SOFTWARE
YouSendIt
by Renad Hakim
ALTHOUGH webmail service providers are offering you more and more mail storage space these days, the same cannot be said about the allowed maximum length of attachment files. Whereas, storage space has reached from 1MB, 2MB to as much as 1 GB now, most websites don’t allow you to add attachments more than 10 MB per email. So what if you wanted to send a video of your baby walking for the first time to your family living abroad, or just need to send a massive presentation file to your boss?
Clueless? Don’t be! Help is just a click away. Just open your Internet browser, type in www.yousendit.com in your URL bar and press Enter for an instant solution. YouSendIt.com was founded in early 2003 in Silicon Valley, and has ever since provided its users with the best possible service. Prior to its creation, the YouSendIt team have leveraged countless years of software development, hardware design, and raw creativity to solve real-world needs. As their mission statement notes, they are always committed to providing solutions to the toughest problems through innovation, solid engineering, and the highest quality of service.
The YouSendIt team was initially formed to tackle a common problem: secure transmission of large documents online without the use of clumsy client software, mail servers with limited storage space, and sharing passwords. By eliminating the size constraints and security risks of sending files by email, YouSendIt.com has turned the most common form of communication over the Net into the best method of secure document transmission. And what’s more, you can get all of its services without spending a penny of your hard earned money!
Now, let’s take a look at the key benefits of using YouSendIt.com. For using YouSendIt, you don’t have to have an account with them or bother about files to maintain; nor do you have to go through any kind of painstaking registration process of any sort or maintain full mailboxes. There are just 3 simple easy to use steps that you have to go through to send large files of up to 1000MB (1GB) in size. First of all, you need to choose who you want to send a file to.
It can be anyone with an email address. You can also specify multiple email addresses separated by commas. Next, you need to select a file to send. You can send photos, audio, documents or anything else. Your file will be stored by YouSendIt.com without ever filling up your recipient’s mailbox. Finally, click on the Send button. YouSendIt will automatically email your recipient a link to your file stored on their server. Your file will be deleted after seven days.
File transfer through YouSendIt is extremely safe. Your data goes to who you want it to and nobody else—no risk of having old data end up in the wrong hands. If you are not satisfied with even that, to make sure that your data transfer is 100% safe, you can use YouSendIt’s data security encrypted HTTPS session (SSL/TLS). YouSendIt is also surely one of the fastest data transfer systems available. It has been designed to be lightning fast, and uses typical Firewall permissions to ensure that feeling of safety for the millions of people who use it.
If you try YouSendIt.com, you’ll find yourself effortlessly working with its easy to use interface. If you like sending files through YouSendIt, it has 2 other services you can try out, namely: YouSendIt FileLink and YouSendIt Enterprise Server. Using the YouSendIt Enterprise Server, you can make corporate document transmission secure and simple. But for using this industrial strength version of the YouSendIt service to your business you need to register as paid user.
ARENA
Rainbow Six 3 Raven Shield
by Moinuddin Sifty
TOM Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, the third installment in the series, is a tactical squad-based tactical shooter set in the year 2005. The Rainbow Six series revolves around the exploits of team Rainbow, a multi-national group of counter-terror experts under the command of the United Nations. In many countries, local police forces aren't trained or prepared to defuse situations caused by well-armed and prepared terrorists. Team Rainbow's mission is to go in after all the negotiations have failed and swiftly put an end to any situation. In Raven Shield Team Rainbow sees action in a number of exotic locations ranging from Norway to the Caribbean to South America. The missions' locals vary from snow covered mountain villages to grimy meat packing plants to penthouses in downtown Buenos Aires. Some missions demand a straightforward terrorist elimination objective, while others have trickier hostage rescue scenarios.
Missions start out in a planning stage where you assign members of the team (you select up to 3 sub-teams to control - 3 persons for each team), equip them, and devise a strategy. In the planning phase you'll see a top-down view of the map and you determine which team goes where and you give tactical orders and so forth. Planning the missions is quite simple with a lot of commands and orders accessible via mouse selections. During the action phase you can control any squad and any member you want (you can give them simple orders), though just one at a time, and the AI takes care of the rest. Additionally, the game does come with pre-planned missions, where your team/equipment and tactical data is already done for you. You just have to either watch in observer mode or assume the role of 1 operative in first person perspective while issuing your orders. Of course, if you want to take the time to plan out the mission yourself, you can completely customize your mission from scratch.
The single player portion of the game contains 15 missions, ranging from an oil refinery to a private airport to a mansion in the tropics. The missions are all unique and contain a variety of mission themes, such as the familiar but fun hostage rescue, prevent terrorists from detonating a bomb, releasing nerve gas, or destroying important data.
There's also a custom mission mode, which allows you to play the campaign missions you've successfully completed. Maybe I shouldn't forget to mention (for those of you who never played any Rainbow Six game) that Raven Shield's gameplay is focused on stealth and one-shot-kill realism, so you will quickly find that the Quake-style FPS play won't work well in this game. Yeah, it's not a very fast paced game and Raven Shield will sure make you think! If you've played the previous Rainbow titles, you've probably realized already that you'll be right at home with this one.
There are a total of 57 guns (including MTAR-21 9mm, Mac-11/9 9mm, Micro-Uzi 9mm, SR-2 9mm, USAS-12 12g, TAR-21 5.56mm, Type 95 5.56mm, VSS Vintorez 9x39mm, 23E 5.56mm) in the game and each of the weapons has five ratings, including amount of damage, range and accuracy. Of course, all the weapons have their advantages and disadvantages but you have access to a good number of them from the outset. You can also customize weapons using four different weapon attachments: sound suppressor, thermal sniper scope attachment, high capacity magazine, and mini-scope. For game balancing reasons, each weapon can only have one attachment at a time.
The multiplayer portion is by far the best of the game. You have the ability to do all the standard DM/TDM, or you can play cooperatively against AI controlled terrorists. Both modes are great fun.
Overall, Raven Shield is a fantastic tactical shooter. If you are a fan of the Tom Clancy series, this is a must-have for your collection.
NEWS
Red Hat exec takes over Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative, a group seeking to become more influential in matters concerning the cooperative-programming philosophy, has seen its second change of leadership in less than a month. Michael Tiemann, vice president of open-source affairs at Linux seller Red Hat and an OSI board member, has taken over from Russell Nelson as president pro tem, Red Hat and Nelson confirmed on Friday. News of the change was reported Wednesday on ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog. The Open Source Initiative grants official open-source status to various software licenses and now is working to reduce the number of such licenses. Nelson was named OSI president Feb. 1, taking over from co-founder Eric Raymond. Tiemann took over Feb. 23 and will continue in his role at Red Hat. “We thought that Michael would be a better president,” Nelson said of the change, declining to share further details. Nelson will remain a board member and active in the group, he said. He and Tiemann will be getting more company on the board, however: OSI plans to expand the board from five members to nine, Nelson said. “If we’re going to take on more work, we need more people,” he said. OSI also wants better international representation from areas such as Brazil that are active in open-source software. Among the projects OSI hopes to tackle are reducing the proliferation of open-source licenses—not an easy task—and creating a matrix that will enable people to compare details of all open-source licenses, Nelson said.
Netscape launches browser beta
Netscape has released a public test version of a Web browser that includes antifraud technology, with hopes of challenging Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser dominance. The company, a division of media giant Time Warner’s America Online subsidiary, said Thursday that the browser, dubbed Netscape 8, will better protect people from growing online fraud threats such as phishing. Over the last several months, the browser has been available only to a small number of individuals involved in a limited beta test. Now anyone can download the software via the company’s Web site. The beta was expected to arrive in mid-February, but the release date slipped so that the company could fix some bugs in the software, according to Netscape. The product will remain in test mode for at least several more weeks. No date has been set for the browser’s official launch, a company representative said. Netscape once controlled approximately 80 percent of the Web browser market. But Microsoft’s Internet Explorer wrested the market away and currently owns nearly 90 percent of the sector, according to most surveys. However, IE’s growing specter of security vulnerabilities has encouraged Netscape and other companies, most notably Netscape’s open-source spinoff Mozilla, to make security their main selling point. Online fraud, in particular phishing, has been growing rapidly over the last several years. Phishing attacks typically consist of e-mail that appears to come from trusted companies, such as banks or e-commerce vendors, which attempt to lure people to bogus Web sites where they’re asked to divulge sensitive personal information. Most often this information is used by criminals to commit identity fraud. Among the weapons the browser features in its effort to guard against online criminals are frequently updated blacklists of Web sites that are suspected of distributing spyware or hosting phishing schemes. Those lists are provided to Netscape by outside security researchers. The browser promises to redirect customers to a warning page when they access a banned site, and also disables various technologies with questionable security implications, including ActiveX, scripting and cookies, if a user chooses to continue on to a blacklisted Web address. The lists had not been offered in earlier test versions of the browser. Another feature of the browser, unrelated to security concerns, allows individuals to add RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, feeds to Netscape 8 with a single mouse click, and simplifies the process of designating a set of tabs as their home page. The browser was built through a partnership with Canadian development company Mercurial Communications, as Netscape has cut its own programming staff considerably.
eBay scrambles to fix phishing bug
eBay is fighting to repair a software glitch that opens the door to phishing attacks using one of its own legitimate URLs. The online auction giant is working on a fix for the problem, and it hopes to distribute that fix among its Web pages in the next several days, a company representative said on Friday. The problem, described by the company as a “software bug,” could be exploited by criminals to create an actual eBay link that redirects customers to a malicious site, the representative said. eBay is one of the most popular targets of phishing schemes, which typically use e-mail messages that look like they come from a trusted service provider to dupe people into visiting a malicious Web site. The fraudulent site appears to be legitimate, but has been set up to steal the victim’s personal information, such as a credit card number, which could then be used to commit identity fraud. The company, based in San Jose, Calif., has repeatedly warned its customers not to respond to such e-mails, and has even adopted a messaging system to eliminate the need for most e-mail correspondence with its registered members. This latest phishing issue for eBay differs in that it uses a legitimate URL to hook victims and send them to a malicious site. The flaw may have already allowed individuals to use one of eBay’s URLs to trick unsuspecting parties into visiting malicious sites, the company representative said. It is becoming significantly harder to discern phishing attempts from legitimate e-mail and Web pages, eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said in previous interviews with CNET News.com. He said that the company is working hard to put down fraudulent e-mail campaigns and sites before consumers can be tricked into giving over their data. “We’ve done a lot in the eBay community to try and educate people how to identify a phishing e-mail or site, but it’s becoming increasingly harder to do so just by eyeballing something,” Durzy said. “Because education only goes so far, we’re also working on technology solutions that could help protect against these kind of attacks.” The number of phishing threats aimed at the company have “exploded” over the last year or so, Durzy noted. He has indicated his belief that the problem is not likely to slow down anytime soon. “People have become more aware of phishing, but the bad guys have become much better at it, so it’s not going to go away overnight,” Durzy said. “The key for us is really about educating Internet users to protect themselves in the same ways they do offline.”
FACTB0x
Game description
Title: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: Shooter/TTA
Game website
http://www.raven-shield.com/index.php
Minimum system requirements
800 MHz Pentium III, AMD Athlon, or equivalent, 128 MB RAM (XP users: 256 MB required), 64MB DirectX 8.1b compatible graphics card, DirectX 8.1b compatible sound device, CD-ROM/DVD-ROM 16x or faster (not recommended for use with CD-RW drives), 1.7 GB HDD space
Ratings
- True realistic tactical combat, multiplayer portion if by far the best of the game, challenging AI (especially if you choose high realism settings), easy planning interface, weak storyline, can’t climb over small obstructions, a number of small flaws
- Exceptionally well done graphics (Unreal engine), great effects and models, no death animations, the Ragdoll physics rocks (though sometimes the bodies end up in impossible, contortionist poses)!
- Excellent Bill Brown music, tasty & realistic sound effects, footsteps on various surfaces are convincing, stunning implementation of EAX, mediocre voice-overs (all terrorists speak English)
Our verdict B+
Review CD provider
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