Adeona: open-source protection for your laptop

Presenting Adeona, your free software driven laptop angel from The University of Washington. The great thing about Adeona is that it doesn’t rely on any centralized web service or any 3rd party. Shortly, this means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and…that’s it.

How does Adeona work?

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. Adeona monitors the current location of your laptop, collecting all types of informations such as IP addresses and network details. Read more

Symantec’s Norton products entered the 2009 open beta stage

Symantec Corporation, opened this week the 2009 Public Beta versions of Norton Security and Norton Antivirus. Symantec claims that this versions will be more faster than their predecessors, more user friendly and moreoever, less resource hungry.

While the Symantec security products lost some market share to other companies such as Kaspersky, Avira or Esset (NOD32), the new features and overall speed increase might get them back on the average home user’s list.

Let’s review some important features, worth taking in consideration:

Speed Increase

The Norton programs can determine now which files are trustworthy based on prior scans and community feedback, adding them to a “white-list” and avoiding them in the future scans. Read more

MS Word: malicious gateway to your PC

A new bug within Microsoft Office seems to allow attackers to plant Trojan horses within our computers. This new exploit isn’t confirmed at this moment, Symantec, the security company behind this finding, is still in discussions with MIcrosoft to confirm this exploit. Symantec states that some MS Office versions, even if fully patched, are affected.

Microsoft released a Security Advisory, with further details regarding this security flaw. Within this security report, they state:
“Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a possible vulnerability in Microsoft Office Word 2002 Service Pack 3. Our initial investigation indicates that customers who use all other supported versions of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Word Viewer, Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats, and Microsoft Office for Mac are not affected.” Read more

Big Windows Vista reliability fix coming up

Even if the title of this news is little ironic, considering the fact that most Windows users don’t find WIndows Vista reliable at all, it’s true. Microsoft stated that this fix will containt some security fixes and some performance wise patches, thus improving Vista’s overall reliablity, they say Read more