Great story and explanation at eWeek about a recent deluge of spam that has been arriving in many e-mail inboxes around the world the past few months: 'Pump-and-Dump' Spam Surge Linked To Russian Bot Herders.

For starters, the Trojan comes with its own anti-virus scanner--a pirated copy of Kaspersky's security software--that removes competing malware files from the hijacked machine. Once a Windows machine is infected, it becomes a peer in a peer-to-peer botnet controlled by a central server. If the control server is disabled by botnet hunters, the spammer simply has to control a single peer to retain control of all the bots and send instructions on the location of a new control server.

The bots are segmented into different server ports, determined by the variant of the Trojan installed, and further segmented into peer groups of no more than 512 bots. This allows the hackers to keep the overhead involved in exchanging information about other peers to a minimum, Stewart explained.

Posted by Aaron at 7:33 AM | Permalink

From Dell:

Great way to represent the weight of a laptop -- using something that many people have around the house or office, a ream of paper! (I'm sure I don't have 3 reams of paper though at home). Sure beats using your house cat, the gallon of milk from the refrig, or a bag of sugar!

Posted by Aaron at 3:19 PM | Permalink

Inspired by a visit to Vegas, I just checked out Virtual Earth 3D ... very cool! It's a bit slow on my laptop (not sure if it's the laptop or my dismal "high-speed" Internet available at the hotel -- but the wait was worth it:

The view is 3D -- with the ability to select the angle of view and the rotation by holding down the CTRL key.

It does require an install -- but it's relatively small. Make sure you look for the 3D option:

(I don't know what cities have the 3D data though -- I probably lucked out by selecting Vegas).

Posted by Aaron at 10:35 PM | Permalink

Want a new theme for your XP PC? Try the new "Zune" theme (download):

click to enlarge:

You don't need to use the Zune background. I'm calling it a Vista-style theme for XP as it reminds me of the look Vista has -- (yet of course doesn't have any of the cool glass effects, or glowing, or any of the other eye-candy for that matter). Enjoy!

Posted by Aaron at 8:57 PM | Permalink

The news is here.

Can't say that I'm shocked. I'd still reiterate my suggestion to release the source code for Max rather than just killing it entirely. Given the project, I find it hard to believe that there's much in there that could be considered "secret."

I know it's tough to have your project/product killed at Microsoft (been there, done that), so I hope that everyone involved on the Max team can find new positions and have an easy transitions to a new team.

Posted by Aaron at 12:39 PM | Permalink