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Four major media companies joined together to compete against Youtube.

News Fox, Viacom, CBS and NBC Universal joined their forces to create a new website specialized in video clips to compete against the famous Youtube, which was purchased by Google this year. Even if the negotiations are still in progress, the officials want to make a website that will become the main source on the internet for their shows and movies.

The purpose of this is the rising profit of online advertisement. Another goal is the development of a web video player that will be used to view video clips. The business looks extremely profitable, if the four companies relate to the earnings of Youtube, which, in less than two years evolved very fast, being the most known site for video clips, with a daily access rate of over 100 million video clips.

Although many of the clips published on Youtube are made by amateurs, the most watched are pirated tv shows, so a lot of media companies threatened the website with lawsuits.

Walt Disney, which owns the ABC television network, didn’t attend to the negotiations, because it wants to rely on the power of it’s own brands.

Google started testing a radio advertising service, which represents the most important attempt of the gigantic search engine to extend outside the web.

The test will offer publicity space to over 700 radio stations from over 200 cities in United States. Google hopes that in the end it will associate with over 5000 stations.

At least for now, Google will be far behind the well known services such as Software Media Exchange, which states that has associated itself with over 1500 radio stations with a combined audience of nine million listeners.

The announce didn’t specify how many companies are involved in the initial faze of the test.

Google thinks it can do for radio the same thing it has done for the internet, automating the process of selling and distribution of advertisements to an audience that is interested by the content of the advertisements. Just the same as on the web, Google intends to tax for the service.

The company has stated their intention to extend in this area in January, by acquiring dMarc Broadcasting, for 102 million dollars. Google seems determined to pump much more resources in the radio service, company’s management staff saying that they intend to hire approximately 1000 persons for this.

Microsoft will launch on Tuesday six security patches, at least two of these being considered critical. On the list, however is not specified a patch for a security problem recently discovered in Word, as Office will not get any support this time.

With the exception of one patch, all fixes take care of different problems of Windows, one of these being critical. The sixth patch is a critical fix for Microsoft Visual Studio.

Although Microsoft never reveals the nature of the patches to protect his users, sometimes the reported vulnerabilities can give clues about the company’s changes. For instance, the Visual Studio deficiency could be linked to an exploit initially discovered at the beginning of November.

The vulnerability exposed users to the risk of arbitrarily code being executed from distance, according to experts.

It will not be fixed however a zero-day exploit of a Word deficiency. Microsoft announced that is working to repair the new vulnerability, but it seems that the new exploit was discovered too late to launch a patch for it.

As an addition to the security patches, Microsoft also intends to launch an updated version of Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Besides the security patches, Microsoft will also launch a series of patches that are not related to security. Four high priority updates will be launched through Windows Update, and another 10 will be launched through Windows Update, has announced Microsoft.

A security deficiency still left unfixed from different Word versions is exploited in computer attacks, has informed us Microsoft.

The attacks are “limited”, according to the company, which announced that is working out a patch to fix the vulnerability.

The vulnerability is similar with previous zero-day deficiencies that affected Office applications in the last few months. An attacker could change a Word file in such a way that could take control over a vulnerable system when the document is open.

An attacker could exploit the deficiency by hosting a web site with a malicious file or sending an e-mail with the file as attachment. In all of this cases, the victim must open the file to compromise his system.

Security experts say that low scale attacks are the most dangerous. Worms, viruses and trojans with large spreading don’t usually raise big problems, as they can be blocked. For companies however, trojans “with target” have developed into a nightmare scenario, as these are very hard to trace.

The most recently Office vulnerabilities affect Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Word 2004 for Mac, Word 2004 v. X for Mac and Works 2004, 2005 and 2006, announced Microsoft. The company advised the users not to open Word files that come from unreliable sources.

With a major release, Microsoft’s new operating system is promising a lot. But with what cost?

Microsoft has labeled computers in Vista Capable and Vista Premium Ready. According to the official website, “Vista capable” will be able to run the os, but advanced features such as the new Windows Aero user experience may require advanced hardware. Here are the requirements:

• A modern processor (at least 800MHz).
• 512 MB of system memory.
• A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.

Premium Ready PCs will deliver a better Vista experience, running all included features:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor.
• 1 GB of system memory.
• Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum), Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel.
• 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
• DVD-ROM Drive.
• Audio output capability.
• Internet access capability.

Microsoft has done a lot of changes in the way the hardware is used, adopting the system to the new available hardware. Thus, Vista is no longer using the CPU to display bitmaps on the screen, but is now taking advantage of the Gpu to render vectors. That is because all computers nowadays come with a dedicated graphics card.

Windows XP was designed in a time when memory was expensive and processors relatively slow, but with the development of multi-core processors, Vista’s target is to perform better on these cpus. Right now, very little of Windows Xp is threaded.

Although Vista takes advantage of all the wonderful technology out there, it seems we are back to the same situation we were when Windows XP was launched: current systems run it, but future ones will run it well.

My advice is this: if your computer is more than one year old, stick to Xp until you are ready to buy new hardware. This way, you’ll enjoy your new operating system.