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Source: Cornell University Date: January 4, 2007 Avian Flu Virus Unlikely To Spread Through Water Systems Science Daily — A close relative of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (H5N1) can be eliminated by waste and drinking water treatments, including chlorination, ultraviolet (UV) radiation and bacterial digesters. The virus is harmless to humans but provides a study case of the pathways by which the influenza could spread to human populations. To test whether the H5N2 virus could survive water treatments, such as chlorine, UV light and bacterial digesters, chicken embryos were inoculated with the treated virus. Days later researchers removed...

LOS ANGELES - MySpace devotee Kary Rogers was expecting to see a gut-busting video when a friend from the popular online hangout messaged him a link. First, though, he was directed to a page where he was supposed to re-enter his password. Rogers realized that someone was trying to steal his information, and he didn't take the bait. At best, he would be spammed with junk e-mails; worse, the Web thief might steal his real-life identity. "I immediately went back and changed my password," said Rogers, 29, a network analyst for Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss. MySpace bills itself...

Wikipedia Spreads Computer Viruses By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency Jerusalem----November 19...... Wikipedia, which brands itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", now appears to be the "site that anyone can get a computer virus from." Wikipedia, which has been condemned by almost every responsible news organization and university for its lack of credibility, recently had many of its pages hijacked and tricked Wikipedia users into downloading a virus. Most viruses which users of Wikipedia encounter are of the emotional abuse variety, creating oceans of libel and slander. But the most recent transmission of viruses from Wikipedia were...

Microsoft's browser gets upgraded IE 7 will be the browser that ships with Windows Vista Microsoft has made Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) available to the general public.The new version is the first upgrade to the web browsing program for more than five years. New features include tabbed browsing, the ability to search the net directly and an anti-fraud system to thwart phishing attacks. The new program is available as a free download on 19 October, but many will get it as an automatic update to Windows XP in November. Phish fighter The new version of the browser has...

Hotel-room surfaces can harbor viruses Nathan Seppa From San Francisco, at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Rhinovirus, which is responsible for roughly half of all common colds, survives on surfaces in hotel rooms for hours and can be transferred from there to people, a study shows. J. Owen Hendley, a pediatrician at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, and his colleagues obtained mucus samples from 15 people who had active rhinovirus infections. The scientists then invited each participant to spend a night in a hotel room. Each person was instructed to remain awake in...

Threat of 'superflu' rampage as mutant viruses resist drugs By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent (Filed: 01/10/2006) The drive to fight deadly flu pandemics with special antiviral drugs risks creating an untreatable "superflu", the head of -Britain's public health watchdog has warned. Sir William Stewart, the chairman of the Health Protection Agency, warned that the widespread use of antiviral drugs to treat illnesses, including bird flu and seasonal influenza, is causing- viruses to mutate into drug-resistant- forms. He claimed that drug-resistant viruses now represented as big a threat to public health as antibiotic-resistant superbug bacteria, such as MRSA. His comments come...

In an advance that speeds up diagnosis of the most dangerous avian flu, scientists have developed a detailed influenza test that takes less than 12 hours, federal health officials said yesterday. The new technology, a microchip covered with bits of genetic material from many different flu strains, cuts the typical time needed for diagnosis of the A(H5N1) flu to less than a day from a week or more. In addition, rather than giving just a yes-or-no result, it usually reveals which flu a human or an animal has. That means that public health officials investigating, for example, a flu outbreak...

Bird flu viruses diversifying, making vaccine target harder to pick: WHO 19:23:04 EDT Aug 18, 2006 Canadian Press: HELEN BRANSWELL, The Canadian Press (CP) - The World Health Organization urged influenza vaccine makers Friday to use newer strains of virus when making vaccine to protect against H5N1 avian flu, saying the evolution of the microbe has led to increased variety in circulating strains. While the diversity creates challenges for vaccine manufacturers - and potentially additional costs for the governments paying them to make and test vaccine against H5N1 - it does not mean the worrisome virus has moved closer to...

Bot Networks What could you do if you controlled a network of thousands of computers -- or, at least, could use the spare processor cycles on those machines? You could perform massively parallel computations: model nuclear explosions or global weather patterns, factor large numbers or find Mersenne primes, or break cryptographic problems. All of these are legitimate applications. And you can visit distributed.net and download software that allows you to donate your spare computer cycles to some of these projects. (You can help search for Optimal Golomb Rulers -- even if you have no idea what they are.) You've got...

In the 30-plus years that Richard Atkinson has been studying obesity, he has always maintained that overeating doesn’t really explain it all. His epiphany came early in his career, when he was a medical fellow at U.C.L.A. engaged in a study of people who weighed more than 300 pounds and had come in for obesity surgery. “The general thought at the time was that fat people ate too much,” Atkinson, now at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me recently. “And we documented that fat people do eat too much — our subjects ate an average of 6,700 calories a day. But...

I have a two-year-old eMachine T3092 running Windows XP Home Edition. Over the past six months it has become progressively slower until it now takes 30-60 seconds to open a new screen or start an application. I use Norton Antivirus, Spy Sweeper, and BlackIce Firewall. I suspect the problem is simply too much extraneous crap in it. Is there a product that can clean-up Windows and my files to get it up to speed again? Thanks.

ITHACA, N.Y. — In May, scores of dead fish started washing up along the eastern shoreline of Lake Ontario. James O. LaPlante, 59, first noticed them at a friend’s house. By the following week, so many carcasses had come ashore, they littered the beach near his home in Cape Vincent. “There were lots,” he said. “When I say lots, I mean hundreds and thousands.” The fish had fallen victim to an unknown disease. At first, residents and fishermen were not alarmed, since the victims were round gobies, a nuisance fish that consumes the eggs of more prize-worthy catches. But in...

"Overall, the research shows that many consumers have a false sense of security while online," ESET Chief Research Officer Andrew Lee said in a statement. "With the number of zero-day threats rapidly increasing, users need to be even more cautious and proactive in their own protection." While nearly 90 percent of computer users have software on their machines to protect them from malware like viruses, Trojans, worms and spyware, almost two-thirds of those users are reluctant to upgrade the software after it's installed. That was the finding in a survey released Monday by security software maker ESET, of San Diego....

Rockets bursting in air, fireworks everywhere! Thank you for helping mark the 200,000th entry into the VirusScan malware (malevolent software) detection database. But truly, this is not a moment to celebrate. For, larger and larger numbers of malware is a plague, not a cause to celebrate. Instead, we mark this moment simply as a milestone in our continual trip to fend off the bad stuff from everyone’s machines. It is alarming that we reach this milestone so soon after September 2004 when the count reached 100,000. Eighteen years to reach 100,000. Less than two years to double. Looking ahead, our...

Excerpt - A security researcher with expertise in rootkits has created a working prototype of new technology that is capable of creating malware that remains "100 percent undetectable," even on Windows Vista x64 systems. Joanna Rutkowska, a stealth malware researcher at Singapore-based IT security firm COSEINC, says the new Blue Pill concept uses AMD's SVM/Pacifica virtualization technology to create an ultra-thin hypervisor that takes complete control of the underlying operating system. Rutkowska plans to discuss the idea and demonstrate a working prototype for Windows Vista x64 at the end at the SyScan Conference in Singapore on July 21 and at...

Excerpt - Security software makers, the 800-pound gorilla has landed. Microsoft Corp. was to announce Wednesday that it is releasing software that aims to better protect people who use its Windows operating system from Internet attacks. The move pits the world's largest software maker head-to-head with longtime business partners Symantec Corp., McAfee Inc. and others. Windows Live OneCare, which will protect up to three computers for $49.95 per year, marks the latest step in Microsoft's effort over the years to make its operating system less vulnerable to crippling Internet attacks. Windows, which runs on the vast majority of personal computers,...

By studying chimpanzee droppings in remote African jungles, scientists reported yesterday, they have found direct evidence of a missing link between a chimpanzee virus and the one that causes human AIDS. Scientists have long suspected that chimpanzees are the source of the human AIDS pandemic because at least one subspecies carries a simian immune deficiency virus closely related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. But because the simian virus, known as S.I.V.cpz, was identified in chimpanzees in captivity, researchers could not be sure that the same simian virus existed among these apes in the wild. It does, the team...

My wife woke me up yesterday morning and told me she had to restart the computer. An ad had popped up that said, "A major virus could be on your computer, download from us and we'll fix it..." Being familiar with pop-ups, I didn't think much of it, until four hours later when I went to use my computer. There were 47 Internet Explorer windows open and something was trying to open more. My system was almost at a standstill. Even a simple click of the mouse took two minutes to process. I disabled and deleted the P2P application, but...

Despite widely available testing, about a quarter of the Americans infected with H.I.V. don't know it. Those who are unaware of their infections can spread then unknowingly. They also miss out on powerful drug therapies that have been shown to extend lives, while protecting infected people from the diseases to which H.I.V. makes them prone. Rapid AIDS tests — which have cut the waiting time for results to 20 minutes from as much as two weeks — have greatly helped the outreach effort. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will take another important step forward this summer when...

The virus one is funny