Security firm Sophos has the details:

The fake anti-virus attack first appears in your timeline as a message apparently posted by one of your friends.

In case you’ve been out of the loop, the text used refers to the news story of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn who is facing charges in New York over charges that he allegedly tried to rape a hotel maid.

People who know what they’re doing will recognize this for what it is – a sick fakey headline and the promise of a video is used to entice people to click on the link which goes to a site pushing malware – in this case Mac Defender. For good measure clicking on the link also posts the same message onto the Facebook wall of the person clicking on the link – this helps find the next sucker victim.

Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley calls it a ‘a genius piece of social engineering.’

Needless to say, if you see this on Facebook, don’t click on the link!

Apple has promised a patch for Mac Defender and its variants, but so far this hasn’t materialized. [UPDATE: The Apple security update has just materialized.]

Windows users shouldn’t get too cocky though, given that the same viral ‘video’ is being used to spread the Zeus botnet malware to the Microsoft crowd. Linux users don’t get to play.

source from: zdnet

Denis Reggie, a wedding photographer, takes a different approach, with outstanding results. Over his 30-year career, his unobtrusive style, which he calls “wedding photojournalism,” has led him to shoot now-iconic images of the Kennedy-Bessette wedding, as well as the nuptials of Chelsea Clinton, Vera Wang, Emilio Estevez and many others.

Here’s his advice for getting shots fit for a king, or at least a prince.

1) Overlook the obvious. Typically, wedding photographers plan for the classic — you might say clichéd — wedding moment, like the bride walking down the aisle. Mr. Reggie looks for a detail that tells the story in a new way. “Maybe it’s the mother clenching her hand to her chest, watching her husband walk the bride down the aisle,” he said. The only way to find those shots is rapt observation. “Look for the unexpected,” he said. “The reason so many people don’t get those real moments, is they are busy trying to orchestrate them, ‘Come over here, you’re here, turn this way.’”

2) Be unobtrusive … somewhat. While the inconspicuous style would seem to lend itself to long lenses, Mr. Reggie says that is seldom the case. “Weddings are inherently crowded spaces, so while a long lens can be great for a garden wedding, they are not the ultimate tool for capturing people shoulder to shoulder, trying to get a glance at the bride’s sparkly ring.”

For most shots he moves in close with a fast, flattering 50-millimeter lens. With his camera’s less-than-full-size sensor, that is the equivalent of a 65-millimeter lens on a 35-millimeter camera. The wide angle is only for special situations. “They are not flattering to the human body” he said. Another tip is to prepare for low light, setting your camera’s light sensitivity – the ISO – as high as you can without getting too much speckled “noise” in your images.

3) Work fast. A key to capturing those real moments is not trying to force them. Mr. Reggie does take classic group shots of the wedding party, but, “I think it’s an 11-minute process,” he said. “Eleven minutes is about all people can tolerate.” Any longer and people begin to look bored and stiff. While he relies on old etiquette books to determine who stands where in the group shots, it doesn’t pay to be too fussy. “In terms of ‘perfect,’ of adjusting every bowtie, I’d rather have it real. In some of the best shots the bride’s slip is showing.”

He prefers to give just enough direction to relax his subjects. “There is an art to making people comfortable,” he said, which includes speaking in an “almost Alec Baldwin” sotto voce. “I draw on psych 101 to make someone comfortable using compliments. ‘My gosh these are lovely photos.’” he said. “Don’t ask them to ‘turn here, you move there.’”

4) Use a flash — carefully. “I do use flash, it is necessary at many weddings, but I can’t remember the time I have pointed a flash at a human being,” Mr. Reggie said. He bounces his flash off a wall — sometimes as far as 30 feet away — to achieve a painterly effect. “To have the side of the face nearest the camera in shadow is so dramatic,” he said. “It renders a Vermeer-like window lighting.” He relies on technology for this effect. His Canon EOS-1D Mark IV, as with many high-end cameras, does a series of calculations when the flash is pointed in a different direction from the lens: It adjusts the flash for the right exposure and the camera analyzes white balance, so that light bounced off a red wall won’t tint the bride’s white dress pink.

5) The eyes have it. Shooting in low light often results in a low depth of field, meaning only a limited area of the photo can be in focus. The most important thing to have sharp is the eyes, Mr. Reggie says, but remember how depth of field works. If your camera has, say, one foot depth of field in a certain shot, one third of the depth of field — four inches — is in front of the spot you focus, and two-thirds — eight inches — is behind that focus point. If shooting a couple where one is closer to the camera, “Aim a third of the way behind the nearest point you want in focus,” he said. “Maybe it’s her shoulder, maybe it’s his boutonniere. That is most likely to get both sets of eyes tack sharp, even though the focus wasn’t on either of them.”

6) Edit hard. Because he is looking for the unexpected, Mr. Reggie keeps his eye to the camera and shoots a lot of images, an average of 3,500 for his typical 10 hours at a wedding, he said. He will edit it down to about 700 shots. “I’m fine with an 80 percent edit,” he said.

7) Photoshop lightly. Mr. Reggie is not a fan of creating radiant lighting effects and model-perfect skin using post-production techniques. “Photoshop is salt and pepper, not the steak,” he said. “Photoshop is at its best when the use of it is not evident.” He uses it for emergency repairs only. “Maybe I have a wall sconce behind the head that looks like a Viking headdress,” he said. “I hate to modify reality, but when a moment is perfect, I don’t want something to distract.” He prefers to use Adobe’s Lightroom, which allows fewer drastic corrections.

Most of all, Mr. Reggie said, keep in mind you are recording an event, not orchestrating it. “You are the historian for Volume One of this young couple, that will be looked at for dozens of years.” If you miss a moment, you can’t get it back, and you shouldn’t try to. “I like to never ask anyone to ‘do it again.’ If I miss a kiss, let it go,” he said. “I think people know if it’s real or staged — it shows in the eyes.”

source from: nytimes

Some days I feel like technology is conspiring against me. In the past couple weeks I’ve been through the wringer with my Media Center PC, my Apple iPhone, and my Nintendo Wii. Oh, and then there was Skype, which worked fine for a week straight and then suddenly started locking up my system. Argh!

This stuff happens to everybody–and over the years I’ve pulled out enough hair and drop-kicked enough wastebaskets to have learned some lessons. So the next time your PC behaves in a way that makes you want to tie it in a burlap sack and find the nearest pond, remember these three rules.

1: Accept it. This stuff happens to everybody. Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to it, and most of the time it’s through no fault of your own. Windows is an unpredictable, unreliable beast (yes, even Windows 7). A single problem driver or incompatible program can wreak havoc on an otherwise healthy system. When you accept that problems can and will happen, they’ll be less of a surprise–and less likely to ruin your day.

2: Relax. System won’t boot? Printer won’t print? iPhone won’t sync? Take a deep breath. In fact, take several. Then walk away from the offending machine, device, or whatever, and do something else for 5-10 minutes. I know full well how annoying and frustrating these glitches can be. That’s why it’s crucial to get some distance, so you can come back calm and clear-headed. Which ties directly to rule #3:

3: Don’t overreact. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made things worse by failing to heed rule #2. Instead, I start flinging mouse-clicks at the troubleshooting dartboard. Uninstall a driver here, update a BIOS there, run the free virus-removal utility that promises to fix everything–it all snowballs. That’s how one problem evolves into several, until eventually you think: “Ah, screw it, I’ll just buy a new PC.” (Tell me you haven’t had that exact reaction at some point.) By all means, troubleshoot the problem, but do so slowly and methodically.

Overcome Windows 7 Software-Compatibility Issues

Windows 7 has the same core code as Windows Vista, right? So application compatibility should be a non-issue, right? Wrong.

Recently I tried to apply a firmware update to a Blu-ray drive, but the installer was designed for Vista and produced an error in Windows 7. Meanwhile, I’ve had ongoing problems getting my iPhone to sync properly with iTunes–even though it worked just fine in Vista.

Much as I like Windows 7, at times like these I wish I could turn back the clock and run Vista, or even XP. It turns out that I can. Windows 7 has a little-known feature that helps you troubleshoot application compatibility. Here’s how to use it:

1. Right-click the icon of the app that’s not working properly, then click Troubleshoot compatibility.
2. Windows will try to detect compatibility issues, then give you two options: Try recommended settings and Troubleshoot program. Select the first option.
3. After Windows applies the selected settings, click Start Program and see if that solves the problem. Either way, click Next to have Windows apply the settings “permanently” or try again with different settings.

This tool solved my Blu-ray drive firmware problems, but it didn’t completely clear up my iTunes/iPhone quagmire.

Get Detailed Information About Your PC

So my iPhone was still refusing to sync properly with my recently upgraded Windows7 PC.

I’ve read here and there that there’s a known issue with Windows 7, gigabyte motherboards, certain Intel chipsets, and iTunes. Maybe that’s the culprit? Just one problem: I have no idea what kind of motherboard and chipset are inside my PC.

Enter CPU-Z, a free utility that reveals all kinds of information about your hardware: processor model, RAM size and speed, BIOS brand and version, and so on. It gives you just the kind of information you might need when trying to troubleshoot a sticky problem like this one. Of course, CPU-Z can come in handy for more mundane tasks as well, like figuring out what kind of memory to buy when upgrading your system.

A quick check of the Memory tab, for instance, reveals that I have 400MHz, dual-channel, DDR2 RAM. And the SPD tab shows me what’s in each memory slot. On my system, slots 1 and 2 each have a “1024 MByte” (aka. 1GB) Samsung PC2-6400 module. Perfect: Now I know to buy two more just like that to bring my system total to 4GB.

If you ever need detailed information about your PC’s inner hardware, CPU-Z can’t be beat. And it’s a freebie to boot.

Now I just need to do some research and figure out what the heck’s going on with iTunes–at least now I’ve got the hardware specs I need.

Source:pcworld.com

Source:pcworld.com

It’s an age-old question: When you’re done using your laptop, or just taking a break from work, should you put it to sleep, let it hibernate, or turn it all the way off?

Allow me to answer by way of a mnemonic: hibernate is great. You see, sleep mode (a.k.a. standby) puts your system into an off-like state, allowing you to pick up where you left off after just a few seconds (unlike rebooting, which can take minutes). But a PC in standby mode continues to consume battery power, so it’s not uncommon to return to a “sleeping” PC to find that it’s just plain dead.

Hibernate, on the other hand, writes your machine’s current state to a temporary hard-drive file, then shuts down completely (much like “off”). When you start it up again, it loads that file and returns you to where you left off–no booting required.

Both ends of the hibernate process take a little longer than standby (usually 10-20 seconds, in my experience), but you avoid any of the issues that can arise when Windows suddenly loses power. What’s more, standby is a notoriously flaky mode. I’ve encountered plenty of systems that refuse to wake up properly, so you end up losing whatever work you were trying to preserve.

Consequently, unless you’re running your laptop on AC power, I recommend using hibernate most of the time.

Source:pcworld.com

MAP is a Solution Accelerator from Microsoft that allows you to inventory and analyze the systems in your organization without requiring any sort of agent software to be installed on the endpoints. MAP leverages existing Microsoft technologies such as Active Directory Domain Services, the Remote Registry Service, and the Computer Browser Service to gather information and produce informative reports to help guide your IT planning.

MAP analysis and reports can help with a variety of IT planning scenarios. MAP can help inventory servers and clients on the network, identify physical servers that are not being utilized effectively, and make recommendations for consolidating servers and virtualizing roles using Hyper-V. In this case though, we’re mainly interested in the ability of MAP to determine hardware compatibility and readiness for upgrading to Windows 7.

MAP identifies systems running earlier versions of Windows like Windows XP and Windows Vista, then compares the MAP scan results against Windows 7 minimum and recommended system requirements. Systems that do not meet the needs of Windows 7 for things like memory, free disk space, or processor speed are identified, and MAP makes specific recommendations for actions to take to make the system ready for Windows 7.

The resulting Windows 7 Readiness Summary report provides a simple overview of the number of systems that are ready for Windows 7, the number that are not ready, and the number that will never be ready. The MAP results deliver the information you need to get your hardware up to speed for Windows 7.

MAP is great, but it actually only tells half of the story compared with the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. You also have to consider the software you rely on and whether those applications will work in Windows 7. Microsoft has another Solution Accelerator to fill that need–Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT).

Similar to MAP, ACT will scan the systems on your network and identify any software that is incompatible with Windows 7. Most applications should be able to run under Windows 7. For those critical applications that don’t work in Windows 7, Microsoft provides XP Mode to bridge the gap and let you continue to run them in a virtual Windows XP system within Windows 7.

Armed with MAP and ACT results, you can plan your upgrade to Windows 7 to make it as efficient and hiccup-free as possible. A little due diligence and planning goes a long way to ensuring a smooth migration experience for your organization.

Next, determine which version of Windows 7 is right for you, and start planning your upgrade.

Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience. He tweets as @PCSecurityNews and provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at tonybradley.com.

Source:pcworld.com