This was a fund raising show, but we spent very little time on fund raising. No listener phone calls.

You can donate to WBAI by check or at WBAI.org. Donations at WBAI.org can be of any amount to the station or you can donate either $25 or $55 to your favorite show. Both our Gold Card, for one year of technical support from everyone on the show, and our Toolkit software CD, can also be purchased at wbai.org at any time. To see the software on the Toolkit CD, go to the Membership Premiums page.

Hotmail experienced an outage, so to did Yahoo's email. Microsoft was fined 1.5 billion dollars by the European Union. The Air Force is developing a big brother computer system. Your medical records may end up at Google or with Microsoft. This could be a very bad thing.

If your copy of Windows Vista always re-boots, the fix for the problem is at Microsoft fix KB937287. We all advise using Windows XP rather than Vista. Michael suggested waiting a few days after Microsoft releases patches to make sure there are no drastic problems with the patches. Anyone who waited, rather than using the Automatic Updates feature of Windows, would not have experienced a problem because the bug fix was not important and Microsoft withrew it the day after releasing it.

Some of the software on our Toolkit CD: JKDefrag a better file defragmenter than the one in Windows, Page Defrag which defrags the page file, registry, event logs and more, Primo PDF which can create a PDF file from any Windows application, portable versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and much much more.

We discuss the definition of RSS and podcasts. There is an update to the Thunderbird email program that fixes a critical bug. The latest version is 2.0.0.12.

 

This show was not heard over the air, but it was recorded at WBAI on Feb. 20th. There was no fund raising and no listener phone calls.

HD will NOT be the dominant format for High Definition DVDs. Who is affected by the upcoming elimination of analog over the air broadcasts. Hank reviewed the Cradlepoint WiFi router that supports three inputs; Evdo, wired Ethernet and some 3G cellphones. All your computer stuff can be examined or seized when crossing a border into the U.S. Microsoft is giving away all their development software to college students. This includes Windows 2003 server. See channel8.msdn.com for more.

 

When it rains, it pours. Just about every popular piece of software has been udpated in the last few days. Michael blogged about this at CNET, see Bug fixes! Patches! Updates! Come and get it.

To see which version of Java is installed on your computer, you can use Michael's javatester.org web site. Be sure to check in every web browser that you use. The latest versions are 1.6.0_03 and 1.6.0_04. If you are using the older 1.5.x version they are all buggy except for the last one 1.5.0_14. You should un-install old versions of Java before installing a new version.

To see which version of the Adobe Flash player is installed on your computer, go to www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/. The latest is version 9,0,115,0. Again, you need to check this is all web browsers on your computer as different browsers can be using different versions. For more see Michael's CNET blog posting A heads-up on the Adobe Flash player. Here too, the old version should be manually un-installed before installing a new version. After un-installing use the version tester page again to make sure it was really un-installed. Adobe has a dedicated un-installer program if the usual removal method doesn't work.

Firefox released Version 2.0.0.12 on February 7th. If you are using anything older, upgrade. The usual Help -> About displays the version number. It can be updated with Help -> Check for Updates.

The Adobe Acrobat Reader was also just updated. The latest version is 8.1.2. The usual Help -> About displays the version number. It can be updated with Help -> Check for udpates. If there are available updates, check the details. You really don't need the dictionaries for spell checking for multiple languages. See the Secunia advisory and this from fellow CNET blogger Robert Vamos Exploits plague Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

Apple's QuickTime was updated on February 6th to fix a security problem. The latest version is 7.4.1. The udpate affects Mac OS X v10.3.9, Mac OS X v10.4.9, Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard), Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2. Download it here. See the Secunia advisory .

Speaking of Macs, the operating system itself was updated on February 11th. Bugs were fixed in both Leopard (OS X 10.5) and Tiger (OS X 10.4). The lastest Leopard is now 10.5.2. For more ,see this from Apple docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307109 and this from fellow CNET blogger Robert Vamosi Apple updates Leopard, Tiger with security updates (Note: "security udpate" = "fix to a security related bug").

Skype was updated on February 5th to fix a security problem. This only affects Windows users. The new version of Skype for Windows is 3.6.0.248. Get the latest Skype for Windows software here. See the Secunia advisory or read about the problem from Skype.

The latest Windows bug fixes are to be released on Tuesday, February 12th, otherwise known as "Patch Tuesday". It is expected that Microsoft will release 12 security "updates" (a nicer word than bug fix), 7 of which are rated critical (think of it as "you better install this ASAP).

Windows users can check for software that is missing bug fixes using the online Secunia Software Inspector .

Real Player was recently labeled as "badware".

 

Membership drive. You can donate to WBAI by check or at WBAI.org. Donations at WBAI.org can be of any amount to the station or you can donate either $25 or $55 to your favorite show. This new feature just went live today. Our Gold Card for technical support can also be purchased at wbai.org at any time.