Yawn ...

Barry Goffe, Director of Windows Ultimate, today disclosed on windowsultimate.com that the remaining 18 language packs (with Serbian still forthcoming) have been made available via Windows Update.

The additional supported languages are:

• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Croatian
• Czech
• Estonian
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hungarian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Romanian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

Let me introduce the latest addition to the PC Doc team ...

His/her name is Puddle (gender is a little ambiguous at present ... but that doesn't matter).  Puddle is a 5 week old orphaned kitten who's been hand reared.

Cute eh? 

Needless to say Puddle has his/her own gadgets and will probably start blogging real soon.

Over the past few years I've seen all kinds of spam - ASCII art spam, image spam, animated GIF spam, PDF spam and Excel spam to name but a few, but this new wave of spam is odd indeed - MP3 spam.

GFI Software, a leading developer of network security, content security and messaging software, today announced it is tracking a new method through which spammers send messages with MP3 attachments that contain the latest pump-and-dump stock scams.

The spam is a short, 30-second MP3 file recorded at low bit-rate with a synthetic female voice promoting a particular stock; the voice heavily distorted to avoid signature-based anti-spam approaches (click here to listen to an edited sample of MP3 spam).

Spammers are taking advantage of the fact that the MP3 format is one of the most common in use today and that most anti-spam solutions do not handle attachments very well because they do not actually analyze the attachment content.

I really don't see this working on anyone.  The voice it way too distorted and audio is nowhere near as convenient as a link.  This trick might mean that emails get past filters and into inboxes, but I still think that it'll fall on deaf ears. 

Online, on one knows you're a dog, or a cheat!

Some opponents became suspicious of how a certain player was playing. He seemed to know what the opponents' hole cards were. The suspicious players provided examples of these hands, which were so outrageous that virtually all serious poker players were convinced that cheating had occurred. One of the players who'd been cheated requested that Absolute Poker provide hand histories from the tournament (which is standard practice for online sites). In this case, Absolute Poker "accidentally" did not send the usual hand histories, but instead sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never release. The file contained every player's hole cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing. (I put "accidentally" in quotes because the mistake seems like too great a coincidence when you learn what followed.) I suspect that someone at Absolute knew about the cheating and how it happened, and was acting as a whistleblower by sending these data. If that is the case, I hope whomever "accidentally" sent the file gets their proper hero's welcome in the end.

...

So the poker detectives turned their attention to this observer. They traced the observer's IP address and account name to the same set of servers that host Absolute Poker, and also, apparently, to a particular individual named Scott Tom, who seems to be a part-owner of Absolute Poker! If all of this is correct, it shows exactly how the cheating would have transpired: an insider at the Web site had real-time access to all of the hole cards (it is not hard to believe that this capability would exist) and was relaying this information to an outside accomplice.

I've never understood how people trust online gambling - there's so much scope for cheating it's incredible.

In order to satisfy those patiently waiting for Leopard to be released, Apple's released a guided video tour.

There's nothing new revealed in this video but it should keep the fans satisfied for a while.