It's not like this functionality is exclusive to Microsoft, many antivirus products contain a similar service, just have a look at Norton's "Community Watch" or F-Secure's "Real-time Protection Network".
You don't have to be connected to a Wi-Fi access point in order to query its location. Your device might have a local copy of the "radiomap" or it could use 3G to connect to a geolocation database.
A "hidden" access point will still broadcast the BSSID and the MAC address in every beacon frame...
Hi,
I had the same problem after 10.4.4 update.
Try running sudo fc-cache -f -v from the Terminal. It will rebuild the fontconfig indexes. WorkedForMe(tm).
If the file is an AVI you use a tool like cfourcc (a command line tool) that prints out a four character code and compare that against list of known codecs.
Have you checked the Samba logs? In Debian the logs are stored in /var/log/samba/.
You can increase the amount of debug information with smbcontrol smbd debug <level> where the level is from 0 (default) to 10 (maximum).