Microsoft will shut down Windows Live Messenger next year, compelling users to migrate to Skype, whose latest version can import users’ Messenger contacts.
 With the exception of mainland China, Windows Live Messenger will close in the first quarter of 2013, and its users should install the latest version of Skype, Microsoft said on Tuesday.
 Users can sign into the Skype service with the credentials they use to access their Microsoft online services, including Windows Live Messenger. They will find their Windows Live Messenger contacts on their Skype contacts list. If they used both Windows Live Messenger and Skype, the contacts lists will be merged.

 “We want to focus our efforts on making things simpler for our users while continuously improving the overall experience,” wrote Tony Bates, Skype’s president, in a blog post.

 To encourage Windows Live Messenger users to update to Skype, Bates touted several benefits they’ll get from Skype, including support for more devices such as iPad and Android tablets, screen sharing, the ability to place calls to landline phones, and group video conferencing.
 However, this type of migration is rarely seamless, and users are already raising questions in comments to Bates’ blog post, including the availability of certain Windows Live Messenger features and the capacity of the Skype infrastructure to sustain the new workload.
 Microsoft, which acquired Skype in October 2011 for $8.5 billion, will provide more information about the transition, as well as introduce special offers for fee-based Skype services, in the coming months, Bates wrote.

COLD WAR ERA TACTICTS STILL USED BY THE RUSSIANS

Eight people have been arrested in Houston, Texas, on charges of illegally exporting hi-tech components to Russian security bodies.

Alexander Fishenko, who owns companies in Texas and Moscow, was charged with operating in the US as an unregistered agent of the Russian government.
The indictment names 11 suspects, all of whom are due in court in Houston except for three who are in Russia.

Virtual machine software is only the beginning

Virtualization - from mainframes to industry standard systems

Virtualization is a very useful tool that allows system resources to be utilized in new ways. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly equate virtual machine technology, technology that can encapsulate all of the software that runs on a physical system and allows that capsule to run along side of others on a single host system, with virtualization itself. In reality, virtualization is a well-established group of technologies with a long track record of success in data centers around the world. Suppliers, such as HP, IBM, Intel, and Oracle, have been involved with all levels of virtualization technology for a very long time. IBM, for example has been offering virtualization technology since the late 1960s.

Flaws sited in the TOR Anonymity network

At the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin, Germany on Monday, researchers from the University of Regensburg delivered a new warning about the Tor anonymizer network, a system aimed at hiding details of a computer user’s online activity from spying eyes.
The attack doesn’t quite make a surfer’s activity an open book, but offers the ability for someone on the same local network—a Wi-Fi network provider, or an ISP working at law enforcement (or a regime’s) request, for example—to gain a potentially good idea of sites an anonymous surfer is viewing.
“Developers have to be aware of this kind of attack, and develop countermeasures,” said Dominik Herrmann, a Regensburg PhD student studying profiling and fingerprinting attacks. “But that proves to be very difficult.”

A Virus Program to Block Websites

Most of us are familiar with the virus that used to block Orkut and Youtube site. If you are curious about creating such a virus on your own, here is how it can be done. As usual I’ll use my favorite programming language ‘C’ to create this website blocking virus. I will give a brief introduction about this virus before I jump into the technical jargon.

HTML 5: The New Tech Kid taking over

It's hard to imagine now, but original sites on the world wide web, written in HTML code or hypertext mark-up language, were made up of little more than text.

Corporate web designers were well aware that most of their customers had slow connections and would not tolerate much of a wait. 

Even a simple black and white image could irritate a user, as it gradually appeared on the screen revealing itself one painful line at a time.