Pro IT Zone

Spend a couple minutes listening to a Linux user to talk about their favorite operating system and sooner or later you will hear mention his favorite feature: Linux is virus immune. Such a belief is generally accepted as the gospel in the community of open source. But is not it?

“That depends on what you mean by ‘virus immune,’” said Ben Greenbaum, manager of research at Symantec Security Response.

It explains, “There is no technical reason for that Linux is immune to viruses and infections. They happen but not often. ”

One of the biggest obstacles to malicious software into Linux is diversity, according to a research made by McAfee scientific, Marius van Oers. The viral code is designed to work in specific core operating systems and there are enough differences between the various clusters of Linux that is almost impossible that a malicious program to infect all variants of Linux in the same way. In addition, the market share of Linux is so small that the creators of malicious programs do not focus on that platform.

Conclusion: At this time, Linux users have very little to worry about viruses. Both Greenbaum and van Oers estimate that the current number of threats from malicious software for Linux is about 50 and most of them are demonstrations of concepts that do not represent danger. Compare that with the millions of threats already identified for Windows and Linux users might be entitled to make fun about Windows.

Even so, remember that Linux is not inherently immune to malicious software. As their popularity grows, so will the threats.

Gartner has estimated that to date have exceeded one billion computers in active use.

Growth continues with approximately 12 per cent per year, and at this rate the world will have exceeded two billion PCs by 2014.

Gartner said that does not relate to the quantities of computers sold, as well as they do in their periodic reports on the status of suppliers. In it latest report, the consultant has focused on the number of PCs in use.

Most computers in use are in the industrialized world, but the penetration of PC has established itself firmly in developing countries. It is precisely this last factor that leads to double the forecast growth.

“The market developed as the United States, Eastern Europe and Japan now account for 58% of computers in use worldwide,” said George Shiffler, head of analytical Gartner in a press release. According to Gartner, this situation will change drastically in the coming years.

“We expect the number of computers in relation to the number of people in developing countries will double by the year 2013,” Shiffler said.

Suppliers of computers have understood that there was strong growth in developing countries, and several initiatives are underway to put in those markets economic PCs, so that the population of these countries can be part of technological development.

The project “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC), is the best known, but traditional suppliers also see this market as very important.

“While mature markets in the industrialized world accounted for slightly less than 60% of these early billion, we expect the markets of developing countries will account for 70% of the next one billion”, said Luis Anavitarte, director analytical at Gartner.

Gartner also expects that approximately 180 million computers will be replaced this year, which constitutes about 16% of the machines installed.

Although Microsoft did not confirm directly the launch, a representative of the firm’s public relations of the company sent an email referring briefly to a “product that marks a milestone” on Thursday. Then another representative hinted in an email that the reference had to do with Hyper-V.

While none said that was exactly the announcement, several blogs reported on Wednesday that Hyper-V would be launched on today Thursday. Other sources close to the company also said that the technology was in its final stages, but spoke in return for not revealing his identity.

Microsoft said it would launch its monitoring technology Hyper-V six months after the launch of Windows Server 2008, the latest version of the Windows operating system for servers. The company launched the software in late February.

Microsoft had originally trying to launch Hyper-V as part of the original launch of Windows Server 2008, but the technology was backward and reschedule to availability for 180 days, or about six months after the launch of Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft delayed the launch of Hyper-V, originally called codename “Viridian” because the company chose to withdraw some functions originally raised.

The virtualization is starting to become a key element in companies that are conducting the reduction of costs for data centers that run operating systems in virtual containers rather than physically in servers. Microsoft aims to reach the leader of virtualization VMware on the provision of these technologies for hardware systems that not only run Windows but also Linux or other operating systems.

The company said that promises to make virtualization a key part of its strategy of management systems and now also is spreading beyond the hardware towards virtualization applications and desktop computers.

The search giant, Google, is beginning to compete with Alexa, Compete and other services that base their existence in the delivery of statistics popularity of Internet sites.

However, it has always questioned the accuracy of the information Alexa and Compete, because their statistical calculations are based on information from third parties.

This time, Google joins the competition for describing and systematize information websites with their product Google Trends, which has added the ability to search among the statistics themselves.

Google Trends also becomes a provider absolutely reliable statistics, but it represents a new alternative to which users can rely in order to obtain benchmarks.

Google Trends base their results in a combination of source material, which includes sites and search traffic, as well as anonymous figures analysis from Google and other third party information.

The new Web browser from Mozilla, Firefox 3, reached a world record in downloads during the first 24 hours after its launch. However, only happen a couple of hours before it was detected the first critical vulnerability. The information was provided by Ryan Narain from the computer security company Kaspersky Labs, in his blog on ZDNet.

The company ZDI (Zero Day Initiative) which bought exclusive rights to information on software vulnerabilities has reported on the vulnerability.

According ZDI, the vulnerability in question provides the ability to intruders to run a malicious code on the victim’s computer, which in the worst case lets take control of the apparatus intervened.

The technical details of the security hole, as shown is also present in earlier versions of Firefox, were not published to avoid specific attacks.