One of the most common ways to be infested with malware is to visit a site designed to exploit some poorly written code on your computer and trigger a download of the stuff to your pc.

How do they get you to their site? It appears luring you with music lyrics and screensavers are the best way. McAfee released a study showing that music lyric sites are very risky to visit, along with more obvious ones like free screensavers, work from home plans, or free music.

There’s no easy solution to avoid these sites; just make sure you’re patched with the latest Microsoft and Adobe updates. We’re also using OpenDNS servers for our clients which we can program to block access to known bad sites.

Cablevision announced today a new speed tier for their cable modem service – 101 mbps down and 15 mbps up. To be launched on May 11^th to residential customers, this represents the fastest speed available on any major carrier – and at a reasonable $99/month.

Of course, such speeds are pretty unnecessary unless you’re linking sites via VPN or working with large, large files. Even high definition videoconferencing tops out at around 2 mbps, beneath the 30 mbps down, 5 up offering Cablevision has today.

My Optimum business rep has no announcement yet on a business offering, but I’m hoping it will land at about $120-$130 month.

Our business clients can sleep well tonight: Dell has announced that they will be offering XP Professional on systems past June 30. They’re using a “feature” in the Windows Vista license which allows for the licensee to downgrade their OS to XP. For some models, this is a no-cost option; for their lower-end systems (Vostro, etc) there will be a nominal charge.

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When signing up for a free email account, you’ve probably encountered a CAPTCHA verification: it’s a graphic with characters partially obscured by random lines. The idea is that only humans can make out the text behind all the scribbles.

Unfortunately, malware has been spotted in the wild which has a fairly good success rate at reading these symbols, paving the way for spammers to generate thousands of accounts a day. From these accounts, they can blast out many messages before getting caught. And antispam services which depend upon identifying high-risk sources of spam are powerless against messages that come from reputable sources like Hotmail.

The battle might be waged on several fronts – with CAPTCHA using different approaches for validation, and webmail services starting to filter outgoing mail. Perhaps they will detect and shut down repeated attempts at account generation from the same computer.

The net of this for the average user is that they can expect their mailboxes to continue to be filled with spam for some time.

Check this blog entry for more information.

In a cruel announcement, Microsoft announces that XP will be available for manufacturers for the next two years – but for Home only, not Professional. The thinking is that Vista won’t be suitable for all the ultraportable, low cost PCs that are flooding the channels.

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