If you ask me about Heaven and Hell, all I can tell you for sure is that I love Black Sabbath's song, and I am also crazy about some of those many covers recorded and released by various bands, including Overkill, Solitude Aeturnus or Enola Gay. I know, you may say this has nothing to do with the software world, but I must tell you it has a lot to do, because hackers are considered to be the demons of this world, and a recent court decision just turned Netherlands into a "hackers' heaven," if we exaggerate a little!

I know those waiting to read about the facilities in Heaven, especially wireless access, will be disappointed, but I can't give you the accurate description of heaven, because there's no human able to do that, but if we talk about Netherlands, here's the story...

Earlier this summer, London Transport's Oyster Card was hacked by Dutch researchers, who turned a laptop into a mobile card lab, and scored a day's worth of free rides. So far, so good. They did it for the sake of science, of course, and now, a Dutch court gave them permission to publish details on how they did it, disregarding the protests of the chipmaker involved, although this wasn't just some small company, but a Philips spinoff, called NXP.<-336x280 Large Rectangle - right->

The tragicomical part of the story is that these cards are used around the world for both public transit and building security, and I am sure somebody will have to spend a lot of money to make things right, and that must happen really soon. "Driven by a sense of social responsibility, the University immediately and confidentially informed the Dutch Government as well as the manufacturer (NXP) of the results of the independent research on the Mifare Classic Chip. Since March, the researchers have deliberately withheld further details of the imperfections of the chip in order to give those involved, including NXP, the opportunity to take the necessary steps. Publication of the scientific article was anticipated in October 2008 and in June the article was sent confidentially to NXP so that NXP could ask for a legal opinion," said the University behind the researchers involved in the whole deal.

Well, at least they did it for "the greater good," and now NXP has enough time to solve its security issues, I guess. Since even the Dutch government's buildings were protected by the smartcards system hacked earlier, I guess Netherlands could be used as a description of heaven for hackers...as long as they don't do it with bad intentions! ;)

If you forgot what a Trojan Horse is, when talking about the computer world, then let me remind you - after all, we're not talking about this every day - "a Trojan horse, also known as a trojan, is a piece of malware which appears to perform a certain action but in fact performs many different forms of codes. Therefore, a computer worm or virus may be a Trojan horse." That should make things clear. So...want to buy one? Don't ask why, just read on, I won't ask "why" either!



As it was recently reported by Prevx, some evil genius out there has put his wicked synapses to work, and the result is a new "uberTrojan," MOAT(think about the MOAB, to figure out what this means!), "ultimate Trojan," "Ghost Trojan..." just call it whatever you want, but the idea is that this evil piece of code is for sale, guaranteed to evade any detection method - or you will get your money back. How much money? Well, "just" $1300, and nothing more...a piece of cake, don't you think?<-336x280 Large Rectangle - right->

The Trojan is known as Limbo 2, and can be easily customized, so those that created it are selling custom versions to various customers, according to their requests, so if a variant is being detected after a while, the changed one won't be... at least for a while, of course. Now, here comes the interesting part...

Apart from doing what most keyloggers do, Limbo 2 also displays spoofed information boxes, so you may be asked to enter credit card data, email addresses, your T-shirt size, and the favorite beer brand. Oh, no, wait - I was kidding with the last two! Even worse, any personal information on your hard drive will be packed up and sent away. Not good, not good at all!

No, I don't know where can this Trojan be purchased, and I don't even want to know. Just...be sure to stay away from such things, and pay extra attention to the incoming and outgoing traffic stats on your firewall, all right? Good luck, and stay safe!

I heard about a lot of cases when different people tried to rip off Google and were caught in the process, losing their AdSense account and all the money inside it, but never thought I'd live to see the day when it happens the other way around. OK, I know there are a lot of smart guys clicking the ads on their own sites, I know there are also errors with this, and clean webmasters end up losing the money they worked hard to earn, but what about Google being the one guilty of fraud? Well, that's exactly what just happened!

The story goes like this - attorney Hal K. Levitte advertised his legal services though a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign last year. Nothing out of ordinary, millions of people do that, but they also get results from this action. What Mr. Levitte got was a fee of $136.11 for seeing his ads appear on various parked domains and error pages, instead of The New York Times and other similar websites! Now...is Google the ripper here, or not?

I guess Google made a little mistake here, since nothing's perfect, but their misfortune was to happen exaactly with a client that's an attorney...so now they have a class-action lawsuit opened in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California. According to the complaint filed by Levitte's lawyers, his ad campaign ran between the 1st of June and the 18th of August, 2007, receiving no less than 202,528 impressions from parked domain pages. While this seems pretty impressive, our attorney here got only 668 clicks and no conversions, so he spent those money on nothing!<-250x250 Square - right->

Wait, this is not everything - he also got 1,009 impressions, 25 clicks and zero conversions from various error pages, thank's to Google's AdSense for Errors... In the complaint, it is said that "Google includes millions of parked domains and error pages that have little or no content, and that result in practically zero conversions, in both its Content Network and its Search Network. Given the low quality of these parked domain and error pages, advertisers would not want to spend their advertising budgets on these distribution networks. However, Google designed its network in such a way that it was virtually impossible to opt out of the AdSense for Domains and/or AdSense for Errors programs."

Since Google says they didn't get to see the complaint yet, they made no official statement yet. What do you think...is Google the ripper, or is it being ripped off? I guess it's none of the above, but only a misunderstanding, and a lawsuit started for only $136 by someone who's not dying of starvation, anyway.

Did you miss Firefox? I hope you're using it right now, so you shouldn't miss it, but what about the SoftDistrict Series? I hope you did, because despite the fact I may not be able to install that impressive number of Firefox addons I have in mind by the end of the month, I've been thinking about this subject a lot, and also talked with some of my geek friends about my idea, while using Firefox 3 with the best Firefox addonI met so far, of course! Most of them think the browser will crash somewhere along the way, or will be turned into "Slowfox," but I think there are plenty of chances for this to succeed. Anyway, today we'll take one little step towards the starting line...

...by booting up Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit and getting to know the hardware and software setup I'll use for the test, and also choosing the sites I'll load with Firefox each time I'll install new plugin sets. These being said, let's start with the hardware setup, shall we?

The parts that could have an impact on the speed of our beloved Firefox and those - hopefully - 500 plugins we'll have in the end are the following:<-120x240 Vertical Banner - right->

- MSI K9N Neo v2/v3(MS-7369) mainboard, usually known as MSI NEO-F V3, using revision 2.5 of the BIOS(there were some problems with memory performance in earlier versions, at least for me and some other guys using this board, now it works like a charm)
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Brisbane(BH-G1) processor, slighlty pushed up, from 2.1GHz to 2.4GHz(approximate rating 4600+ now), with stock cooling and default voltage
- A-Data Extreme Edition DDR2 800+ 2X1GB memory kit, running at 800MHz and 4-4-4-11 timings
- Asus EAX1950 Pro PCI Express video card with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, just great for running Vista without any problems
- Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB S-ATA drive, with 16MB of cache memory and spinning at 7200rpm

The above should be enough, since I don't think that my speakers, monitor or mouse could help Firefox load faster those sites I have in the list, but before getting there, let me tell you what I am usually running when I use Vista. Obviously, I have more stuff installed, but since we are trying to reproduce a real-world situation here, I won't close everything else and run Firefox alone, so here's what will compete with it to get the most out of my hardware:

- XMPlay, a brilliant audio player, because I can't live without music. Just as a side note, I have to tell you that I'll listen to my music collection from a different partition than the one used by Firefox, so that shouldn't have any impact on the loading speed.
- MirandaIM, simply because it offers me all I need, and I hate Yahoo's Messenger software, although I love Yahoo as a whole(I know it may sound strange, but that's the truth). "Smaller, Faster, Easier" is finally more than just a headline!
- Unreal Commander, a very good (and free!) alternative to the notorious Total Commander that's getting better with each new version, and still has to reach version 1.0!
- avast! 4 Professional and Spyware Doctor, both pretty good antivirus and antispyware solutions, perfectly compatible with Vista.
- Firefox 2.0.0.16, just updated, followed by a manual update to Firefox 3, of course, but there's still some time and a lot of things to do, until then.

I know there's still a tool for measuring startup time needed, but I'll get it until next time. For now, there's still one big thing to do - give you the list of sites I'll be using for the test. Are you ready? Here we go...

- The list of notorious sites contains Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, PC Magazine, Wikipedia(theEnglish Wikipedia, in my case), Alexa, About.com, Mozilla, IMDB, AMD and CNet. 12 so far...
- Next, there are some of the sites from our network - TechPin, BindApple, Cool Gadget Concept, HQ Speakers, Laptops Arena, PlayerzBlog and Pets Funky.
- In the "heavyweight category," we have the following: 2Advanced Studios, probably the best Flash site I have ever seen, the Short Movies section on Pixar.com, Discovery Channel, and Vida Guerra's Official Site(she's not really my type, but the site is well done, and seems to load a pretty serious amount of data, that being the main reason for me to include it in the list).

This is it - 23 sites, if I didn't count them wrong... After loading all of them, Firefox 2.0.0.16 eats around 210MB of memory, and I only have a few plugins installed now. These being said, we'll check back in a few days, when I'll make the final preparations for the big test! Stay close - subscribe to our news by email, bookmark us, set this site to open with your browser, that's not important, just be sure to be by our side, and if you have any ideas until then, don't hesitate to drop a comment below!

Still looking for a free Visual Studio? Yeah, right, I am also looking for a free Porsche Carrera GT, but couldn't find any, so far, and if I ever find one, probably the police will also find me, probably before I fully enjoyed one of the cars of my dreams. Anyway, back to software, now - what would you say about a free Visual Studio that doesn't come from Microsoft? Well, read on to find out more!

First of all, let's see what Microsoft has to say about Visual Studio in a few words, just "for the record," shall we? "The Microsoft Visual Studio development system is a suite of development tools designed to aid software developers—whether they are novices or seasoned professionals—face complex challenges and create innovative solutions. Visual Studio's role is to improve the process of development and make the work of achieving breakthroughs easier and more satisfying."<-250x250 Square - left->

OK, so we know all that mumbo-jumbo, but what about a free Visual Studio, like in "freedom?" I know it may sound like a dream, but some people are trying to make this dream come true, shaped as a open-source tool, all being started by two new members of the Eclipse Foundation.

The idea is simple - Sonatype is planning to offer a Java environment to fight Visual Studio, expected to drop by in mid-September. This company has been founded by the same team that built the Apache Maven Java build and release framework and repository, and they are going to lead the m2eclipse project, an Eclipse plug-in combining Maven and Eclipse.

According to Jason van Zyl, CTO and co-founder of Sonatype and developer of Maven, "Maven combined with the Eclipse IDE is, we think, a solution that is starting to approach the usability of Visual Studio." Unfortunately, there's a pretty long road from "thinking" and "turning a dream into reality" but, as ambitious as it seems to be the entire roadmap of the Eclipse Foundation, we may have the free Visual Studio closer than we think, although its developer and basics are completely different from Microsoft's product...