Yahoo Launches Web-Based Yahoo Messenger

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Yahoo finally launched a web-based version of Yahoo Messenger, allowing the users to communicate with their friends straight from an online page. The product is actually quite amazing, providing an impressive interface bundled with almost perfect functionality. The web-based Yahoo Messenger is probably the most powerful rival for the famous Meebo or other similar services like Ebuddy. As far I can see, the way this new version works is quite impressive, the messages are sent extremely quickly, just like the downloadable application. Yahoo Web Messenger is based on Flash 9 and is compatible with any Yahoo ID or Live Messenger contacts.
Basically, the Yahoo Web Messenger is compatible with most of the popular browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. All you need is to install Flash 9, the Adobe product being available for free for all the users. The main difference between the web-based version and the downloadable application is that you're not required to install anything as it can be accessed from a simple online interface.

Some time ago, Yahoo announced its plans to introduce a web-based messenger into Yahoo Mail, the mail solution provided by the company. However, the giant portal released this version of the Yahoo Messenger, probably the same release as the one meant to be implemented into the mail service. Until this new product, Yahoo already owned a web version of the instant messaging client, but it was quite buggy and provided only a simple way to communicate on the Internet.

If you want to access the web-based version of Yahoo Messenger, you should click on this link. If you want to download the latest version of Yahoo Messenger and install it on your computer, you can take it from Softpedia. As I informed you last week, there are several ways to chat with your Yahoo contacts, all of them being mentioned in this article.

33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity

Heuristics are rules intended to help you solve problems. When a problem is large or complex, and the optimal solution is unclear, applying a heuristic allows you to begin making progress towards a solution even though you can’t visualize the entire path from your starting point.

Suppose your goal is to climb to the peak of a mountain, but there’s no trail to follow. An example of a heuristic would be: Head directly towards the peak until you reach an obstacle you can’t cross. Whenever you reach such an obstacle, follow it around to the right until you’re able to head towards the peak once again. This isn’t the most intelligent or comprehensive heuristic, but in many cases it will work just fine, and you’ll eventually reach the peak.

Heuristics don’t guarantee you’ll find the optimal solution, nor do they generally guarantee a solution at all. But they do a good enough job of solving certain types of problems to be useful. Their strength is that they break the deadlock of indecision and get you into action. As you take action you begin to explore the solution space, which deepens your understanding of the problem. As you gain knowledge about the problem, you can make course corrections along the way, gradually improving your chances of finding a solution. If you try to solve a problem you don’t initially know how to solve, you’ll often figure out a solution as you go, one you never could have imagined until you started moving. This is especially true with creative work such as software development. Often you don’t even know exactly what you’re trying to build until you start building it.

Heuristics have many practical applications, and one of my favorite areas of application is personal productivity. Productivity heuristics are behavioral rules (some general, some situation-specific) that can help us get things done more efficiently. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.
2. Daily goals. Without a clear focus, it’s too easy to succumb to distractions. Set targets for each day in advance. Decide what you’ll do; then do it.
3. Worst first. To defeat procrastination learn to tackle your most unpleasant task first thing in the morning instead of delaying it until later in the day. This small victory will set the tone for a very productive day.
4. Peak times. Identify your peak cycles of productivity, and schedule your most important tasks for those times. Work on minor tasks during your non-peak times.
5. No-comm zones. Allocate uninterruptible blocks of time for solo work where you must concentrate. Schedule light, interruptible tasks for your open-comm periods and more challenging projects for your no-comm periods.
6. Mini-milestones. When you begin a task, identify the target you must reach before you can stop working. For example, when working on a book, you could decide not to get up until you’ve written at least 1000 words. Hit your target no matter what.
7. Timeboxing. Give yourself a fixed time period, like 30 minutes, to make a dent in a task. Don’t worry about how far you get. Just put in the time. See Timeboxing for more.
8. Batching. Batch similar tasks like phone calls or errands into a single chunk, and knock them off in a single session.
9. Early bird. Get up early in the morning, like at 5am, and go straight to work on your most important task. You can often get more done before 8am than most people do in a day.
10. Cone of silence. Take a laptop with no network or WiFi access, and go to a place where you can work flat out without distractions, such as a library, park, coffee house, or your own backyard. Leave your comm gadgets behind.
11. Tempo. Deliberately pick up the pace, and try to move a little faster than usual. Speak faster. Walk faster. Type faster. Read faster. Go home sooner.
12. Relaxify. Reduce stress by cultivating a relaxing, clutter-free workspace. See 10 Ways to Relaxify Your Workspace.
13. Agendas. Provide clear written agendas to meeting participants in advance. This greatly improves meeting focus and efficiency. You can use it for phone calls too.
14. Pareto. The Pareto principle is the 80-20 rule, which states that 80% of the value of a task comes from 20% of the effort. Focus your energy on that critical 20%, and don’t overengineer the non-critical 80%.
15. Ready-fire-aim. Bust procrastination by taking action immediately after setting a goal, even if the action isn’t perfectly planned. You can always adjust course along the way.
16. Minuteman. Once you have the information you need to make a decision, start a timer and give yourself just 60 seconds to make the actual decision. Take a whole minute to vacillate and second-guess yourself all you want, but come out the other end with a clear choice. Once your decision is made, take some kind of action to set it in motion.
17. Deadline. Set a deadline for task completion, and use it as a focal point to stay on track.
18. Promise. Tell others of your commitments, since they’ll help hold you accountable.
19. Punctuality. Whatever it takes, show up on time. Arrive early.
20. Gap reading. Use reading to fill in those odd periods like waiting for an appointment, standing in line, or while the coffee is brewing. If you’re a male, you can even read an article while shaving (preferably with an electric razor). That’s 365 articles a year.
21. Resonance. Visualize your goal as already accomplished. Put yourself into a state of actually being there. Make it real in your mind, and you’ll soon see it in your reality.
22. Glittering prizes. Give yourself frequent rewards for achievement. See a movie, book a professional massage, or spend a day at an amusement park.
23. Quad 2. Separate the truly important tasks from the merely urgent. Allocate blocks of time to work on the critical Quadrant 2 tasks, those which are important but rarely urgent, such as physical exercise, writing a book, and finding a relationship partner.
24. Continuum. At the end of your workday, identify the first task you’ll work on the next day, and set out the materials in advance. The next day begin working on that task immediately.
25. Slice and dice. Break complex projects into smaller, well-defined tasks. Focus on completing just one of those tasks.
26. Single-handling. Once you begin a task, stick with it until it’s 100% complete. Don’t switch tasks in the middle. When distractions come up, jot them down to be dealt with later.
27. Randomize. Pick a totally random piece of a larger project, and complete it. Pay one random bill. Make one phone call. Write page 42 of your book.
28. Insanely bad. Defeat perfectionism by completing your task in an intentionally terrible fashion, knowing you need never share the results with anyone. Write a blog post about the taste of salt, design a hideously dysfunctional web site, or create a business plan that guarantees a first-year bankruptcy. With a truly horrendous first draft, there’s nowhere to go but up.
29. 30 days. Identify a new habit you’d like to form, and commit to sticking with it for just 30 days. A temporary commitment is much easier to keep than a permanent one. See 30 Days to Success for details.
30. Delegate. Convince someone else to do it for you.
31. Cross-pollination. Sign up for martial arts, start a blog, or join an improv group. You’ll often encounter ideas in one field that can boost your performance in another.
32. Intuition. Go with your gut instinct. It’s probably right.
33. Optimization. Identify the processes you use most often, and write them down step-by-step. Refactor them on paper for greater efficiency. Then implement and test your improved processes. Sometimes we just can’t see what’s right in front of us until we examine it under a microscope.

Spammers use new spam technique to evade filters

Spammers have stepped up efforts to use encrypted attachments to evade filtering systems, service provider Email Systems has reported.

The technique relies on the fact that many spam systems can’t scan inside emails containing encrypted or password-protected attachment, and work out that they are not legitimate. Without a rule to block such attachments, most systems will pass on the email to recipients, handing spammers an important victory in the battle to get spam through.

In recent weeks, Email Systems detected a small but steady stream of such spam emanating from bot-compromised hosts, containing a zipped-up version of the pervasive ‘Storm’ bot-loading Trojan that plagued Internet users in January.

Recipients would have been able to inadvertently unzip the Trojan using an embedded password, after being attracted by a number of eye-catching subject lines, including ‘Worm Detected!’, ‘Virus Detected!’, ‘Spyware Alert!’ and ‘Warning!’

Although the technique has been around for some months, spammers appear to be stepping up their attempts to use it, said Greg Miller of Email Systems. The company had quarantined hundreds of thousands of copies of attachment spam, up from levels a tenth this volume some months ago.

“We have moved on from spam being just a guy sending out huge amounts of spam,” said Miller. The vast bulk of spam was now automated via bots, and this made finding new infection methods even more critical to the spam economy. “Every six months or so we see a new attack that is very successful,” he said.

As anti-spam systems adapted to popular techniques such as image spam, criminals were having to look further to engineer spam stealthiness.

The easiest means of detecting the current encrypted file attacks would be the attachment’s filesize, 77KB, but this could be varied in future attacks quite easily. The best approach was simply to disallow encrypted emails to pass through the system at all.

Yahoo puts instant-messaging inside Web browsers

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), the world's second-largest supplier of instant-messaging, has begun offering a new version that works inside a Web browser rather than requiring users to download a separate piece of software.

By dispensing with the need to install and run a separate IM program, Yahoo is looking to reach out to tens of millions of consumers around the world who use the Web in Internet cafes instead of on personal computers at work or at home.

The move also appeals to travelers, business professionals on the go and office workers whose companies block IM software downloads on their internal networks for security reasons.

"Too many people have been restricted from benefiting from this type of communication," Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's senior vice president in charge of communications, said in an interview.

The introduction of Web-based IM paves the way for Yahoo to eventually allow the rapid-fire text communication service in the member profile pages of social networking services such as MySpace, Facebook or other sites popular with young users.

"We certainly think about the opportunity where social networking and real-time IM communications intersect," Garlinghouse said, giving no timeline for when that may occur.

The Yahoo service is initially available in Brazil, India, Malaysia, Philippines, the United States and Vietnam and will expand to additional countries within the year, Yahoo said.

In India, 46 percent of consumer Web users log on from Internet cafes. Yahoo is the biggest IM service in India, according to comScore data, and it dominates in the Philippines and Vietnam, where upward of 80 percent of IM users use Yahoo.

Web-based IM is nothing new. Meebo.com grew popular among early technology adopters with a Web-based service that allows users to simultaneously sign on to AIM, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google IM programs. Rival Google Talk has been embedded inside Google's e-mail program, Gmail, for more than a year.

But Yahoo brings the advantages of Web-based IM to a far larger market of tens of millions of active users.

"The Internet is evolving from a static experience where a Web page is just a Web page to where Web pages behave more like traditional desktop computer applications," Garlinghouse said.

GOSSIP ARCHIVE

One attraction of Yahoo's new Web-based IM service is an archive feature that allows a user to search back to find all previous conversations with any of their IM contacts. Another feature likely to impress heavy users is the ability to manage 10 or more simultaneous conversations in just one IM window.

Yahoo is No. 2 worldwide in IM with 88.5 million users, according to audience measurement firm comScore Inc., AOL's AIM is No. 1 in the United States, and Microsoft's MSN/Windows Live Messenger is most popular globally.

Historically, a big disadvantage of IM was that both sender and receiver had to use the same service. Since last July, Yahoo Messenger users have been able to talk to MSN IM users.

IDC analyst Rebecca Swensen said Yahoo, along with AIM, MSN, Google and eBay Inc.'s Skype, is blurring the distinctions that existed in the first decade of the Web between e-mail, instant-messaging and phone-calling.

"All these guys are laying the foundation for an online communications platform for users," she said, noting that Web services are fast becoming available not just on computers but also mobile phones, televisions and game consoles.

From yahoo news

Internet Explorer 8 – Such a Disappointment

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As planned, Microsoft delivered a general preview of Internet Explorer 8.0 at MIX07 in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Chris Wilson, Platform Architect for Internet Explorer, presented a session entitled IE7: Past, Present and Future. The Future reference was correlated with Internet Explorer 8, but Wilson failed to present any specific details related to the upcoming version of Microsoft's browser.

Wilson did manage to share a selection of general directions Microsoft is planning to bring to the table with Internet Explorer 8. If IE7 was the indisputable star at MIX06, this year, Silverlight stole the whole show and IE8 was nothing more than a prompt. Wilson even stated openly that Microsoft was not allowing him to go into IE8 details.

Still, the next version of IE will be focused, from its development phase on two aspects, standard compliance and security. As far as customer protection goes, the Redmond Company will aim to repeat the security performances delivered with Internet Explorer 7, but also raise the standard. Since October 2006, when it was released, IE7 has had a good run in terms of security, delivering a major evolution over the feeble IE6 that has permitted Firefox to gain a consistent market share.

According to Mary Jo Foley, IE8 will require developers to “opt-in” to standards mode for websites built for the next version of the browser. This strategy is designed as an inherent part of the effort to make IE8 more standard-compliant. Layout, object model and Ajax development are additional aspects that will be addressed in the development process together with increasing standard compliance.

According to Wilson increased compliance with CSS 2.1 layout standards will be one of the core elements of IE8 development. The Redmond Company also plans to drive up the interoperability of the IE8 object model and to make the browser more tweak- and extension-friendly.
From Softpedia.com

Belarc Advisor 7.2.14.0

Author: Belarc, Inc.
Date: 2007-05-02
Size: 1.2 Mb
License: Freeware
Requires: Win All

The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware and displays the results in your Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server.

Limitations: Free for personal use.

From majorgeeks.com
Download
Click here

Symantec Slips, but Closes In on AV Product Delivery

Symantec Corp. is slipping on its target delivery time for the next major upgrade of its security product for enterprises, code-named Hamlet, while it irons out final code wrinkles during beta testing.

In May 2006, Symantec CEO John Thompson said Hamlet would be released between January and March of this year. But the product is one of Symantec's biggest releases, incorporating technology from several of Symantec's acquisitions into one piece of code, so more testing is being done.

The company, which holds the highest market share of any security software maker, is deploying Hamlet internally as well as among a limited set of beta customers for testing, said Mathew Lodge, director of product marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, on Wednesday.

"The trials are very important to us, and we feel it's important that we get through those and ensure it is very solid," Lodge said.

Next month, Symantec will announce a public beta schedule, pricing, delivery dates and the product's name, Lodge said.

Symantec has woven in an ability to detect malicious programs based on what the software does on a computer. The technology came from WholeSecurity Inc., which Symantec bought in 2005. Hamlet will still use the signature-based method, which relies on knowing the identity and characteristics of a bad program.

Most security software companies are developing behavior-based detection techniques as the number of malicious software programs has nearly outpaced the ability of vendors' antivirus labs to analyze them and create signatures.

Hamlet also will be able to control what devices can be connected to the network and set policies if those devices lack proper security updates, an area called network access control (NAC). Lodge said Hamlet's NAC will work regardless of what network hardware an enterprise is using.

NAC is considered important because employees are using a growing number of mobile devices that frequently leave and reconnect to the mother network. But the NAC area has moved somewhat slowly because of conflicts over protocols, types of network switches and incompatibility between vendor products, according to Current Analysis Inc.

The NAC technology comes from Sygate Technologies Inc. After the August 2005 acquisition, Symantec rebranded and sold Sygate's NAC product, Lodge said.

Symantec also incorporated rootkit detection capabilities into Hamlet. Rootkits are malicious applications that install themselves in evasive ways to avoid malicious software scanners, Lodge said. That code came from Veritas Software, he said.

Hamlet also includes traditional antivirus product features, such as a firewall, and a single management console for administrators.

LimeWire for Windows 4.13.3 Beta

LimeWire enables individuals to search for and share computer files with anyone on the Internet. It is compatible with the Gnutella file-sharing protocol and can connect with anyone else running Gnutella-compatible software.

LimeWire has the following other editions available: LimeWire for Linux and LimeWire for Mac OS X.

Screenshot:

Download:click here.

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