PC

An online scam scheme sends junk email messages telling people that a hotel has mistakenly charged their credit card with a wrong payment. The result of being victimized is an infected PC.

According to reports the messages appeared on the net in recent days and so far there are hundreds of versions already. The main theme is: A hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund.

On Thursday a fourth-quarter report will be posted by Microsoft. The company will report a 9% increase in its profit while investors are not satisfied as they believe the Redmond company will never again recapture its old growth rates.

Microsoft’s shares have grown by 10% over the past month but they still remain in the mid-$20 range, a level they have circled since 1998, adjusted for splits.

Kaspersky Lab has developed an app for the iPhone to allow users to fight blocker programs that restrict the access to PCs and through racketeering require to pay for being unlocked. Kaspersky Deblocker provides users with the code to get rid of the blocking banner without paying any money to cyber criminals. The app can be downloaded from the App Store.

According to the forecast made by Cisco within the framework of its Visual Networking Index global Internet traffic will grow four-fold by 2015 to 966 exabytes a year, or a zettabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) while the number of devices connected to the Internet will increase to 15 billion.

Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of global service provider marketing, predicts that the average resident of the United States will have 7 networked devices in 2015 while in 2010 there was one connected device for every human on the planet.

Now users who want to have an option to shut down their PCs remotely from their iPhone can do it with the new app. Thus, if you are sitting in your chair and watching your favorite TV program you do not wish to leave, while there is a PC turned on in another room, you may switch it off via your iPhone or iPad device with the new iShutdown app.

This week at the Computex technology exhibition in Taipei Asus will show its first new PC in the "Ultrabook" class on Intel chips. Intel says it will include the best features of tablets and will go on sale by Christmas and cost under $1,000.

The Ultrabooks will be slim and lightweight but still pack high-performance processors. They should account for 40 percent of laptop sales to consumers by the end of next year, Tom Kilroy, a senior vice president at Intel, told Reuters in an interview.

Apple provided its response to the new attack started by hackers on Mac computers, the most pernicious types of computer virus infecting Cupertino machines.

Apple has issued a security advisory to customers warning them about a recent scam that infects Macs with malicious software that wrongly tells them their computer is infected with a virus. Hackers are targeting Mac machines to obtain credit card numbers and other valuable personal information.

Starting June the world’s top search engine Google will be selling its laptop computers on Chrome operating system to challenge Microsoft and Apple in their market. It is the latest of Google’s efforts to show that they are real innovators in the field of computing and hi-tech.

The PCs with the focus on the web are manufactured by Samsung and Acer inc. The operating system developed by Google is essentially a web browser that encourages people to use applications like email and spreadsheets directly on the web, instead of storing software.

According to separate studies a great number of users still remain infected with PC malware even though their machines have security protections such as anti-virus software.

One study by European Union statistics agency EUROSTAT shows that 31% of PC users had malicious software in spite of the fact that 84% of users were running security apps including anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall. Besides, 3% of respondents also reported financial losses because of farming or phishing attacks, while a further 4 per cent reported privacy violations involving data sent online.

Last week Microsoft confirmed that it had completed the RTM version of SP1, and it had been shipped out to its closest OEM partners for integration into new PC’s.

While for some people it may sound exciting many users in fact do not need to buy the Service Pack because 95% of what is stuffed there has already been supplied via regular system updates.

Researchers have found that at least 2,500 victims paid to hackers so that they would free them from the worm that had sized users’ PCs. A fast-spreading virus identified by Trend Micro as Worm_Rixobot.A has been spreading in recent weeks using infected porn websites, instant messaging applications and even infected USB drives.

$1.5 billion will be paid by Intel Corp to Nvidia to license a technology putting an end to a legal dispute between two tech Titans. It was a major victory for Nvidia whose shares climbed up 4 after hours in recognition of the value of its high-end graphics technology to Intel.

Under the terms of the settlement agreement Intel will have the right to use Nvidia's technology in its PC chips as graphics processing becomes increasingly important.

Tablets won’t displace PCs anytime soon according to a new forecast made by Gartner analyst George Shiffler. He says that despite media shouts about soon “death” of PC market, tablets are only expected to displace around 10% of PCs by 2014. The reason, he says, is that tablets aren't likely to develop the extensive content creation capabilities that users find in PCs.

Another iteration of the infamous ZeuS Trojan was developed to be run only on high-end machines with fast performance. Security researchers usually deploy automation and virtualisation technologies to cope with the growing volume of malware spewed out by cybercrooks every day. Knowing this cyber crooks use virtual machine detection and anti-debugging code in their creations. This increases the time for security analysts to detect, develop and distribute anti-virus updates.

One of the few surviving old models of original Apple-1 machines is being auctioned off next week for approximately between $161,000 and $242,000.

The junk features 8KB of RAM, a cassette board connector, and a 6502 8-bit Microprocessor clocked somewhere in the 1-2 MHz range. No monitor or keyboard.

Apart from the hardware the winner at the auction will also be given the original box, manual, receipt, and a letter to the first owner from Steve Jobs typed on lined notebook paper.