SpeedPlexer Blog

The New York Times tells us about a whole new approach to getting our favorite cable programs onto our computers. It’s not the same as watching cable shows on the Web.

Reporter Saul Hansell paints the picture: “What happens when you want to watch the Food Channel in the kitchen, and (horrors) you only have a laptop there?” 

He goes on to explain that new technology will let cable companies feed programs onto your home network in the standard formats used by the Internet. That way you could simply run video software, such as Windows Media Player or a special program given to you by your cable company, to watch any show on your cable system on your PC, game console or smartphone.

“Your computer will be your alternate screen in your house, or it could be your primary screen if you want that,” said Peter Percosan, a partner in the San Francisco consulting firm Digital-strategy who works closely with the cable business of Texas Instruments. Apparently four major cable companies in the United States are already working on this, as well as one in the UK.

Feeding your cable system onto your home network would let you watch everything, whether it’s available online or not. This would include live news and sports, and it could be seen from any device. Plus, the video quality delivered by a cable system is likely to be higher than Web-based video for a good long time.

Some cable systems, however, are talking about a much more ambitious approach. They are planning to send signals all the way from their central offices to your home by Internet Protocol. This will take changes in the cable company’s back offices, but should be more flexible in the long term, and would allow you to watch your shows in cable quality, but with internet speed.

The latest threat to computer users is an infectious worm called Conficker, which was expected to hit on April 1st.  But don’t relax yet—now techies are saying it’s merely evolving, becoming harder to find and harder to fight, while quietly awaiting instructions.

Tens of millions of computers are thought to be infected worldwide. It can spread very quickly on a local area network by taking advantage of a (now-patched) flaw in Microsoft Windows. The hardest hit areas are also those with the most pirated, and therefore unpatched, versions of Microsoft software–  Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America. Could it be a ploy by Microsoft to stamp out pirating?

Machines can be infected with the speed of an Internet connection or by hiding on USB memory sticks carrying data from one computer to another. The worm also has the ability to communicate using peer-to-peer (p2p) protocol. That’s right, Conficker is file-sharing. With p2p, the worm can distribute software updates much faster  than if every infected machine had to communicate with a main server.

Right now, it contacts 500 Web sites from a randomly generated list of 50,000 sites every day, until it receives instructions, which could be a simple software update or the order to commit theft or attack other computer networks.

Microsoft has modified its free Malicious Software Removal Tool to detect and remove Conficker. Security firms, including Trend Micro, Symantec and F-Secure, provide Conficker removal services at their websites too. Even The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is getting involved, creating a tool to detect infection and recommending that Windows users apply Microsoft security patch MS08-067 to help protect against the worm.

The tell-tale sign that a computer is infected is if your efforts to connect a website providing online virus removal tools are blocked.