By Demetrius Anderson

Just right for Halloween is this tale of robots and zombies. Over the past few semesters Eastern has experienced a rise in software robots or BOTNET software. BOTNETt (also known as a zombie army) is a number of Internet computers that, although their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward transmissions to other computers on the Internet. These computers are remotely controlled and they are used to send out worms, Trojans, and/ or backdoors throughout the net. According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, through the first six months of 2006, there were 4,696,903 active BOTNET computers.

Of course there are many ways to prevent this from happening to your PC and the safest form of prevention is always internet absence. If you don’t what your PC to become a Zombie we recommend that you avoid going to websites you don’t trust, don’t install software when you’re unsure of what it is, and be cautious of programs like Limewire and many other file sharing programs that install a huge amounts of spyware. If a browser or instant messenger pop up asks you to install software it’s probably not a good idea to install it! We recommend that you download and install Ad-aware and other free anti-spyware programs offered on our support site. Make sure to keep these programs updated and run them weekly!

For more support visit:
http://support.resnet.eku.edu/
http://www.resnet.eku.edu/

By: Scott Roberts

As “Frag Your Brains Out 15” is on our door step we should take the time to reflect and think of how one should act at a LAN Party.
• Be conscious of space limitations.
• Don't bring alcoholic beverages unless the host specifies that they're allowed.
• Be kind to players who are new to a given game or to LAN fests in general.
• Be very careful around open beverages.
• Make sure your PC is virus-free before connecting to the LAN, and have an antivirus program running and up to date.
• Do not cheat.
• Be a good sport.
• Be prepared to listen to and obey those in charge.
So whether you’re going to attend FYBO15 or are a LAN Party fanatic keep these in mind and remember the most important rule. HAVE FUN!!!

by. Chelsea Rilley

Most people would say that a laptop bag needs to have a few certain qualities. The laptop bag should be lighter than the laptop itself; the shoulder strap should be comfortable; and with all of the gadgets that are out now, it should in turn have many compartments. Color and material are a personal choice of course, along with the style of the bag. Most people will settle on just a basic black nylon laptop bag for protection and easy transportation, although some laptop bags are on the market to completely defeat the basic needs of the laptop bag. Here are the top ten most outrageous bags on the market with no other purpose but to be on this list:

10.) The Crazy Metallic bag- This bag resembles the crazy pants that MC Hammer wore in the 80’s. This glossy material has somehow travelled through the test of time and is now being compiled into laptop bags. This 16 inch bag sells for about $46.00 at MangoTangoLLC.com.

9.) The High Voltage Laptop bag- This bag, sounding like you may get electrocuted at any given moment however does not have any special powers like that. This bag, is army-green with yellow "high-voltage" signs all over it. Inside, there are four medium pockets and six small pockets. It is made of durable canvas and has a nylon interior. On the back of the bag is a duct-tape ID tag to write your name and number. This bag is sold for about $65.00.

8.) The Warm your fingers bag- This laptop bag is complete with a “muff pack” for cold hands in the winter. This bag is ideal for college students who walk across to campus in the winter. Oh yeah, and it houses a laptop too! This mitten is going for about $200.00 and is made in the colors blue, dark green, and grey.

7.) The Laptop Luxury Bag- This bag is for the Princess of the laptop world. This bag is made of Italian leather with satin lining and is complete with a matching clutch. Each of these bags run at about $700.00.

6.) The Wooden bag- Yes along with wooden shoes and earrings now there is now a wooden laptop bag. This bag is crafted from Japanese cedar, canvas, and leather. There is nothing else amazing about this laptop bag other than the price. This bag is selling for $300.00 from Monacca.

5.) The International Space Station Parachute laptop bag- This bag while being waterproof, and containing a dual quick-released strap, also is made out of parachute material for reliability. The many closed compartments make it easy for any daredevil to travel anywhere with their laptop. This bag is selling for $225.00 at SpaceToys.com

4.) The Skin bag- This gruesome, watertight laptop bag is shock absorbent and contains many pockets for little knick-knacks. O yeah and lastly it is made up of synthetic human skin which stretches for stability. This skin bag’s price is starting at $655.00.

3.) The Mac truck laptop bag- This durable laptop bag is made entirely of aluminum alloy, with two steel latch bars, designed to house a MacBook or PowerBook. This bag is so tough that the company has said a truck can be drove over the bag and it still be completely fine. This bag does weight about 3.5 pounds too! Its going for $199.00-$299.00 depending on what size you get.

2.) The Wool-Worthy laptop bag- This cozy laptop bag is made of 100% thick wool. It is shock absorbing and biodegradable, just in case you decide to throw it out of a car window. This itchy bag is starting at the price of $450.00 in many colors.

1.) A picnic friendly laptop bag- This bag consists of bamboo chopsticks. The liner is hemp cloth with several pockets. The liner comes in tan or dark green. The bag is sold at a surprisingly low cost of $54.00.

By: Scott Roberts

With Halloween coming up its time to start thinking about the candy to feed the ghouls that will soon be haunting your home. If those ghouls just so happen to be of the tech loving persuasion then here are some treats that may appease them.

• Bawls Mints – Highly Caffeinated Mints for energy (http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/candy/6b77/)
• Foosh Energy Mints – Another Highly Caffeinated Mint for energy (http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/candy/6e27/)
• Buzz Bites Chocolate Chews – A chocolate chew packed with caffeine for energy (http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/candy/6e1c/)
• Penguin Mints – Highly Caffeinated Mint for energy that has a penguin on the tin (http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/candy/287d/)
• Warp Mints – Not Highly Caffeinated, but full of Green Tea goodness for energy (http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/candy/5cd0/)
For more ideas on energy treats see Think Geeks page at (http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/candy/).

by Tony Morrow

The month of October is here and with that comes the falling of leaves and the carving of pumpkins. There is another fruit that will be getting attention this month, Apple. Being released this month is Apple’s next OS installment, Mac OS X 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard, and with it comes a list of new features sure to improve your computing experience.

First up is the Desktop. Leopard has reworked the look and feel of the desktop to give it a new, glossy feel that many applications, as well as Windows Vista, are using. The Menu Bar at the top of the screen is now semi-transparent much like what Aero does in Vista. The Dock at the bottom of the screen has been given a whole new makeover (the first since 10.2) and the icons now look as if they are setting on a shiny table. One of the new features added to Leopard’s desktop is the addition of Stacks. Stacks allow you to easily manage commonly used items on your system. Say for instance you download a lot of files from the Internet. Safari automatically creates a stack to show all of your downloaded files. The user can also create custom stacks for things, such as commonly used applications.

Leopard’s Finder has also received a refresh. The most noticeable feature is the new iTunes like interface. The sidebar now groups your items into categories based on device or location. The iTunes feature, CoverFlow, has also been added to give you a new way to browsing your computer. Anybody who is familiar with iTunes should have little difficulty navigating the Finder.

Many other programs have also been updated. Mail, Apple’s email client, has new themes to help give your emails elegance. Apple’s media center, Front Row, has received a complete redesign and now looks similar to the interface from the AppleTV. iChat has added many effects that are part of Photo Booth. During a video chat, you now have green screen capability. This means you can change the scene behind you and appear as if you were on a beach, under water, etc. In all, Leopard has roughly 300 innovations both under the hood, and easily noticeable.

One of the new features added to Leopard is Time Machine. Gone are the days of losing data by accidentally deleting files or hard drives crashing. Time Machine will automatically backup you computer to a specified hard drive on a regular basis or to a networked hard drive attached to an AirPort Extreme base station. Time Machine’s browser allows you to see what your desktop looked liked on a specific day. Simply find the file you lost and drag it back to your desktop.

Leopard has many new and innovative additions, but all great things come at a cost. Current developer builds of Leopard appear to be more resource intensive then previous versions of OS X. Older Macs, such as PowerBooks, iBooks, and G4 desktops, may have a hard time with many of the new visual effects offered. If you are looking at purchasing a new Mac system, waiting until Leopard’s release date isn’t a bad idea.

All new Macs that ship after Leopard’s release date will have the OS either installed on the hard drive or bundled as an upgrade DVD. Owners who already own a Mac will be able to purchase Leopard from an Apple Retail Store, Apple’s Online Store, or any Apple Authorized Reseller. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has already announced the price of OS X 10.5 as $129 and, unlike Windows Vista, there will be only one edition of Leopard. Previously students have had the benefit of an educational discount, reducing the price to $69. However, we will have to wait a little longer to find out if this is true for Leopard. So get your Macs ready and happy computing.

Apple – Mac OS X Leopard: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/
Leopard Performance Observations: http://andrewescobar.com/archive/2007/0 ... n-leopard/

By Justin Adams

The fifteenth Frag Your Brains Out festivities are just around the corner and more than likely a good number of the attendees-to-be are keeping their eye on a new piece of hardware slated to be released by SteelSeries later this year. SteelSeries was, until recently, a company that specialized in performance mouse pads designed for gamers. But while they were developing mouse surfaces, they were watching the evolution of "gaming" mice. After testing all the available hardware on the market, receiving constant feedback from some of the top gamers from Team 3D, compLexity, mousesports, SK Gaming, Team NoA and a community of 5000+ enthusiasts and 15 months of research and development SteelSeries is ready to put their chips on the table in the form of their new Ikari series of gaming mice.

SteelSeries' approach was to make a no-frills, cut-the-crap reliable piece of hardware that would meet all the expectations of professional gamers. In this spirit they've done away with a weight system and fancy glow lights. They also designed the chassis to accommodate any style of mouse use and put on a layer of anti-sweat, slip-resistant material. There's 5 buttons with durable, high quality contacts and the largest glide surface of any mouse SteelSeries has produced (over 300% more over their last model). One of the more unique features the Ikari will sport is the highly customizable DPI (dots per inch) which roughly translates into precision. Most mice on the market, even the newer performance mice, allow you to adjust this value but only in multiples of 400. The Ikari will have a switch which allows you to choose ANY two DPI values and toggle between them on the fly.

A very impressive feature is the fact that despite all the functionality the Ikari sports, it does so without the need for any special drivers. It was designed to be completely plug-and-play to comply with gamers that have to play on tournament hardware. Macros can even be programmed at home and the mouse will remember them without drivers. Also, the surface sensing hardware has a sampling rate of 40,000 samples per second and uses their new XY2 chipset which needs only 4 inputs compared to hundreds with other mice, greatly increasing the number of calculations performed per second, and senses changes in the X and Y axes independently ensuring totally free flowing movement. SteelSeries even went an extra step to provide the most precise and accurate mouse. They found that among most major optical and laser mice there's software that will try and remove tiny fluctuations in mouse movement to try and help the user draw a straight line. This software prediction greatly reduces precision and accuracy so it has been made optional and even customizable on the Ikari. SteelSeries suggests you simply disable prediction so the mouse always performs exactly as you move it.

At first glance, the Ikari doesn't seem to be anything spectacular. There's plenty of flashier gaming mice with more buttons and buckets of features. But the Ikari is a sleeper. It's all under the hood. All the features you need, none that you don't and all the ones you've been begging for for years. All that remains is to see if, once released, the Ikari can live up to the hype and SteelSeries' own boasting. I'd say it's a safe bet that it will.

I suppose I'm showing my age but when i was young (in the late 70s and early 80s) we had these devices called a cassette tape. Know what was terrific about a blank one...recording music from LPs, other cassettes, 8-tracks or the radio. We played those until either the tape was "eaten" in the tape player or the tape wore out. Did those ever stop people from buying music from music companies? Sure they did...did people pirate "legal" copies with them? Sure they did. Did people still buy music legally and go to concerts? Yes, of course.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, this was a day before anti-piracy lawyers worked for each music corporation in droves and before such organizations as the RIAA. It was before someone would show up at your front door with a multi-thousand dollar fine and jail time for you to serve in their hands. It was a day before music companies complained about lagging sales of CDs and concert attendance.

Today we have CDs, all types of radio options (Internet, satellite, AM/FM), iPods, the Internet, and concerts, for example. For some odd reason when someone swipes music today you hear complaints about lagging sales and millionaire musicians who can't get anyone to attend their concerts....Music companies are forming bread lines because of the lost revenues but they can afford to throw money hand over fist into lawyer and court fees to stop you from getting a CDs worth of music ($18 CD that costs them, say, $9 to make and is costing them $3,000+ in fees to get it back from you). Does it make sense? What's new now that wasn't new back then? Do their tactics really stop anyone?

No. Greed. And no.

Some people say the quality today is different but I say hogwash because in "my day" the quality of our cassettes was fine because LPs and 8-tracks weren't CD quality either so our tapes sounded fine.

Some people say that it's because the Internet makes sharing so much easier. That may be "true" but it's also an opportunity to re-market--getting music to the people (iTunes) creatively and stopping the greed. Or maybe we should get music companies a full-time accountant who can do the math.

The latest news from Capital Records, et. al. v. Jammie Thomas, a P2P lawsuit happening at this moment--according to a Sony BMG anti-piracy lawyer we're now suppose to buy each copy of a song we possess. If you want a song from a CD you own legally on your iPod you should buy the song twice. Also want it on your PC--three times. And you can forget making a backup of the CD--stealing! So, once it gets ware and scratches and won't work anymore...you're out of luck. Buy it all again. Remember...they're all starving now. $15 billion+ buys nothing these days!!

Am I advocating stealing? NO WAY! Am I saying copyright violations are right? NO! I don't think people should "steal" music or "steal" copyright. All I am saying is what is so different today than what's always happened? How is all this madness cost effective? And, does the silliness of buying 5 copies of a legal CD make sense to the consumer and what are the repercussions of that? Does it make people want to "share" more or less? I think the music industry would better spend their money ($15+ BILLION in revenues between the top 4) researching what drives all this and how to fix it in a way the consumer will agree with, instead of making lawyers and the RIAA rich/er.

RIAA http://www.riaa.com/
THE BIG 4:
EMI Group http://www.shareholder.com/visitors/dyn ... anyid=EMIL
Sony BMG http://www.sonymusic.com/about/corpcomm.html
Universal Music http://www.vivendi.com/corp/en/subsidia ... _music.php
Warner Music Group http://investors.wmg.com/phoenix.zhtml? ... ortsannual

Boycott RIAA http://www.boycott-riaa.com/
RIAA Radar http://www.riaaradar.com/
How to Not Get Sued for File Sharing http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/howto-notgetsued.php
Recording Industry vs The People http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/
Internet "Trial of the Century" Produces "Playlist of the Century" http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/riaa_trial/index.html

WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) a broadband wireless network based on the IEEE 802.16 standard is the current buzz promising wireless access that has a range up to 31 miles and doesn't have the expense of wires and distance limitations of DSL.

There are two types of WiMAX:

1. Fixed WiMAX, which is primarily the same as DSL or cable except that there's a WiMAX modem to connect to your PC. Sometimes refereed to as 802.16d, it promises to bring a simpler, quicker, and more cost-effective Internet into homes--many that still can't get affordable cable or DSL connections.

2. Mobile WiMAX, sometimes referred to as 802.16e or WiMAX "e," is the latest WiMAX standard. This version allows for roaming ("handoff") between WiMAX base stations opening up a true mobile Internet experience for users.

Who can we expect to see WiMAX from? These companies include: Spring (Xohm); Intel (WiMAX/Wi-Fi chips); Motorola; Samsung; Alcatel-Lucent; and Clearwire.

So, will WiMAX be a dominant product in 2008? Depends. If these companies can deploy on time...if users are given a consistent and satisfying 2-4Mbps experience...probably!

WiMAX Forum www.wimaxforum.org/
WiMAX Spectrum Owners Alliance www.wisoa.net/site/
802.16 Working Group ieee802.org/16/

Imagine a TV that is only 3mm thin! Imagine that it has a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a low 45W power consumption. Imagine too that it has a resolution of 960x540px (input resolution up to 1080p). Is it science fiction?

No! It's the first OLED TV ever developed--Sony's XEL-1. What is OLED? A typical TV is made with semiconductors but the OLED (organic LED) is made from carbon-based molecules.

The drawbacks? First is the size--11 inches. Second, the cost at $1,700. But hey, it is the FIST OLED TV!!

Product Page (Japanese): http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/oel/index.html

by Chris Adams

When it comes to iPods you have many choices available to you from Apple. The newest of which, will be the iTouch. Now you may or may not already own an iPod. Regardless, you should check out this in-depth review from iLounge.

The review covers many topics like Hardware, New Technologies, Battery Life, Capacity, Transfer Rates, Audio/Video Performance, Settings, and ultimately, price. The review also compares them to one another so you will see how it stacks up to the many other editions of the iPod that have been released in the past.

Before you buy that first iPod, upgrade to a new one, or if you just don’t know what you want read the review and see if it’s really the right one for you and if it’s worth the money you’ll have to lay down to get it.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/ipod/r ... gb-16gb/P0