On 2 November 1988 a 22-year old Cornell University student called Robert Morris released an internet worm capable of exploiting vulnerabilities in the UNIX operating system. It is estimated that it infected 10 percent of the internet including computer spy. Twenty years on, the scale of the malware problem has grown astronomically. Today’s internet attacks are organized and designed to steal information and resources from consumers and corporations. Although there have been instances of attacks driven by politics and religion, the main motivation is fnancial. The web is now the primary route by which cybercriminals infect computers, mainly due to the fact that increasing numbers of organizations have secured their email gateways. As a consequence, cybercriminals are planting malicious code on innocent websites. This code then simply lies in wait and silently infects visiting computers.

The scale of this global criminal operation has reached such proportions that we discover one new infected webpage every 4.5 seconds – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Computer spy activities such as spyware, adware, malware are world wide threats. 2008 proved that malware is more than just a Microsoft problem. Although the sheer number of Windows threats far outweighs attacks against any other platform, cybercriminals are turning their attention to other operating systems such as Apple Macintosh, and vulnerable cross-platform software. This seems likely to continue in 2009, with the increasing popularity of portable devices such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android phone and ultra-mobile netbooks.

2008 computer spy activities

Biggest malware threats – SQL injection attacks against websites and the rise of scareware

New web infections – one new infected webpage discovered by Sophos every 4.5 seconds

Malicious email attachments – fve times more at the end of 2008 than at the beginning

Spam-related webpages – one new webpage discovered by Sophos every 15 seconds

New scareware websites – five identifed every day

Top malware-hosting country – US with 37 percent

Top spam-relaying continent – Asia with 36.6 percent

Amount of business email that is spam – 97 percent

It remains paramount that organizations defend themselves at all levels of their business, not just at the email and web gateways. Networks, desktops, laptops and mobile devices must be comprehensively secured to defend against the myriad threats posed by the criminal underground

This presents a new mechanism, called a shadow driver, that improves overall system reliability by concealing a drivers failure from its clients while recovering from the failure. During normal operation, the shadow tracks the state of the real driver by monitoring all communication between the kernel and the driver. When a failure occurs, the shadow inserts itself temporarily in place of the failed computer driver, servicing requests on its behalf. While shielding the kernel and applications from the failure, the shadow driver restores the failed driver to a state where it can resume processing requests. Our design for shadow drivers reflects four principles:

1.

Device driver failures should be concealed from the drivers clients. If the operating system and applications using a driver cannot detect that it has failed,they are unlikely to fail themselves.

2.

Recovery logic should be centralized in a single sub-system. We want to consolidate recovery knowledge in a small number of components to simplify the implementation.

3.

Driver recovery logic should be generic. The increased reliability offered by driver recovery should not be off set by potentially destabilizing changes to the tens of thousands of existing drivers. Therefore, the architecture must enable a single shadow driver to handle recovery for a large number of device drivers.

4.

Recovery services should have low over head when not needed. The recovery system should impose relatively little over head for the common case(that is, when drivers are operating normally).

Overall, these design principles are intended to minimize the cost required to make and use shadow drivers while maximizing their value in existing commodity operating systems. Such as sound driver and windows driver are compatible to this post.

If you’re having trouble with your PC, then you might just need a registry cleaner and registry editor to improve performance. You definitely need one if you want to avoid or stop that annoying slow paced start up and sloppy program response. These are the main symptoms you may have when your system registry is compromised.

You may be curious as to how this process works. Your computer is basically comprised of two parts a tangible half and an intangible half. Your hardware is the physical part and software, the intangible written codes. Your PC is only a piece of heavy and rather pricey blinking machine that can do nothing if you don’t have the correct software.

The programs installed in your Personal Computer do what they are supposed to do. These programs may enable you to create beautiful office presentations or may allow you to edit your home movies and post them on Youtube. You can even then download these special videos and transfer them to your cellphone.

All these functions leave their mark on your PC. This mark is actually sort of like instructions for your PC on how to perform their specific tasks. These instructions are normal, every software has this set of instructions for your PC to follow. These instructions are stored in your PC’s registry.

Your registry is the computer’s way of keeping track of all individual programs’ activities. These registry keys make the programs do what they are intended to do. Every program you have has embedded its own registry keys and because of this huge number, it is becoming a problem.

When the accumulation of these registry keys become too much for your PC to handle, then your computer does the only thing it can do, freeze up. It may be a good idea then to have clean registry. Like a person, your computer is growing old. It may even have problems like old people do. Like a person, it too is capable of regaining its former glory; but much quicker. Registry cleaner will improve your PC’s performance and make it work as though it were new. Registry cleaner and registry editor are the best solution to your problem of a very slow personal computer. Your problem will be solved and the best thing.

The variety of broadband media services that consumers will receive is only limited by the creativity of network, service, and content providers. While research is being conducted regularly to determine demand for specific services, one thing is clear—for broadband media services to have successful deployment, the services will have to add value to individual lives. User interface (UI) is an important component of this, and the interface and controls have to make sense for users. Ideally, users would control and access content with familiar remote-control devices and create and select content via customized on-screen menus according to their preferences. An example would be a single on-screen menu (viewable on the users TV, PC, etc) that provides access to the home DVD collection, music library, video game library, Internet and e-mail, e-greetings library, family photos, broadcast TV, pay-per-view options, and more. In the office, a single interface could provide access to employee-training videos, industry discussion forums, Internet and e-mail, and other company news and information. Since ease of use is a crucial part of the overall solution, companies are actively researching consumer preferences for integrated media interfaces to offer a variety of options that address individual tastes.The three cornerstones of Broadband Media Services are

• truly customized “per customer,” “per media type” access to multimedia content
• content “on demand”—what you want, when you want it
• advanced interactivity

With that in mind, broadband media services are probably best described as a mix of

• Internet applications (interactive surfing of the WWW)
• e-commerce
• pay-per-view
• interactive targeted marketing

To better understand the potential of broadband media services, here are a few real-world examples of services that are being intensively developed and tested:

Media on Demand

On-demand experiences are a cornerstone of broadband media services in that users can consume content when it is convenient for them, as opposed to planning viewing or listening times around a preconceived, generic broadcast schedule. Generally, a media on demand (MOD) system’s primary goal is for a client to request video or music and have it play back without interruptions, with little or no delay. MOD means that the content starts playing back from the beginning or from some specified point as opposed to joining a transmission in progress. An MOD server operating on the Internet today uses IP protocols to deliver the data. These protocols define how the server encapsulates the media file into packets and how a client decodes the received data. In MOD, content is “streamed” to the viewer in real-time. The recipient may choose whether to view the content the same time it is streamed (which is possible) or save the content in the video server to view another time.

Much more than movies or VOD, MOD could be anything—music, interactive games, university courses, vacation videos, replays from last night’s hockey game, a scene from your favorite music video, a video phone call with grandma and the kids, your real-time stock portfolio with different scenarios e-mailed from your broker, a live Webcast for work. You get the idea! The premise of broadband media services is the same in that all digital content transmitted through IP networks can be “streamed” to devices and/or saved in servers, merged with other content, and ultimately viewed and interacted with. And, you will have fast, seamless access to it via a customized on-screen menu, viewable from different devices such as TV sets in different rooms of the house or PCs at the home or office. Here are two examples:

• It’s Saturday night and you feel like staying home and watching a movie. You heard about a great foreign movie but you haven’t been able to find it near your home. You log on to your broadband media services because you know your personal video search engine will help you locate the movie online. Then you will buy it and have it “streamed” to you instantly, but only after you’ve seen a preview. After you watch the movie, you notice a personalized message from the provider indicating the release date of another movie by the same director, along with a preview of the movie and an offer for 20 percent off your next purchase. Since you enjoyed this movie so much, you go ahead and order it in advance and specify the date you’d like it to be sent to your home server. Then you click on your “late night music” selections on your entertainment menu and play a few tracks from your jazz music library before you finally doze off.
• Your daughter’s friend from school just got a new interactive video game for her birthday and your daughter has been rightly chosen to be the first to play with her. The only problem is, your daughter is tired from a long day by the seaside and she doesn’t want to get up from the sofa. So, you fire up the laptop and drop it in her lap while her friend streams the game from her home server to yours. As your daughter desperately tries to outwit her friend at the game with the help of your speedy WLAN laptop connection, her friend has unwittingly downloaded a few “hints” from a private Internet site only available to buyers of the game. Feeling guilty after beating your daughter five games in a row, her friend decides to send a quick video demonstrating the hints for a more even match tomorrow.

Live IP Broadcasting

Of course live broadcasts exist today, but broadcasting of live events in real-time over the Internet provides a completely new range of entertainment possibilities that can be offered to end-users. There are no channel limitations and the coverage is global. Live video feed can be captured using real-time video encoders and then streamed to video servers. Broadcasting of live streams could also mean receiving satellite, cable, or terrestrial TV channels and encoding them into the IP network. Here are some examples of what IP broadcasting will mean:

• You’ve recently moved out of the country. You like your new home and job but you miss the local news back in your hometown, and especially the extensive coverage of your old high school football team that recently made it to the playoffs. With IP broadcasting, you can watch your local news every night and you won’t miss a thing. And, you can have the local broadcast of all the playoff games “streamed” to you via IP broadcasting.
• You have tickets to the symphony but your boss just handed you a last-minute business assignment so you won’t be able to go. No problem. You can have the symphony “streamed” to you in real time and keep it on in the background, while you’re working, hearing it just as if you were there live. Since you’ve saved it on your home server, you can replay it again and again for the full video experience later.

Regional production of global sports events, concerts, and local events in real-time will become a reality and will create new revenue streams for operators. For consumers, IP broadcasting will become as close to “being there” for the live event as one could possibly get and allow people to keep close ties with favorite local programming around the globe.

New revenue opportunities abound for service providers, as broadband media services will enable advanced targeted marketing messages. Broadband media services will create new classes of advertising such as on-demand marketing, where companies provide audio and video messages to consumers who express interest in a particular product. Automakers, for example, could offer one- or two-minute video clips demonstrating the features of specific new car models. Broadband media services will enable marketers to reach consumers near the time of the purchase consideration, with content targeted directly to the actual purchase decision-makers.

Some additional revenue-generating possibilities that operators and advertisers will enjoy are

• e-commerce. Transaction commissions on e-commerce via retailers on the system.
• real-estate charge. Monthly “rent” charged to each retailer on the system including links to retail sites and a number of pages on cache memory.
• network games. End-users or groups of end-users pay for getting access to the latest games over the network.
• sponsoring packages. Arrangements for retailers to be primary or secondary service providers in a service category (hub) with exclusive exposure possibilities on portal and hubs (fixed monthly or quarterly fees).
• pop-up specials. Pop-up on-screen banners with save, open, or close functionality. An interactive alternative to TV program sponsorships or as interactive add-ons to traditional commercials. Sales synergies with hard-drive space sales.
• Internet access. Sales margin on fast Internet access sold via the system.
• hard-drive space sales. “Rent” charged to advertisers for hard-disk space necessary to display products, product catalogues, or other direct-marketing pieces via the TV. Based on alternative costs of traditional direct-marketing distribution.
• subscription. Membership fees for access to extra or enhanced services.
• digital TV sales. Sales of broadcast entertainment.

So while high speed and shared access to Internet services, media delivery, and local networks provide endless possibilities for consumers, it can also create new revenue streams for operators, media companies, and service providers, through, among other things, multiplied use of access networks, branded media portals, interactive advertising, and e-commerce.

Broadband media services enable operators to capture part of households’ new TV and video services and bundle them with traditional voice services, reducing customer churn and margin pressure. Everyone will benefit. Operators and service providers will provide access to services; network providers will generate revenues by maintaining and managing modular and scalable network enhancements and add-ons; content providers will create and license new content; advertisers will target customer user groups better than ever; and end-users will enjoy a new level of personalized services.