Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Tools of the Trade - Junk RNA Not So Junkie

Genetic material once dismissed as mere "junk" may in fact be responsible to the evolution of simple invertebrates into more complex organisms sporting backbones, according to a new study.

Tiny snippets of the genome known as microRNA were long thought to be genomic refuse because they were transcribed from so-called "junk DNA," sections of the genome that do not carry information for making proteins responsible for various cellular functions. Evidence has been building since 1993, however, that microRNA is anything but genetic bric-a-brac. Quite the contrary, scientists say that it actually plays a crucial role in switching protein-coding genes on or off and regulating the amount of protein those genes produce.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=junk-rna-may-have-played

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On to the tools....

On Feb 12th, TrueCrypt 5.0a was released. The big news in this version is the ability to encrypted the entire hard drive. Check out the version history for all the details.

On Feb 7th, Quicktime Lite and Quicktime Alternative 2.4.0 were released. Both were updated to include the QuickTime 7.4.1.14 components which addressed a serious security issue. QT7 also includes the updated Media Player Classic to version 6.4.9.1 rev. 36. If you use QT or any of these products, I recommend updating them now.

On Feb 6th, Cody Pierce and Aaron Portnoy released PyMSRPC. PyMSRPC is an attempt to develop a working library for communicating with remote Microsoft RPC endpoints. It includes an IDL parser and NDR data types for making requests. Check out Cody's Cody great article about NDR Types over on the DVLabs blog.

On Feb 5th, Aircrack-ng 0.9.2 was released. Aircrack is an 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program that can recover keys once enough data packets have been captured. This version now works with rtc_cmos and has a compilation fix. Various support was also added to airmon-ng.

On Feb 4th, CDPSnarf was released. CDPSnarf if a network sniffer exclusively written to extract information from CDP packets. It provides all the information a "show cdp neighbors detail" command would return on a Cisco router and even more. The application is written in C using the popular PCAP library.

On Feb 1st, J.C. Kessels released JkDefrag v3.34. JkDefrag is a disk defragmenter and optimizer for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/X64. See the changelog for the minor tweaks.

On Feb 1st, MySQL AB 5.0.51a was released. This release includes fixes for several recent security vulnerabilities.

On Jan 30th, Filezilla 3.0.6 was released. FileZilla is a powerful FTP-client for Windows NT4, 2000 and XP. Check the changelog for all the details.

On Jan 30th, Gimp 2.4.4 was released. The GIMP is a multiplatform photo manipulation tool. GIMP 2.4.4 is a bug-fix release in the stable 2.4 series. Please see the NEWS file for a list of changes.

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