The mysql server that serves the Support and CSIFDocs web servers went down last week. The mysql services have been temporarly moved until the mysql server can be rebuilt.

This web page, and the csifdocs (http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu) will be down for a short period of time today, near 9:30AM.

Maintenance is complete: reboot successful

Both Firefox and Thunderbird have new releases - hot on the tail of their last release. Go get the newest release at http://www.mozilla.org/

Norm Matloff informs us on a new LaTeX slide presentation package:

If you use LaTeX to write your papers, you may be interested in a new
package for making slide presentations, Beamer. I had been using
Prosper, which is nice, but Beamer is much more powerful.''

''You can get Beamer from its home page, http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net
You can see some very nice examples there too. The first one is at
http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/beamerexample1.pdf

I've written a mini-tutorial on Beamer, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/beamer.html If you are an
experienced LaTeX user, you should be able to start writing Beamer
presentations within 15 minutes.

The support.cs.ucdavis.edu webpage (this one) will be down periodically down for maintenance today. Expected down time should not exceed 15 minutes.

Maintenance on support.cs.ucdavis.edu is done. The website is back up.

The support.cs.ucdavis.edu webpage (this one) will be down periodically down for maintenance today. Expected down time should not exceed one hour.

According to the release notes, the latest version of Firefox, Firefox 1.0.1 has made Firefox more stable, and fixed a number of security bugs.

If you are already running Firefox, now would be a good time to upgrade to this latest version of Firefox. If you are not using Firefox you might download it and give it a try. It is free, does a good job of popup blocking, has tabbed browsing, live bookmarks and other great features.

You can download the latest Firefox for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux i686 – in over 3 dozen languages – at this link:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/all.html

A new virus is hitting campus pretty hard. The WMydoom AX (or AU) mass mailing worm forges an email and sends it to addresses it gathers from the Windows Address Book on the victim's computer.

The email tells the recipient that their computer has been used to send a large amount of junk email, and that their machine is probably infected. The email has software attachments, that are said to help you protect your computer, but ironically the attachments are the virus, and running these programs infects your computer.

Because the Systems Support Group of the Computer Science may be in your address book, or in the address book of others, this email could look like it was sent to you from the SSG. Since we don't send software attachments, you should always be suspicious of such email.

Make sure you update your virus checker's definitions regularly, and don't open or run any email attachments!

The Systems Support Group will be conduction regular scans of the Computer Science department's network beginning today. The scanning is designed to be low impact, and non intrusive, but it is likely to show up in some machine's logs. For further information, click Read More.

Multiple sources, including the FBI, campus, and our own Dean Copsey have indicated that the flow of fraudulent email SPAM has increased.

Campus has a great page on Phishing and how to avoid falling for this type of scam.

Phishing email scams, are a social engineering attack designed to lure personal information, such as social security numbers, passwords, bank account numbers, and so forth, from an unsuspecting victim.