Latest news about Consumer Electronics and Education And Reference

A number of people really want to use the latest in technology, but they just feel held back by a lack of understanding toward the programs. One of the best way for them to overcome this problem is to just get Microsoft Office training. Microsoft Office practically runs the world. If they get a good overview of the programs in the suite, then they will know how to build presentations, databases, and write. That should be all the basics that they really need.

This isn’t that easy for everyone though. Some people have rough schedules or face a tough drive to the local training center. They need a good way to train on their own schedule without leaving the home. This is where the Microsoft Office training CD comes into play. This is a way to teach them everything that they need to know while they are using the computer. If they can put the disc in the drive, then they are set. The CD contains lessons, examples, and simulations to walk them through all the little problems that they could face. Once it is all said and done, they should be just fine. If nothing else, it is a really great way to get them past any initial fear of technology.

Blockbuster has officially entered the “battle of the boxes” with the launch of its new set-top box yesterday. The box will serve movies to TVs over the Internet and is going against Netflix’s set-top box solutions (Xbox, Roku, and Tivo). Blockbuster’s MediaPoint box allows users to watch thousands of movies without the need of a monthly subscription.

To get the MediaPoint player, made by 2Wire, Blockbuster subscribers will have to pay a one-off $99 fee, which also includes 25 pre-paid movies. After that, users will have to pay between $1.99 and $3.99 for each DVD rented, without a monthly subscription fee. Netflix’s box also costs $99, besides your chosen monthly subscription. But unlike Blockbuster’s 2,500 “of the best, biggest and most current movies available“, Netflix offers its whole 10,000 DVD collection for rental through its box.

The major difference between the MediaPoint box and Netflix’s is that Blockbuster does “progressive playback” in comparison to Netflix’s streaming, meaning that the video quality is independent of you broadband’s connection speed. By progressively downloading the movie on the box (up to five movies storage capacity), Blockbuster’s solution can offer a much more consistent video quality. In comparison, Netflix’s service which can reduce the movie’s quality if your Internet connection slows down.

Spec-wise, Blockbuster’s MediaPoint can store up to five full length feature films (rented films must be viewed within 24 hours of downloading) and can connect to both SD and HD television sets. For the SD crowd, you can connect the MediaPoint to your TV with Composite A/V cables and if you have an HD TV you can use an HDMI cable. If none of the above matches you television set, you can use the box’s Component Video and Line Audio connections.

In terms of Internet connectivity, the MediaPoint box can use both wireless and an Ethernet cable from your router. For the full specs, check out MediaPoint’s user manual (PDF link).

The suicide of a Missouri teen could have been avoided had she not been tormented online by a mom who lived a few houses away, prosecutors said on Monday, describing the girl’s death as a tragedy.

The jury will begin deliberating on Tuesday in the federal case against Missouri woman Lori Drew, who is accused of posing as a teen boy on the MySpace social networking website to tease and humiliate 13-year-old Megan Meier, who later committed suicide.

Prosecutors told jurors that Drew, her daughter and a teenage employee created the profile in a plan to publicly embarrass Meier and get back at her for saying bad things about Drew’s daughter.

“The tragedy in this case is not just Megan Meier’s suicide,” U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien said in his closing arguments to jurors.

“It’s the fact that it was so preventable. If, as a 47-year-old woman Lori Drew was so upset that Megan Meier had called her daughter ugly or a lesbian, she could have gone over and talked to her mom and we wouldn’t be here,” he said.

Drew’s attorney, H. Dean Steward, also described Meier’s death as a tragedy, but he reminded jurors that Drew is not accused of homicide in Meier’s death.

“Please do not add to this tragedy,” he said. “This has been such a woeful, woeful case and there’s been so many tears here. Don’t add to it by going along with the government’s case.”

Drew, 49, is charged with conspiracy and accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information for the purpose of inflicting emotional distress on Meier.

She faces a maximum of 20 years in federal prison if she is convicted on all of the charges.

The trial began on Wednesday, and jurors have heard the testimony of Drew’s teenage daughter and Ashley Grills, who was an 18-year-old employee of Drew and sent a final message on the day of Meier’s suicide in October 2006 that read in part, “The world would be a better place without you.”

Grills was not charged and testified after reaching a deal with prosecutors.

Drew did not testify in her own defense. But Tina Meier, the dead girl’s mother, testified that Drew knew her daughter took medication to handle her depression.

The case was tried in a federal court in Los Angeles because MySpace, the social networking site that was used to create the false profile of a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, is based in the nearby city of Beverly Hills.

The trial is being closely watched by the burgeoning social networking industry.

Steward argued that the computer statute Drew is accused of violating was designed to stop hackers, not MySpace users.”When you look at the facts that you’ve heard and you listen to the elements of the law it doesn’t fit,” he told jurors. “And I submit to you it’s like trying to take a size 11 foot and fit it into a size 6 shoe.”

Internet criminals have been getting more “professional” for years, trying to run their businesses like Big Business to get better and more profitable at selling stolen data online. Now the bad guys of the cyber-underworld are exhibiting other unexpected traits: remarkable patience and restraint in stalking their victims.A new report by antivirus software vendor Symantec Corp. details a startling trend that highlights the inventive ways criminals are figuring out ways to make money online.

Hackers are sometimes breaking into online businesses and not stealing anything. Gone are the bull-in-the-China-shop days of plundering everything in sight once they’ve found a sliver of a security hole.

Instead of swiping all the customer data they can get their hands on, a small subset of hackers have concerned themselves with stealing only a very specific thing from the vendors they breach - they want access to the compromised companies’ payment-processing systems, and nothing else, according to the “Symantec Report on the Underground Economy,” slated for release Monday. Those systems allow the bad guys to check whether credit card numbers being hawked on underground chat rooms are valid, the same way the store verifies whether to accept a card payment or not.It’s a service the crooks sell to other fraudsters who don’t trust that the stolen card numbers they’re buying from someone else will actually work, and it’s good business.

The bad guys hardly touch anything. The customer data for that store’s clientele remains intact. They don’t install malicious software that turns the compromised machines into spam-spewing robots.

Think of it like taking a used car to a mechanic for an inspection before buying. Only in this case the mechanic’s a squatter who’s holed up illegally in some other guy’s shop and using his tools when no one’s around at night. And he cleans up spotlessly once he’s done.

“They treat these things fairly pristinely so they can maintain access,” Alfred Huger, vice president for Symantec Security Response, said in an interview.

According to Symantec, in the company’s yearlong look at 135 so-called “underground economy servers” - all public servers hosting mostly legitimate chat channels, with a few bad ones catering to cyber crooks - researchers determined that criminals have latched on to this tactic as a way to make money and self-police the underground.

Symantec said it didn’t find out which vendors had been compromised. The company says it didn’t get inside the compromised servers that carry even more secretive back-channel…onversations, because doing so would have broken the law.The Cupertino-based company’s researchers were only able to determine the trend is happening by looking at thousands of credit card numbers being checked every day - and either accepted or rejected - by shadowy groups online promoting that service and charging a fee. That fee is about $10 per card checked. Considering they’re typically checked in batches of 10 or more, the revenue can add up fast.

Researchers said that the high number of cards the groups were checking each day suggests that they either had long-term access to a few compromised vendors, or had a lot of compromised vendors under their control and would shift the credit-card-checking chores to different ones to avoid being detected.

Huger said the reason the criminals don’t raid the victim companies’ databases is it’s much lower risk to just check the card numbers on someone else’s computers, rather than to start taking stuff out, which gets noticed. Plenty of bad guys are still looting everything in sight, according to Symantec’s study. Researchers spotted $7 billion worth of stolen credit cards and bank accounts being sold during the yearlong project. That figure assumes the cards and accounts were completely drained by the crooks.The actual price for those cards and accounts could command on the black market was far less, however, because of the risk the buyer takes on in trying to extract money or make fraudulent purchases. Symantec estimated that the total value of the goods advertised for sale was more than $276 million during the time they were watching the servers from July 2007 to June 2008.

The report mostly underscores the trend that online criminals are adding more touches of professionalism to their businesses, like bundling packages of exploits together and selling them, or offering up programmers - like a company would hire a consultant - to write malicious code for other people.

Huger said the report just touched on the “low end” of the underground economy. The report emphasized that the potential bounty for hackers on the underground economy will only go up as “matures and operates more like a traditional business model.”…