Miraplacid Publisher: Converts PDFs in Many Surprising Ways
You will be surprised! The new PDF printer driver, Miraplacid Publisher, comes with a new twist. Aside from its ability to create PDFs out of your various documents, it can also come up with outputs in varying formats like bmp, jpeg, gif, png, tga and tiff. These are just some of the formats, there are many others. A virtual printer may also be created for any of the output type or settings that are commonly used today. Examples of this would be Miraplacid PDF and Miraplacid Jpeg. This way, there is no more need to constantly adjust the settings dialog.
The 2009 version of Miraplacid Publisher is extremely user friendly so that anyone could handle the adjustment in gamma, hue and saturation.
Many have asked the website why the program of Miraplacid Publisher better than the regular print screen button. The makers would answer: Miraplacid simply has the ability to practically stitch together screen shots of very long documents. Typically, this is a tedious and long task. But with Miraplacid, the task is done in mere seconds; the ultimate time-saver.
All print documents can be converted by this particular software into any image or web presentation. Your document can be opened with any of the wide range of software and hardware available. The document will have the exact look that you want, complete with images, fonts and even layout design. The wonderful thing about it is that no one will be able to change or copy any of your texts.
After you have installed the software, Miraplacid Publisher now becomes a virtual printer where all the documents ready for printing will first be opened on preview. Now you can do whatever adjustment you need to do in your images in terms of hue, saturation, borders and other types of processing. Once you feel you have gotten it all right, you can save the images in the disk, upload them to HTTP or FTP server, print them using the real printer and email them.
Upon printing using a real printer, you may still be able to adjust colors by reducing saturation to save on colored ink or increase value to save on black ink. The Miraplacid Publisher, being a virtual printer, can be time-saving and cost-saving, too. Before actually trial printing, you can already see the actual image and do alterations from there so that there is no more need to do trial printing because how it appears onscreen is how it will appear once printed. It is a device that is totally advisable for people and workplaces that need to do a lot of image printing. Its cost-effective and time-saving features clearly deserves attention.
Pylon 2.1 of Basler Gives Full 64 Bit Driver Support
The “pylon” driver package, 2.1 version is about to be launched by Basler Vision Technologies. The new release is into the 64-bit system supporting Microsoft Windows. Modifications were added to this version to improve the system such as reworked installation scripts, multicast support and DirectShow64. Basler has been generous enough to allow its free download together with the SDK.
The standard 32-bit systems can directly address four GBs of Random Access Memory (RAM) and have more than 50% of the memory ready for other applications. This is a hindrance because it can cause instability problems like when using multi-camera applications with complicated processing requirements. According to Product Manager, Werner Borchert, images are dropped when the 32-bit system is forced to carry memory exchange schemes into its limited 4 GB memory. This appears to be not a problem with a 64-bit system. The good thing is that GB memory has gone down in price by a good deal so that investing into a 64-bit system is quite small nowadays.
The pylon 2.1 release is a full 64-bit version of the IEEE 1394-b, GigE Vision and the GigE Vision filter performance drivers that come with the pylon package. So that the full installed memory is addressed, pylon’s C++ API is now ready in a 64 bit version. The API has not been altered that is why client applications can readily convert to 64-bit.
The pylon package allows full memory access to applications that operate with DirectShow technology because it has a module that addresses it directly, the DirectShow64. Because of the extended memory,
uninterrupted recording time even with HDTV resolution is now possible.
Pylon 2.1’s multicast support, on the other hand, makes the camera image data visible on two or more PCs in order to share image processing. Developing distributed inspection systems that use several GigE Vision cameras attached to several PCs is now possible. Because of this, a new wave of inspection system performance can be operated on standard PCs with the pylon’s 64-bit system.
Pylon 2.1 version also offers reworked installation scripts that enhance the comfort rating for installations on Windows Vista even with just a 64-bit Vista. These six pylon drivers are Microsoft-certified making Basler one of the few fully-certified providers.
To find out more about the new features, improved modifications of the pylon 2.1 release, you may download the Release Notes from the website of Basler, www.baslerweb.com. At the same time, you may download the SDK and pylon 2.1 release for free from the same site.
Mebroot: Why It Is The Stealthiest Rootkit in the Wild?
Mebroot, the new breed of malware or rootkit can actually replace the Master Boot Record (MBR) of an infected system that has the very first code that is executed when the computer is booting. Mebroot, AKA Torpig and Sinowal, is a very powerful malware that is undetectable in the hardware.
The Mebroot kit has the ability to launch itself very early during startup without having to wait for file modification or registry. It is the stealthiest rootkit out there today because of its speed in launching and its ability to hide and not be detected in the infected system. It cannot be spotted easily because it can attach itself deep within the Windows system.
The Mebroot has already done enough damage in the RSA security division of EMC last year when a big bulk of financial data was stolen. Since then, the makers have developed the new variant so that it could hide while it reaches all corners of the drive-by downloads.
The moment Mebroot gets into your Windows PC, it transports a payload that records all keystrokes, insert random HTML into websites, especially banking sites, and detects HTTP and HTTPS post requests. Most vendors would say that what is really amazing about it is how it can infect the system. It does not need to connect to the disk.sys driver, but inspects what type of lower device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 it is connected to and quickly hooks into the relative driver. Whether it is atapi.sys or acpi.sys, it can attack the driver. Therefore, results differ between PCs and virtual machines.
The makers were also able to integrate into the malware the ability for it to fix a bug that, in the past, has made it easier to become aware of anomalies with the MBR.
The most dangerous feature of Mebroot is that it is not present in the hard drive as a file after the first infection. It remains invisible. It only becomes injected into the kernel drivers during the start-up process and eventually becomes injected into svchost.exe and services.exe. Via IAT, processes will become compromised so that it can access all the internal data. Mebroot, for that reason, will not be found in the hardware. The only clue is its presence in the temp drive for only a short time.
Thankfully, though, the malware has not been widespread so far. It has popped up in several servers but is not present again as of the moment. But the problem remains that it may appear anytime because the authors know exactly the machinery behind the security industry. But of course, these people wouldn’t want to make it a global threat like what conficker.c did before. It may not be present today but we all have to be wary and prepared when it comes again.
The rootkit stores data that’s required to survive reboots in physical sectors instead of files. This means that the data, including the real payload, is not visible or in any way accessible to normal applications. Therefore the rootkit does not have to hook the normal set of interfaces to keep them hidden.
The MBR is the rootkit’s launch point. Therefore it doesn’t need to make any registry changes or to modify any existing startup executables in order to launch itself. This means that the only hooks it needs to make are used to hide and protect the modified MBR. Essentially this means that the rootkit hooks only two DWORDs from the disk.sys driver object which is shown in the picture below.
image credits to Sophos D/A/CH Presseinfo