New Worms Come With Password Protected Zipped Attachments
Zip archives are usually a way of compressing files for ease of sending. Now they are being used to send worm and viruses. It may seem like it's easier to avoid viruses when they come in extra packaging (you'll have to save the attachment, unzip the file, then execute the program to be infected), but there's a small temptation when the zip file comes with a password, making users all the more curious. Also, most people have been filtering out emails with .exe or .pif attachments, but not .zip files. Thus, it allows these emails to slip through.

A First Person Account of Using e-Voting Machines in Maryland
In this story, a heavy critic of the voting machines gives a first-person account of how they work. In general, it sounds like he likes the machines because of how easy they are. Security remains a large issue around electronic voting machines.

Congress Proposes Anti-Spyware Bill
It would make it illegal for a company to have software that is automatically installed without asking permission of the user. It would also require that programs not be harmful to your machine and that they can be easily uninstalled. The bill is just in its infancy stage so it wouldn't be up for a vote anytime soon. Should the government be making decisions on how software should act?

How to Stop Getting Credit Card Offers
Sometimes credit card offers are appreciated. It's nice to know somebody will lend you money at an exorbitant interest rate. Eventually they become a junk mail nuisance. There's a simple way to opt out of this stuff - visit this link for details.

Sharing a Password Could be Considered a Crime
In what could be considered a precedent-setting situation, a judge ruled in a case against somebody who shared their password with somebody else leading to a cyber crime. Although everybody should look out for whom they share their passwords with, this seems like it could be a slippery legal slope that's best to be avoided.

Companies Pushing to Make Facts Copyrightable
Systems like Lexis-Nexis are indispensable research tools. Any journalist knows that's the first place to look up any information printed anytime in recent history. The people who make Lexis-Nexis also know that their system is just a bunch of facts and information that can easily be reproduced by anybody else. So to protect themselves, they are pushing for a law to make large collections of information copyrighted. Although it seems justified that Lexis-Nexis shouldn't be run out of business by people duplicating something they provide, allowing somebody to copyright facts opens up a large can of legal worms for a lot of other businesses.

How Wi-Fi "Man-in-the-middle-attacks" Work
If you're using Wi-Fi, and it's not using any sort of security, there are a few ways people can eavesdrop on you. "Man-in-the-middle" and "Monkey-in-the-middle" attacks are somewhat similar in how they work. Both involve someone in the range of the Wi-Fi network broadcasting a signal similar to that of the Wi-Fi network. When you choose which Wi-Fi network to connect to, you will see their computer listed, but it will have the same name as the Wi-Fi network. All of your data would be passing through their machine and they could easily view any passwords or credit card numbers in it.

There are a few ways to limit this from happening. The simplest one is to just avoid sensitive data over a Wi-Fi network. Easy to do, but it is somewhat limiting. In general you'll want to be careful about which network you are joining. Especially with networks you are unfamiliar with. In a list of available networks, look out for duplicate entries. This could mean somebody is spoofing the original network.

Using WEP (wireless encryption) limits certain variations of this scam from happening but it's not completely secure. You might think that just because your information is encrypted in transit it's safe, but if the destination is corrupt, it doesn't make a difference. It would be like telling somebody a secret in a different language. Just because they speak the same language doesn't mean you can trust them.

Connecting through a VPN (Virtual Private Network) would be ideal since they encrypt your information between you and a point outside of the wireless network, but setting them up is no easy task. If you already use one, say for connecting to an office network, then maybe this can be helpful.

If you can limit your Wi-Fi use to secure websites (those starting with https://) that would work too since it encrypts your information between you and the website server.

Video Editing at Home
Once the arena of giant Avid machines owned by professional editing houses, video editing is now boiled down to some relatively simple software programs. Like sound editing, there's a lot of options available with numerous filters and effects available, but there are also bare-bones applications that just do the most rudimentary chopping and splicing.

The simplest programs are pretty much just that. They're meant mainly for novelty use such as home movie editing or other basic use. On a Mac, iMovie, like all other Apple software products, is a great simple program. Not many options but just a handful of wipes/transitions and effects available with the ability to view multiple video and audio tracks at the same time and burn the results to DVD. It exports movies as QuickTime, which is a good format.

The iMovie equivalent for Windows is Windows Movie Maker. Really, they both do about the same thing. Movie Maker has the drawback of outputting in Windows Media files, which isn't so great because of it's problems with resolution quality.

QuickTime Pro does a lot of the same things as Movie Maker and iMovie but even more bare-bones. No effects and no multiple track viewing. It's more attuned to somebody interested in just quick chop-and-splice editing for importing movies onto the web. It does allow you to create streaming movies, which is mainly something of interest for people who don't want their movies duplicated. If you need to transfer a lot of movies with little editing, this is the program you'll need.

If you want to get in to more creative editing and effects, there are a few more professional options out there too. Adobe Premiere is a powerful program, but it's when used with Adobe Aftereffects that it becomes worth the high price. Final Cut Pro is an Apple program that is about on par with Premiere. Both of these programs allow for non-digital output. What this means is that, while programs like iMovie take a movie, edit it, and spit out a digital movie file. Premiere and Final Cut take in a movie, edit it, but instead of spit out a digital file, they can be hooked up to a negative splitter which will automatically edit the physical video. This may not mean much to most users, but for filmmakers who prefer true-film quality of digital film, it means a lot.

The next step up in software is Avid. Film editing houses mainly use this on giant Avid machines; essentially a computer hooked up to multiple VCR inputs, video splicers, and video outputs particularly meant for editing. It can still be used on a regular computer and it has the most tools in the business. It doesn't come with the sort of effects of Adobe Aftereffects, but it has all of the tools to maintain high quality picture and sound.

Disable Notification Area Balloon Tips in Windows XP
Those balloons that appear in the lower right corner to tell you that there are new updates to Windows or that you have unused icons on the Desktop can sometimes be helpful and other times be an annoyance. If you're confident you can live better without them, here's how you can make a slight change to your registry to permanently remove them.

First off, open the registry editor by going to Start > Run and then typing "regedit".

Be careful, editing the registry is a dangerous thing. Although the changes here are relatively simple, doing the wrong thing can have disastrous effects on your system. That's why we should first backup the registry by going to File > Export and saving the file somewhere like the Desktop.

Once that's done, you'll have to navigate in the registry editor to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced". The registry editor is like Windows File Explorer. Just navigate to that address by clicking on the corresponding folders in the left pane. Once there, right-click on the right pane of the editor, and choose "New > DWORD Value" and name it "EnableBalloonTips". Double-click the new entry and set the value to "0". Hit Okay, close out of the registry editor, then either restart Windows, or log off an on once.

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