Every week, I record the technology news for 820 AM WWBA here in the Tampa Bay area. My news is played here in the Tampa Bay radio market as well as in several other metro areas throughout the state of Florida. Rather than post audio recordings, I thought I would simply post my transcript.

You can tune into the show every Saturday at 1PM EST on the SOS Computer Talk Show, on 820AM WWBA.

Here is my news for this week:

About two weeks ago, spammers were dealt a huge blow on the Internet when their hosting company, McColo Corp, was shut down. This company, based in California, was believed to be responsible for up to 75% of all spam on the Internet. When the company was shut down on November 11th, worldwide spam rates dropped by about 80%. Unfortunately, the spammers that used McColo as their hosting company are moving to Plan B and, as of last weekend, we are beginning to see spam rates increase yet again. Spam rates have climbed about 37% of the amount of the original decrease. The only problem is that these spammers are now moving to offshore hosting companies where the laws are a lot more relaxed. This means it will be harder to shut down the sources of spam in the future. But, it was a temporary blow that will hopefully increase some costs to spammers and put some out of business. And alas, the battle against spam on the Internet rages on.

Microsoft has a service called Live Mesh. It is a file synchronization service and it is free. It will allow you to keep a group of files of your choice in sync between multiple computers. If you change a file on one computer, it will automatically reflect those changes on your other computers. Its pretty cool and it works fairly well. But, up until recently it was a Windows-only option. Of course, that makes sense seeing as Windows is a Microsoft product. However, they just announced that Live Mesh is available now for the Mac. Your data storage is limited to 5 GB. You can access your data from any of your Mesh-enabled computers or via the Mesh website. Expect Mesh to be a fairly visible component to the upcoming Windows 7. If you want to check out Microsoft Live Mesh, go to Mesh.com.

Microsoft has warned about an increase in security exploits of a software bug in Windows which was identified by Symantec. The bug was reported last month and a software fix for it was released last month as well. However, not everybody keeps their Windows operating system up to date as they should, which has led Microsoft to issue this warning. Interestingly, the software worm which exploits this bug exempts computers located in the nation of Ukraine. Sometimes worm programmers will exempt their own country to keep from getting local reaction, which leads to speculation that the creator of this worm is from Ukraine. Either way, the way to make sure your computer isn’t subject to this is to run Windows Update and make sure you install the latest security patches.

Youtube has officially switched to the widescreen video format, a move which gives the most popular online video site a distinctly different look. Standard size videos will still play widescreen, but will have black borders on either side. But, video creators can now upload widescreen videos and they will play in full definition. This move puts Youtube into compliance with what a lot of other video sites were already doing.
However, speculation is that Youtube is also positioning itself to work with some od the major movie studios in order to hopefully bring movies to Youtube. They already have deals with CBS and MGM. It is probably only a matter of time before we will be able to watch newly released Hollywood movies on Youtube.

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