First question

It might be obvious but, at first, ask yourself : “Why do I want to use DRM on my content ?”. To fight piracy or illegal copies ? Bad answer ! Your goal is NOT to fight piracy ! Your goal is to earn money. Lot of money. If you could make more money with the help of piracy, would you still fight it ? Of course not. So keep in my mind that you want to use DRM to make more money of your content. Nothing else.

But piracy will make me loose money…

Now, rename “piracy” by “a free network that promote my content everywhere in the world”. It’s not anymore that evident that piracy will make you loose money. Simply replacing one word by a synonym can give you a brand new vision. Would you fight against “a free network that promote my content everywhere in the world” ? So, here we cannot reply surely. Let’s focus on “making money”, not on piracy or anything else.

The DRM equation

Now, the question is and only is “Will I earn more money with DRM or not ?”.

There is a simple answer call the DRM equations :

DRM profit = Wins – Devel – Unit – Court – Boycott – Hardware – Support – Refund

With the following terms :

DRM profit : the difference between the money you will make with DRM and the money you will make without. Might be negative.
Wins : The exact number of people who tried to illegally obtain your content but could not due to DRM and that finally bought the original, legal version.
Devel : The full development cost of your unbreakable DRM solution, including years of salary for engineers, specialists, …
Unit : Due to the DRM, the unit cost of fabrication of one of your product is slightly more. Multiply this accordingly with your whole production.
Court : The total cost of all your trials that try to forbid this 12 years old child to publish his crack of your DRM on the Internet. You might include here all the legal stuffs related to the fact that your DRM method was patented by someone else before you.
Boycott : Include here all the sells that were never done because a tiny group of people boycott content with DRM. You can include here the bad press linked to DRM.
Hardware : Include here all the negotiation to have hardware manufacturer support your DRM format.
Support : The whole support cost of the DRM. You will have indeed plenty of clients that will call because “your product is not working on their device”. You have to carefully explain the whole thing to them and to double the number of your hotliners.
Refund : All the products you have to refund because it was not working as expected due to DRM. People don’t understand basic principles like “to read my content, you have to use only my hardware and my software”. So, if they buy your content without having your hardware/software, you will have to refund them.

That’s the theory. Now, the practical part implies that you have to compute every term. To help you a bit, you might want to now that the experimentation shows that Wins is null or negligible.

In the best cases, Wins might be almost equal to Boycott.

So, now you can easily compute how much money you will earn with DRM. Simply do the math and make your choice accordingly.

Source.

In my opinion, it is. However, many people do not feel too comfortable using Acrobat Reader and the pdf file format. Some complain that the loading time takes to much, other feel no confidence to work with a text document without being able to edit it and finally there are those who get confused when trying to download a pdf document using a web browser, find out that the document actually opens within the browser’s window.

What ever the pros and cons may be, we have to accept it as it is.

Do not rush to criticize Adobe’s offspring. You might regret it later! Leaving all these apart, let me catch your attention with a nice and useful feature provided by Acrobat Reader. Did you find yourself in the context of being forced to work with a large amount of information stored within pdf files? For instance, you have an exam to prepare for and all the courses are PDF stored. Want to learn faster, easier and more efficient?

I bet you do! However, reading so much text directly on the computer monitor will exhaust you and you will get your eyes red and tired. How would you memorize under these circumstances? I got the solution! Put Acrobat Reader to read to you. As the father reads to his child, the same Acrobat Reader can read the text trough the PC speakers. Learning will be more comfortable and relaxing. Just lie on your bed and listen to the “story”.

First, open the desired PDF document. Now Acrobat Reader will act similarly to a music player with commands for play, pause or stop.

To make it read the whole document, use the following keys combination: CTRL + SHIFT + B. If you are interested in just a part of a document, let us say a single page, just go to the aimed page and use CTRL + SHIFT + V.

To pause the reading you will only need to press CTRL + SHIFT + C. To resume the reading, just use the same key combination again.

Finally, to stop reading, use CTRL + SHIFT + E.

Please note that this feature is available starting with version 6 of Adobe Acrobat Reader and it is only able to read English written documents.

Hope you will find this feature useful. Happy listening! Or should I say happy learning?

Source: Softpedia

As far, neither the exploit nor the PoC for Windows Vista have been submitted to an independent evaluation process. In this context, the authenticity of the Windows Vista 0-day exploit has not been confirmed from any sources aside from its creators. Microsoft has, as yet, failed to issue an official comment.

Trend Micro’s chief technology officer, Raimund Genes confirmed to eWEEK that Trend Micro was able to verify that the 0-day Vista exploit was indeed available for sale on an auctioning marketplace online. The consistent amount for which the 0-day exploit is being auctioned is an indication of the fact that the vulnerability at its basis allows for remote code execution.

Prices for similar code execution vulnerabilities that have not been patched by the developers range from $20,000 to $30,000. As a general rule, the more popular the software, the higher the price. Raimund Genes revealed that bots and Trojan downloaders targeting the Windows operating system have an estimated price of $5,000.

This kind of underground commerce mirrors the fact that the malware environment has geared from a destructive, viral aspect, to a lucrative market. “I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry,” Genes commented.

On this site you will find independent comparatives of Anti-Virus software. All products listed in our comparatives are already a selection of some very good anti-virus products. In order to get tested by us, companies must fulfill various conditions and minimum requirements..

The following products were used in the last comparative (with best possible settings):
Look into the online results to determine the exact version number.
Avast! Professional Edition 4.7
AVG Professional 7.1
AVIRA AntiVir Personal Edition Premium 7.01
BitDefender Professional Plus 9.5
Dr.Web for Windows 95-XP 4.33.2
ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 2.51.26
F-Prot for Windows 3.16f
F-Secure Anti-Virus 6.12
G DATA AntiVirusKit (AVK) 16.0.7
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0
McAfee VirusScan 11.0
Norman Virus Control 5.81
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 12.2
TrustPort Antivirus Workstation 2.0
VBA32 Workstation 3.11.0

Note: The test done this month is the retrospective test, which is done using 3 month old signatures. This is done so that one can test how much can an antivirus detect heuristically (without having signatures for that virus).

“Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system are among Microsoft’s most significant product innovations, representing years of research and development,” said Mr. Ali Faramawy, Vice President Microsoft Europe, Middle East & Africa and Regional Vice President, Microsoft Middle East & Africa. “These products will help businesses overcome the challenges of our increasingly information-saturated world, enhancing the way people collaborate, communicate, protect and manage content, and find, use and share information.”

Windows Vista and the Office 2007 System have been made available in the Gulf region, at Gitex 2006, prior to the official release date in the United States. The Redmond Company has scheduled the unveiling of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 under volume licenses at the New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange on November 30.

“Our aim is to be different and an innovator at the cutting edge of technology” said Frederick Sabty, Director of IT at Burj Al Arab. “We offer the world’s best service, the best food and beverages, the most luxurious accommodation, and the best IT. We wanted to make it even easier for our guests to access their e-mail messages, the Internet, and multi-media without the hassle of moving from one Web site or channel to the next. By becoming an early adopter of a new system, we are putting our guests on the first step of a big staircase because eventually they will all be using it for business and leisure.”

More info here.

Nvidia Drivers v93.71 (Official)

Adobe Acrobat v8 (Reader, Professional)