DigitMemo.com

If they can’t access the Internet when they want to, Americans say they worry that they’re missing out on something important.

Not tonight, Honey. I’m online.

Sound familiar? A survey of about 1,000 Americans showed that the Internet has become such an essential part of their every-day lives that 28% said they spend less time socializing with friends because of it. And 20% said they spend less time having sex because they’re too busy online, according to a study by advertising agency JWT.

Click for more on Americans Can Go Without Sex Longer Than The Internet, Study Finds »

Three Republican U.S. senators want to make permanent a temporary measure banning taxes on Internet access that is due to expire November 1.

The current Internet tax moratorium, which Congress has extended twice since 1998, bans taxes on Internet access, as well as other taxes unique to the Internet. It’s important for Congress to pass a permanent ban soon before state and local governments begin to tax Internet access, said Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican.

Click for more on Senators push for Internet tax ban »

“Another milestone of online communications has been reached. The smiley turns 25, which is a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.

:-)

Click for more on The Smiley Face Turns 25 :-) »

Microsoft release several new downloads today, which include Office 2007 SP1 beta for testers, which has been leaked on torrent network, and some more:

Office 2007 Service Pack (SP) 1 Beta 1. Microsoft made the first test build of Office 2007 SP1 available to Technology Adoption Program (TAP) participants only. Microsoft declined to discuss plans for the final SP1 ship date or feature set. (One anonymous poster on this blog provided what s/he said was a list of what?s included.)

Windows Live ID software development kit. Windows Live ID is Microsoft?s single sign-on authentication technology of which Microsoft Passport is a subset. On August 16, Microsoft released version 1.0 of two SDKs, allowing users to move between Windows Live services without having to log-in multiple times, and to do the same among third-party Web sites that make rely on the Windows Live ID technology. The SDK runs not only on Windows, but also on Linux, believe it or not.

Expression Blend 2 August Preview. Microsoft posted for download on August 14 a new test release of the next version of Microsoft?s Blend user-interface design tool. The tool fixes issues that some developers dabbling with test versions of Visual Studio 2008 have encountered when trying to build early versions of Silverlight apps.

Windows Vista Hardware Assessment Tool 2.1. Another new release of this tool (following by just a few weeks the 2.0 version, announced in early July) includes a number of additional features, including SNMP discovery and IP range scanning. This tool is designed to help companies assess whether their systems are ready to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007.

PerformancePoint Community Technology Preview (CTP) 4: As the Microsoft bloggers promised, the company did deliver this week a new test build of Microsoft?s forthcoming scorecarding server.

Microsoft Update Catalog Version 1.0: The catalog allows users to search for updates available via Microsoft Update and download them. Users also can import updates fromt he catalog into WSUS 3.0, System Center essentials 2007 or System Center Configuration Manager 2007.

Final version of Office Outlook Connector: On August 14, Microsoft made available for download the final release of the free connector enabling access to Windows Live Hotmail or Office Live Mail from inside Outlook 2003 or 2007.

It has been 9 months since the last 6.21 release. The popular IRC(Internet Relay Chat) client updates today.

This version of mIRC offers full Vista compatibility with support for limited user accounts, U3 support, support for tips (those small text balloons that pop up near the Windows tray) to notify you of various events such as incoming messages or users in your notify list coming on or leaving IRC, support for positioning the Treebar at top/bottom of the mIRC window, and a feature that allows you to switch between Normal and Compact modes. Compact mode makes mIRC behave like a messenger with the treebar filling the main window, all windows opening on the desktop, and so on…

As always this new version of mIRC addresses many, if not all, of the issues reported since the last release. A lot of time was spent tweaking new features, fixing bugs, and a handful of other things. In total there are over 100 changes in this version, making this a great new mIRC!

Download page for mIRC 6.3

Source: mirc

The popular IM, Yahoo Messenger, now get another strike. Researchers at McAfee have verified and reproduced a bug first reported by a Chinese researcher.

The bug is caused by the Webcam function and on the most recent version of Yahoo Messenger as of today, V8.1.0.413.

“It seems like a classic heap overflow, which can be triggered when the victim accepts a Webcam invite,” wrote one of the McAfee researchers.

The bug, according to McAfee, may enable user-assisted remote-code execution attacks. Informationweek.com claims that they have not seen any exploit code for this flaw published yet. However, a complied code is currently available as prototype and will initiate a DoS(deny of service) attack to victim computer(i.e. anyone using Yahoo Messenger).

McAfee said it has contacted Yahoo’s security team and notified it of the problem.

“Since learning of this issue, we have been actively working towards a resolution and expect to have a fix shortly,” said a Yahoo spokesman in an e-mail to InformationWeek. “Yahoo takes security seriously and consistently employs measures to help protect our users.”

However, the hacker who found this bug claimed that Yahoo Messenger was poorly written, and there might be more potential security flaw.

Back in June, Yahoo Messenger was patched due to a buffer-overflow flaw in an ActiveX control, which is also part of the Webcam.

McAfee’s researchers offer up a few recommendations to deal with this latest bug:

• Users should not accept Webcam invites from untrusted sources until a patch for this vulnerability is released and installed
• Block outgoing traffic on TCP port 5100 until Yahoo can patch the flaw.