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McAfee pushes bad update, takes down Windows XP computers
Posted by Dan Hughes Categories: Corporate News, Editorial, Internet, PC / Laptop, Software,
Yesterday, McAfee pushed out a DAT file for its Enterprise virus-scanning software that tracked down a core Windows XP system file and quarantined it as malware. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of computer systems were damaged as a result. Windows XP cannot run without the quarantined file, SVCHOST.EXE, and as a result, automatically shut itself down. Other weird settings and symptoms were evident, such as taskbars disappearing, blue-screens-of-death, and other crash-related symptoms.
On one hand, relief simply did not come fast enough. On the other…what more could McAfee have done to repair the damage? McAfee rolled back the virus definition as quickly as it found out, and released an addendum file that could be manually applied to infected PCs. The servers hosting the offered file were strained by the demand, resulting in disconnect errors and failures to update the McAfee software.
“We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of one percent of our enterprise accounts globally, and a fraction of that within the consumer base,” said Barry McPherson, on McAfee’s blog Wednesday. He goes on to identify the error in the update, stating that it was an attempt to detect a potentially damaging virus, and the update “clearly did more harm than good.”
“Having talked to literally hundreds of my colleagues around the world and emailed thousands to try and find the best way to correct these issues, let me say this has not been my favorite day. Not for me, or for McAfee. Not by a long shot.”
Click to continue reading McAfee pushes bad update, takes down Windows XP computers
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| McAfee SI Blog
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Microsoft Fuse Labs announces Docs for Facebook
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Internet, Microsoft, Software,
Microsoft’s Fusion Labs just announced a new product that they are doing in partnership with Facebook, called Docs for Facebook. Built on Microsoft Office 2010, Docs for Facebook is seemingly a play by Microsoft to take some of the cloud-based office suite share away from Google Docs. You’ll be able to create and share documents with friends on Facebook, control privacy settings, and with a click of a button, open the documents in your native Office software on your PC or Mac. That’s all well and good, but do you know many people who’ve been clamoring for the opportunity to add their boss and co-workers as Facebook friends, just so they can share documents with them on the popular social networking site? Yeah, us either.
If you want to get in on the action, hit the link below.
Read More | Docs for Facebook
Slacker Radio Plus giveaway!
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Announcements, Features, Internet, Music,
Here at Gear Live, we love us some Slacker. If you don’t know, Slacker is a fantastic radio’s streaming music service. It has millions of songs in its catalogue, and real DJs actually control their channels, which means you get a great mix of songs that go well together. While Slacker is free, they also have a service called Slacker Radio Plus, which adds the following perks:
- Unlimited Skips
- Unlimited Song Requests
- No Audio or Banner Ads
- Complete Lyrics
- Over 2 Million Songs
So here’s what we are going to do - we are going to give away a two 1-year subscriptions and three 3-month subscriptions to Slacker Radio Plus, and we are going to make it ridiculously easy to enter. All you need to do if become a fan of Gear Live on Facebook, and leave a comment on our wall. That’s it. Next Friday we will select five random entrants and hit them with the goods.
Latest Gear Live Videos
One of our readers sent us this screenshot of a typical Google search, and we agreed that it was worth a chuckle. As you can see, rather than giving Google Maps results, Google instead served results pointing to the MapQuest map of the address. Funny.
[Thanks, Buddy!]
SXSW 2010: Location-based Marketing and Advertising: Targeting the Mobile Consumer
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Editorial, Features, GPS, Internet,
Navteq and their parent company Nokia believe that LBS or Location Based Services are going to be a $7 billion dollar industry by 2013. This is due to an increase of mobile connected devices and their ability to receive targeted advertisements when they are near a specific location.
Navteq currently has 80 people globally in their sales force, working with mobile operators as well as smaller application developers to help sell the data that they collect about locations. They warehouse this information by deploying “data collection trucks” which have high definition cameras mounted on the rooftop and drive most all of the major cities roads . These cameras take photos and collect other data such as elevation as they drive through the streets. Company spokesman and presenter Shawn Gunn said future unknown applications will leverage this. To seed such innovation, Navteq has a location based challenge that they run annually and several augmented reality projects are frequently presented from that.
SXSW 2010: Twitter and an Airline: A story
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, Google, Internet, Transportation, Wireless / WiFi,
My friend Jeff Pulver commandeered a room on the 4th floor at SXSW and had several people who he has met around the world present what they believed were success stories about the Twitter service. This goes hand in hand with the 140 Conferences that he is throwing around the world. One such speaker, Bowen Payson, was from the airline Virgin America that has been using Twitter to outreach to their customers.
Bowen began his session by speaking about the differences in their airline from a physical experience. From the black leather Recaro seats, to the mood lighting. Their on-demand in flight entertainment is just as high tech as their communication strategy. The Twitter story began without a strategy and unfolded and matured into more than
60,000 followers as I write this. Their main social contact, Nick Schwartz is the voice of the airline and loves social networking, partially because of his age. They try to keep a consumer centric voice and mind set, and work to make the experience better incrementally.
Click to continue reading SXSW 2010: Twitter and an Airline: A story
SXSW 2010 Keynote: Systems Design and Inspiration
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, Internet,
The Sunday SXSW 2pm keynote was from Valerie Casey, a consultant who works with entities as large as the government to up and coming Louisiana food startup Naked Pizza.
Valerie is part of a group called Designers Accord who has a mission to use the skills and talents of this team to give back to the community and ultimately Mother Earth. Her profound opening statement was “When will we start thinking that less bad is good?” The example shown was a Dell studio PC, a small desktop computer with an optional bamboo case that adheres to the highest levels of green standards for office computers. Yet, it is still another computer, which has components inside which will ultimately end up in a landfill and be harmful to humans or the environment. A heart-wrenching photo was shown of a child living an an area of China whose community cannot even drink their local water due to contaminants from the e-waste trade; where components are stripped from circuit boards over fire pits for their little precious metal content.
Click to continue reading SXSW 2010 Keynote: Systems Design and Inspiration
How to win at ChatRoulette: Use a piano!
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Music, Videos,
Okay, so ChatRoulette is all the rage right now (although, admittedly, I have yet to give it a try,) and we think we found someone that you’ll want to be on the lookout for when you are randomly talking to um, random, individuals. If you come across Merton, the improvising piano player, give him a moment. Hit up the video above to see why. He definitely had us laughing with some of his classic lines.
SXSW 2010: From Hulu to Yahoo Widgets: Will the Internet Transform the TV?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Internet,
Rovi Chief Evangelist, Richard Bullwinkle had an afternoon session at SXSW 2010, dealing with convergence in the living room, “From Hulu To Yahoo Widgets: Will The Internet Transform The TV?”
He started the session with the statement “It is difficult to upgrade your television because it is affixed to a wall.” With computers, you can go to a new website, such as moving your social network from myspace.com to facebook.com. With a mobile phone you can delete the location centric Loopt app and load Foursquare or Whrrl. But your
television cannot be updated and it is typically maintained by someone who put it on the wall.
With the American market being spread out over thousands of miles, broadband penetration and the speed of those connections becomes the next issue. Music and streaming television is not a problem with existing bandwidth; be it via cable, to the house or Wi-Fi within. As we get to HD quality, few have the capacity to our homes to achieve this rate. I know of this pain point personally and have solved it by running three networks at the house, one for devices like the iPhone and Chumby at 2.4 GHz and the others for high definition video distribution over Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11N at 5GHz.
Click to continue reading SXSW 2010: From Hulu to Yahoo Widgets: Will the Internet Transform the TV?
SXSW 2010: Evan Williams Twitter keynote
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, Internet,
Three years after the Twitter 2007 launch at South by Southwest, Evan Williams announced @anywhere pages at SXSW 2010. This service allows web publishers to enable OAth Twitter logins, much like the Facebook Connect strategy. They are not the first web service with hundreds of millions of users to attempt this tactic. Hotmail users were able to use that log on on other sites via the Microsoft Passport service, after the software giant bought the first web mail provider in 1997. This account was used across all Microsoft platforms like Expedia and even shopping sites like Buy.com until it was ultimately removed from service in 2009. Today, Facebook Connect allows their 300+ million users to log on and make comments on thousands of sites and blogs. Twitters user base is much lower and they are a bit late to this strategy so it will be interesting to see how many sites will employ the service.
With a 10’s wide and thousands deep line to get in, the SXSW day three keynote of Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter was off to a rocky start. He started with an awkward announcement their latest service offering via a video demo and audio problems with the mic of the moderator Umar Haque.
Click to continue reading SXSW 2010: Evan Williams Twitter keynote
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