Chalk up another win for the spammers. According to security company BitDefender, the Captchas Type Challenge Response System has been compromised. The Captchas system is the system used to generate those funky looking letters when you sign up at certain websites. The system was designed based on the theory that computers could not automatically read the swirly letters (Or humans for that matter). The general concept behind Captchas was to cripple the scripts that the spammers setup to automatically generate email accounts to spam with on services such as Hotmail or Yahoo. Since these scripts cannot read the letters generated and sent to the user’s screen, they would not be able to generate the fake accounts to spam with.
Archive for July, 2007
July10
FileMaker Pro 9 Announced
FileMaker Pro 9 was announced earlier today by the software maker FileMaker (Coincidence, I think not!). FileMaker Pro is a database software and was one of the first applications to run on OS X back in 2001. This new release touts a quick start screen, Send Link which lets you send clickable links to the database via email, the ability to connect to an External SQL Data Source to integrate with live data from Microsoft SQL Server, and Software update notification along with many other new features. Continue reading for a link and pricing.
Dell unveiled its new Vostro line of desktop and notebook computers designed specifically for small businesses with 1-25 employees (So those of you with 26 employees are out of luck).
This line of machines is based on Dell’s recent decision to actually listen to what the customer wants, then design a product around it. Some of the notable features include 1 year of 10GB DataSafe Online Backup and Dell Remote Troubleshooting. These new machines also come without any trialware installed which will keep me from having to do the clean operating system reinstall the minute I get a new PC thing I have been doing all these years to get the garbage off of the machine that the big computer makers put on there.
Click below for the full article.
Listen as we go through some of the stuff we like and dislike about our Apple iPhones covering topics such as battery life, email support for Microsoft Exchange, WiFi, Syncing contacts and calendar with Microsoft Exchange, SMS (Texting), Internet (Safari), the Wow Factor, Ring tones, Flash support, Activation tricks and other Misc items.
In an open letter from Peter More, Microsoft has announced that it is extending the warranties for consoles experiencing the infamous three flashing red lights. The extended warranty will cover new and previously sold XBox 360 units that are affected by what Microsoft describes as general hardware failure.
It was reported last week on several large technology blogs that the failure rate of Microsoft’s newest gaming consoles was possibly as high as 33%. Of the 6 people I know with XBox 360 systems, 3 have had to send theirs back in to date because of hardware failure and one that didn’t send in his broken console because Microsoft wanted to charge him $150.00 to fix it.
It is nice to see Microsoft finally admitting to this problem and doing what is right for the consumer. The XBox 360 is by far my favorite of the big 3 right now and this move will help Microsoft save some face in the gaming community.
Click here for the link to Microsoft’s XBox 360 site to read the letter for yourself
Getting asked a lot on how to sync contacts and calendar from Exchange down to the iPhone. So this is how I have mine setup using my MacBook Pro and Entourage. First I setup my Entourage client to connect to my Exchange server using OWA address (which works awesome by the way).
Once that is working, go into Entourage Preferences and goto “Sync Services”, put a check mark in the “Synchronize contacts with Address Book and .Mac” and in the “Address Book:” drop down box I chose “Contacts [DSG Exchange Server]”
Been playing with the iPhone since I got it at about 6:45Pm on June 29th and the first aspect that I wanted to test was the ability to connect to our corporate Exchange server. Had to allow IMAP through the firewall first and configure the Exchange (2003) server to allow SSL IMAP connections. After some initial problems getting the iPhone to connect I was successful in getting connected.
So my email shows up and all the subfolders of email show up, attachment viewing great, but the major problem / challenge I am running into now is the email only syncs one way. If I delete a message from the iPhone it never deletes it from the server. It will mark the message as being read but thats about it. I am going to try it on another Exchange server to see if its any better on another installation of Exchange 2003. So close yet so far away!