recommend Dell notebooks, desktops, servers for enterprises but a normal user always thinks that HP support is available easily so let's buy HP it looks better than Dell. So the impact of service centers and regional centers on the consumers is too much, especially in Saudi community, users like the product which is marketed more often. As Dell is one of the oldest and major computer manufacturer they must think and get out of the eBusiness world, they should open centers in public places where majority of computer consumers lies.


COMPARISON BETWEEN APPLE'S MAC & WINDOWS BASED PCs

There's one more thing I would like to say is that, I don't understand why people compare Apple Mac and a Windows based PC, whatever Mac is and whatever Windows is today, no one should compare it. Let's talk in a way too advance level prospectus. The future of computer world is Web based applications and centralized virtualization servers to provide services to all end-user peers. Now the point is, would an asp.net developer buy a Mac? would IIS server run on Apple computers? would a security analyst use a Mac for security measures? Windows is way too advanced, two-way sync. in different versions of Windows? Unicode support? Built-in powerful firewalls? Okay lets keep it precise, before 2 years, I was a great fan of Apple when it comes to designing, but now when I'm running a Quad-core with 64bit Windows with up to 16GBs of RAM, do you think me as a developer or programmer would to switch to a Mac for designing? Real example; I use designing applications, MS Visual Studio, word processing software, browsing on multiple browsers, e-mail client, chatting clients, and so forth at a same time! with superb speed! I can run other operating systems virtually on this Windows machine how about that?... My point to all this long discussion is that, there is no comparison of Apple's Mac with any of the MS Windows based machines, Mac has it's own value in Media, and Windows has it's own Value in a lot of other stuff than just Media. And Apple's theory; the more you get richer, the more our products get cheaper to you. Where as Microsoft say, Okay? are you a student? verify your university I'll give you up to 90% discount!! How's that?...



No offense, I'm a Mac & a Windows user. Cheers!