Tech News for 05 Nov / Malware Removal Guide

Scads of interesting tech news on Monday, 05 November 2007, with bullets below on four of the top ones for me, plus Luke W decided today to write a pc malware removal guide.

Today's tech news of particular interest:

1. Google made the anticipated announcement about its entry into telecommunications. The OpenHandsetAlliance was announced, with 34 companies listed on the alliance members page as of today. There are a ton of online articles on the topic -- just go to Google Sci/Tech News and read a couple article to get all the available details. My main disappointments about the Gphone are that I'll likely have to wait until at least mid-2008 to get a Gphone, and my current cell service provider, Verizon, isn't one of the alliance mobile operators (yet...).
   
2. Word of Ignite Chicago was spread via a TECHcocktail email. Ignite Chicago is a small conference built around 5 minute presentations that include 20 slides each (allowing for 15 seconds / slide). The presentations must be about *how* to do something cool. For example, they cannot be about how great your startup is, but rather about something novel that you learned while creating your startup.
3. Yahoo! Kickstart and FireEagle were announced. Kickstart is a "professional social network aimed at college students, alumni, and recruiters...to help college students and recent graduates build a professional network." FireEagle is a platform that "geocodes [your] data and makes it machine-readable so other applications can plug into it, publish to it, or read from it...data dissemination also can be automated with a GPS-enabled phone..."
4. Phoenix Technologies announced their new HyperSpace technology that will let you instantly use common applications on your computer such as email, web browsers or media players without waiting (one to five minutes) for Windows to start up.

All four of these announcement can and probably will turn into pretty cool things. A couple of them could even be world-changing. We live in exciting times for technology enthusiasts!

On a different topic, Luke W was telling me earlier today that he was thinking about writing up a pc malware removal guide. Many of his in-home consumer computer service jobs for myDigitechnician are at least partially related to dealing with malware. As a result he's become pretty knowledgeable on the topic. At BarCampMilwaukee last month, he led a session about malware and really enjoyed the discussion that happened during the session. He's probably going to lead another session on some aspect of malware at BarCampMadison in early 2008.

Writing up the malware removal guide will be a good way for him to organize his removal tools for malware and his thoughts about viruses, spyware, trojans, etc. So far today he's written about 3000 words on the topic.

We discussed what animal would be on the cover of his book if it was published by O'Reilly. Our consensus was that the animal would be a mongoose because of how they fight (and defeat) cobras.

In addition to possibly having the completed guide available online, we'll likely end up having copies of it printed and bound for those myDigitechnician clients who would like to have a copy. When he finishes version 1.0, I'll put a note about that on this blog, and you can contact Luke or me if you'd like to get it emailed to you. Or if Luke decides that it has so many of his personally developed anti-malware techniques that he doesn't want to make it freely available, you'll most certainly be welcome to come to NEW NET meetings in Appleton or to BarCampMadison and discuss the topic with him!

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