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| Free Windows 7 Ultimate For Technical Beta Testers |
| Friday, July 31, 2009 |
 Were you in the Windows 7 Technical Beta Program? No, not giant public beta and release candidate tests, but rather the closed, invite-only technical beta that preceded it. If you were, good news - you're getting a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Brandon LeBlanc writes on the Windows 7 Team Blog: "To show our appreciation, members of the invitation-only Windows 7 Technical Beta Program will be eligible for a free, final copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. For more information on how to take advantage of this, refer to Paul's post in the .Beta_Program newsgroup for details." Basically, those who participated in the invite-only Technical Beta (if you did, you'd know it) will be able to download a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate and a key starting on August 6th, depending on the language you want. There will also be a limited number of boxed copies available after October 22nd on a first-come, first-serve basis. Labels: Microsoft, Windows 7 |
by Sajin George on 8:55 PM
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| Firefox to Hit 1 Billion Downloads Friday |
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The Firefox Web browser is fast approaching its billionth download and is likely to hit that milestone some time on Friday.
Mozilla has a Web site and a Twitter feed where people can keep track of the total. On Thursday afternoon, the feed showed more than 999,180,000 downloads, with about 15 more happening each second.
Mozilla said initially that it expected to hit the billion mark some time over the weekend. An hour later, as the news trickled out and the pace of downloads increased, Mozilla revised its estimate to Friday. An enthusiast Web site with a "Firefox Download Guesstimator" predicts it will reach a billion on Friday at noon GMT.
The figure includes all versions of Firefox since the first release in 2004. If a single user downloaded multiple copies for different computers, they are each counted in the total. And if a user goes to the Web site to download an update to an existing version, instead of waiting for the automatic download, that is counted as well. Automatic updates are not included in the total.
So the figure does not mean that 1 billion people are using Firefox. Still, it's a significant achievement for a piece of software that was unknown to most of the world just a few years ago, and one that has had to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which ships free with every Windows PC.
Figures from earlier this month showed Firefox having just under a third of the global browser market, at 31 percent. Internet Explorer led the field with 60 percent, while Safari, Chrome and Opera each had less than 5 percent, according to Statcounter.
Firefox is stronger in Europe, where it has 40 percent of the market to IE's 47 percent. In Asia, Firefox has 23 percent to IE's 72 percent. In Antarctica, Statcounter says, the browsers are neck and neck.
Mozilla plans to launch a Web site Monday, at www.onebillionplusyou.com, where it will provide more information on the achievement. Labels: News |
| by Sajin George on 8:50 PM
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| Microsoft issues emergency patch for IE |
| Wednesday, July 29, 2009 |
Microsoft released an emergency patch on Tuesday to protect Internet Explorer users from a hole in technology used to build ActiveX controls and other web application components that has been targeted in attacks. A critical patch for all versions of IE will protect consumers, while a security update for Visual Studio will help developers fix the controls and components they built that could be affected. Microsoft also has had discussions with Adobe, Sun and Google about some components involving their software that are affected, said Mike Reavey, director of the Microsoft Security Response Center. He declined to elaborate. Internet Explorer users running Flash Player and Shockwave Player are vulnerable, Adobe said in a blog post that contains links to the Adobe security bulletins for those products. A Google representative said the company has been working with Microsoft on the issues but declined to comment further. And a Sun representative did not respond to a call seeking comment. Cisco will release free software updates for any of its software that is affected by the vulnerability and is making available workarounds that mitigate the issue, the company said in a detailed advisory. The company released two security updates that deal with a vulnerability in Microsoft's Active Template Library, which is used to build components for web applications and which could be targeted to take control of the computers of web surfers visiting sites hosting malicious code. The critical update, MS-09034, is targeted at IE users. The other update, MS-09035, is targeted at Visual Studio developers, and is rated moderate. It affects Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. "A library can get used in a lot of places, and vulnerabilities in libraries are challenging," Reavey said. "It's an industry-wide problem when [vulnerabilities] do happen." "The vulnerability is in the controls, not IE; however, to provide protections while developers update the controls, IE (versions that are patched will block attacks)," he said. The company warned on Friday that a security update would come on Tuesday instead of waiting for the next Patch Tuesday cycle on 11 August. This is only the ninth out-of-band release Microsoft has had, according to Reavey. Microsoft first warned about the ActiveX issue on July 6, saying a vulnerability in its Video ActiveX Control could allow an attacker to take control of a PC if the user visits a malicious website and attackers were exploiting the hole. The company offered a workaround for the issue. During the July Patch Tuesday release the following week, Microsoft still did not have a patch ready and was recommending a manual 'kill bit' method to disable ActiveX, or sending customers to a 'Fix it for me' website. Labels: Microsoft |
| by Sajin George on 10:55 PM
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| Microsoft Signs Search Deal With Yahoo |
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 Microsoft and Yahoo struck a long-anticipated search deal Wednesday under which Microsoft's Bing search engine will power Yahoo's search site, and Yahoo will sell premium search advertising services for both companies.
The deal, which took nearly a year and a half to strike and started with an unsolicited bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo last February, is aimed at giving the two companies leverage against search giant Google, which leads the market in search-driven online advertising revenues.
According to the companies, the combined forces of the their search teams and assets will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation to make them more competitive players in the search market.
The deal comes about two months after Microsoft revamped its search engine and relaunched it as Bing, which has already been taking share from Yahoo's search engine and has gotten early positive user reviews, according to analysts' statistics. For its part, Yahoo has a larger network of advertisers than Microsoft, and Microsoft will benefit now by having access to them. Labels: Microsoft, yahoo |
| by Sajin George on 8:44 PM
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| Report finds that fake anti-virus is on the rise |
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Malware posing as anti-virus software is spreading fast with tens of millions of computers infected each month, according to a report to be released on Wednesday from PandaLabs. PandaLabs found 1,000 samples of fake antivirus software in the first quarter of 2008. In a year that number had grown to 111,000 and for the second quarter of 2009 it reached 374,000, Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs said in a recent interview. "We've created a specific team to deal with this," he said, of the rogue anti-virus software that issues false warnings of infections in order to get people to pay for software they don't need. The programs also typically download a Trojan or other malware. PandaLabs found that 3 percent to 5 percent of all the people who scanned their PCs with Panda anti-virus software were infected. Using that and worldwide computer stats from Forrester, PandaLabs estimates there could be as many as 35 million computers infected per month with the rogue anti-virus programs. About 3 percent of the people who see the fake warnings fall for it, forking over $50 for an annual license or $80 for a lifetime license, according to Corrons. Last September, a hacker was able to infiltrate rogue anti-virus maker Baka Software and discovered that in one period an affiliate made more than $80,000 in about a week, said Sean-Paul Correll, a PandaLabs threat researcher. A Finjan report from March estimated that fake AV distributors can make more than $10,000 a day. "The general consumer doesn't understand" the threat, Correll said. "No legitimate anti-virus vendor will start a scan automatically on your computer without your consent." - After all the hoopla about the Conficker threat researchers seemed almost relieved that the it turned out to distribute fake anti-virus software instead of something much worse.
Labels: antivirus, News, Virus |
| by Sajin George on 5:02 PM
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| Samsung's debut e-book reader arrives |
| Tuesday, July 28, 2009 |
 For its first e-book reader, Samsung Electronics has crumpled up and cast aside its catchy codename and gone downright bureaucratic. Formerly known by the working label of Papyrus, the new SNE-50K reader will initially be sold only in South Korea, starting Wednesday. But the device may reach other markets across the world sometime next year, said a Samsung spokesperson. Unlike larger readers such as Amazon's Kindle, the SNE-50K was designed by Samsung to be compact, sporting a 5-inch screen and weighing 6.5 ounces. The device will come with 512MB of memory and offer a resolution of 600x800 pixels. Borrowing some features from a PDA, the SNE-50K will support handwriting recognition, so users can write and store memos, manage schedules, and view calendar appointments. The device will also let people read text files, PDFs, and Microsoft Office documents by converting those files into a viewable BMP graphic format. The reader will sell for 339,000 Korean won, or about $270. "The SNE-50K is expected to open a new chapter in the Korean electronic book market, gaining strength from the expansion of the global content market and recent enthusiasm for reading books on-the-go," said Jae-yeong Lew, vice president of Samsung's Visual Display Division. Partnering with a bookseller
To ready the SNE-50K, Samsung has been collaborating with South Korea's Kyobo Bookstore Company. The two have worked together to design the reader's user interface and to market the product. One of South Korea's largest bookstore chains, Kyobo currently sells only around 2,500 e-books, mostly South Korean titles. Samsung said that books not yet available for the SNE-50K can be requested online at Kyobo's Web site. Samsung is also talking to other book publishers about packaging their books for the new reader. Kyobo predicts the Korean electronic book market will grow to 1.06 trillion won next year and 2.38 trillion won in 2012. "We anticipate that the release of the SNE-50K will result in a sharp rise in the electronic book reading population in the B2C market," said Lee Han-u, Kyobo's online business director. "Accordingly, electronic book content sales will increase by approximately five-fold." On its July 29 launch date, the SNE-50K will be available for sale online at Kyobo's Web site and at a few physical branches of the bookstore chain. Samsung is working on a prototype of the device to sell in countries outside of South Korea. The company hopes to reveal the prototype in January at the next Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Samsung enters a growing and crowded market of e-book readers, facing competition from Amazon, Sony, Fujitsu, and Plastic Logic, which will supply its reader to Barnes & Noble. Labels: News |
| by Sajin George on 7:18 PM
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| Mozilla Releases Firefox 4.0 Interface Mockups |
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Just days after releasing some proposed interface changes to Firefox 3.7 on its wiki, the Mozilla Foundation has put up a page to explore interface changes in Firefox 4.0.
 Two main versions are displayed, one showing the tabs beneath the address bar and one with the tabs above it. The tabs-on-top look is nice and clean, and saves space, but eliminates the title bar.
 Also on the wiki page is a demonstration of an idea for combining the go, refresh, and stop buttons into a single context-sensitive button.
 As with the proposed changes to Firefox 3.7, the Firefox 4.0 changes are aiming to reduce interface complexity, increase page space, and hopefully increase clarity for the user while integrating more naturally into Windows. What do you think of the changes? Let us know in the comments. Labels: Firefox, Mozilla |
| by Sajin George on 4:09 PM
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| Super Search brings search overkill to Firefox |
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If you're the type of person who uses a lot of search engines and doesn't mind having a toolbar installed, you might want to check out Firefox Super Search. This Firefox-only add-on puts the power of 160 search engines in one toolbar, with about 70 that can be searched right from the toolbar itself. If you're used to Firefox's built-in search box, this is a pretty big step up both from selecting one engine at a time and having to add additional engine tools from Mozilla's catalog. It's also laid out in a really straightforward manner, putting search engines with which you can search (from within the toolbar) in drop-down menus on the right side of the query box. There's also a directory of the other 90 or so engines that require a visit before beginning a new search.  Only qualm is that you cannot reorganize the order of the engines or make a shortlist of your favorites. It's also missing out on modern search box niceties like auto-complete and search-as-you-type suggestions--two things that require the search box to know which engine you're searching with first. On the plus side, though, the curation and organization of the engines is spot-on. Note: This add-on is experimental, which means that it may not work perfectly in your browser. We used Super Search on Firefox version 3.5.1 without issues. Labels: Tips |
| by Sajin George on 4:00 PM
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| Western Digital releases 1TB laptop hard drive |
| Monday, July 27, 2009 |
 The storage-capacity gap between laptop and desktop hard drives just shrank significantly. Western Digital announced Monday two laptop drives that offer "extreme" amounts of storage: the Scorpio Blue 1TB and the Scorpio Blue 750GB. Prior to this announcement, the largest laptop hard drive available was 500GB. Scorpio Blue (Credit: Western Digital)Currently, the largest desktop hard drive on the market is 2TB. The Scorpio Blue 1TB drive, though half the capacity, is still very impressive, considering the fact that a 2.5-inch laptop drive is much smaller than a 3.5-inch desktop drive. The new WD laptop drives are the first that use 333GB per platter technology. The Scorpio Blue hard drives support the SATA2 (3Gbps) standard but have a thickness of 12.5 millimeters, as opposed to 9.5 millimeters in other 2.5-inch drives. This means the new drives will not fit in all 2.5-inch slots in laptops. For this reason, WD designates them as a perfect fit for portable storage solutions and they'll be in WD's new My Passport Essential SE Portable USB drive. Other than capacity, the new Scorpio Blue drives also feature a set of advanced storage technologies, including: - WhisperDrive, which is WD's technology that uses seeking algorithms to produce one of the quietest 2.5-inch drives available
- ShockGuard, which helps the drive withstanding shock, such as accidental drops, and vibrations better
- SecurePark, which is a mechanism that parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up and spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures that the recording head never touches the disk surface to improve long-term reliability
Both new drives come with 8MB of buffer memory and spin at 5,200rpm, which is slightly slower than the 5400rpm speed of mainstream laptop drives. The Scorpio Blue 750GB drive (model WD7500KEVT) is available now and costs $190. The 1TB version (model WD10TEVT) is, for now, only available configured into the My Passport Essential SE USB drive, but it will be available as an internal hard drive in a few weeks. It will cost $250. Labels: Hardware, News |
| by Sajin George on 10:35 PM
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| Microsoft Office File Format 'Vulnerable' |
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 Microsoft's plan to "sandbox" Office documents in the next version of its application suite is an admission that the company can't keep hackers from exploiting file format bugs, a security analyst said. "What's been happening is that Office has lots of vulnerabilities," said John Pescatore, Gartner's primary security analyst. "For the past 18 months, hackers have been fuzzing Office file formats," he said, referring to the practice of "fuzzing," a tactic that relies on automated tools that drop random data into applications to see if, and where, breakdowns occur. Fuzzing has been a hacker's best friend: Microsoft has repeatedly had to patch file format vulnerabilities in Office applications, most recently in July when it fixed a flaw in Publisher 2007 and in June, when it patched seven vulnerabilities in Excel and two more in Word. "What's happening is that the bad guys are using fuzzing tools to find vulnerabilities in Office, and now Microsoft is saying, 'Okay, we can't find, let alone fix, every vulnerability. So here's a way to put a sandbox around the vulnerability." The sandbox technique Pescatore mentioned is a new addition to Office 2010, the upcoming upgrade to Microsoft's bestselling Windows application suite. According to Brad Albrecht, a senior security program manager with the Office team, Office 2010 will sport something called "Protected View" that isolates Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in a read-only environment. The sandbox, said Albrecht in a post to a company blog this week, will have "minimal access to the system, and no access to your other files and information. Even if the file is malicious, it can't get out of the sandbox and do harm to your computer or data." "That's a good thing," Pescatore agreed. "Sandboxing and isolation are always good things in security, if only to limit the damage of a malicious file." Albrecht also spelled out other security measures that Office 2010 will implement, including a more flexible file blocker and a suite-wide roll-out of "Office File Validation," a practice that was rolled out in Publisher 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2). The file blocker, introduced in Office 2007 then back-ported to Office 2003 in September 2007 with SP3, automatically bars access to some document types. Albrecht said that Office 2010 will let users fine-tune the feature to better manage which formats Word, Excel and PowerPoint open. "File blocking was a real broad-brush thing in Office 2007," said Pescatore, "and it would give users obscure error messages." He applauded the move toward flexibility in the file blocker. Office File Validation, meanwhile, is a system that validates older, pre-XML file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, then blocks those that don't conform to the documented format. Documents that contain malicious code would presumably trigger the block. At that point, Office 2010 will hand off the file to the Protected View sandbox. "There's still a trade-off," said Pescatore, talking about the improved security Microsoft plans for Office 2010. "The file in the sandbox is read-only, but if I need to open it and add something to it, that's going to annoy users." Another downside, said Pescatore: Sandboxing, which is essentially lightweight versions of virtual machines, consumes PC resources. "On the other hand, PCs are getting faster, so we have the ability to throw more cycles at [sandboxes]." Albrecht claimed that the new security features in Office 2010 would have "an indistinguishable performance impact on your [document] load time," but didn't go into detail about system requirements or the impact on the machine's memory and processor resources. Microsoft declined to make Albrecht available to answer follow-up questions about Office 2010's security plans. Labels: Microsoft, News |
| by Sajin George on 4:17 PM
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| Web Threat Traffic Soars in June 2009 |
| Saturday, July 25, 2009 |
 According to Fortinet's June 2009 Threatscape Report, it has been revealed that there has been a dominance and significant growth in Web threat traffic. This has been marked by an increase in the volume of malware and increased rate of phishing attacks to date. Online gaming Trojans still maintained top positions, as W32/OnlineGames.BBR held tight to number one position in the top 10 malware list, while the W32/Virut.A was placed at number four.
The new entrants in this list were the Zbot variants -- W32/Zbot.M and W32/Zbot.V, which were placed second and third in the list. The Zbot variants spread keylogging and data siphoning Trojans through fake eCard mail and directing users to malicious sites. JS/PackRedir.A, a malware that redirects visitors to sites containing malicious content in PDF and SWF files also featured in the top 10 malware list.
In June 2009, the spam levels remain unchanged as compared to May 2009, despite efforts to take down the alleged spam-centric network, 3FN/Pricewert. Many campaigns remained aggressive, including the Canadian Pharmacy gang which mirrored the efforts of Zbot with a fake eCard hook. On Par with the May 2009 Threatscape Report, threat rates in June 2009 continued to climb. Out of 108 newly reported vulnerabilities this period, 62 were reported to be actively exploited, indicating an all time high of 57.4 percent of active exploits. A majority of overall exploit activity was observed to come out of the U.S. (22.2 percent).
There were some very noteworthy trends that surfaced in the June report, such as the growing popularity of Web-borne malware, which are set to drive the next generation of threats to online services. While hackers continue to attempt to drive mass traffic to their threats, utilizing various tactics aided by large online communities, more than ever users should be wary about who and what they trust.
Labels: News |
| by Sajin George on 11:15 AM
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| Security Certificate Warnings Don't Work, Researchers Say |
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Every Web surfer has seen them. Those "invalid certificate" warnings you sometimes get when you're trying to visit a secure Web site.
They say things like "There is a problem with this Web site's security certificate." If you're like most people, you may feel vaguely uneasy, and -- according to a new paper from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University -- there's a good chance you'll ignore the warning and click through anyway.
In a laboratory experiment, researchers found that between 55 percent and 100 percent of participants ignored certificate security warnings, depending on which browser they were using (different browsers use different language to warn their users).
"Everyone knew that there was a problem with these warnings," said Joshua Sunshine, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student and one of the paper's co-authors. "Our study showed dramatically how big the problem was."
That's not great news. Often the warnings pop up because of a technical problem on the Web site, but they can also mean that the Web surfer is being redirected somehow to a fake Web site. URLs for secure Web sites begin with "https."
The researchers first conducted an online survey of more than 400 Web surfers, to learn what they thought about certificate warnings. They then brought 100 people into a lab and studied how they surf the Web.
They found that people often had a mixed-up understanding of certificate warnings. For example, many thought they could ignore the messages when visiting a site they trust, but that they should be more wary at less-trustworthy sites.
"That's sort of a backwards understanding of what these messages mean," Sunshine said. "The message is validating that you're visiting the site you think you're visiting, not that the site is trustworthy."
If a banking Web site shows a message that its security certificate is invalid, that's a very bad sign, security experts say. It could mean the Web surfer is being subjected to a so-called man-in-the-middle attack. In this type of attack, the criminal inserts himself between the Web surfer and the site he's visiting, in the hopes of stealing information.
Security experts have long known that these security warnings are ineffective, said Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer with Web security consultancy White Hat Security. That's because users "really don't know what the security risks mean," he said via instant message. "So they take the gamble."
In the Firefox 3 browser, Mozilla tried to use simpler language and better warnings for bad certificates. And the browser makes it harder to ignore a bad certificate warning. In the Carnegie Mellon lab, Firefox 3 users were the least likely to click through after being shown a warning.
The researchers experimented with several redesigned security warnings they'd written themselves, which appeared to be even more effective. They plan to report their findings Aug. 14th at the Usenix Security Symposium in Montreal.
Still, Sunshine believes that better warnings will help only so much. Instead of warnings, browsers should use systems that can analyze the error messages. "If those systems decide this is likely to be an attack, they should just block the user altogether," he said.
Even when visiting important Web sites like banks, "people are still dramatically ignoring the warnings," he said. Labels: News |
| by Sajin George on 8:55 AM
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| Microsoft to fix critical hole in IE |
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 In a rare move, Microsoft on Friday said it would be releasing security updates on Tuesday--outside of its monthly patch cycle--for a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer and a moderate vulnerability in Visual Studio. The two security bulletins will address one overall issue and are being released separately "to provide the broadest protections possible to customers," Microsoft said in a statement. The vulnerabilities affect Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and Visual C++ 2005 and 2008, according to the security bulletin advance notification. "While we can't go into specifics about the issue prior to release, we can say that the Visual Studio bulletin will address an issue that can affect certain types of applications," the statement said. "The Internet Explorer bulletin will provide defense-in-depth changes to Internet Explorer to help provide additional protections for the issues addressed by the Visual Studio bulletin." "The Internet Explorer update will also address vulnerabilities rated as critical that are unrelated to the Visual Studio bulletin that were privately and responsibly reported," Microsoft said. Customers who are current with their security updates are protected from known attacks related to the updates, the company said. The updates will be released through the Microsoft Update, Windows Update, and Windows Server Update services. A Webcast to address customer questions is scheduled for Tuesday from 1 p.m. PDT to 2 p.m. at this site. Microsoft typically releases security patches on a monthly basis, the second Tuesday of every month, and did not say why it is making this rare, out-of-cycle release. Labels: IE, Microsoft |
| by Sajin George on 7:31 AM
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| Thunderbird 3's latest beta out now |
| Thursday, July 23, 2009 |
 Thunderbird 3 beta 3 is now available to download for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. The beta introduces some significant improvements to the open-source desktop client, from performance to interface. The new beta is built on Mozilla's Gecko 1.9.1.1 platform, keeping it up to date with the latest changes that affect Firefox. Mozilla also claims that there are more than 500 changes in this version, and hints at more alterations to come by stating in a press release that many of them are ''laying the groundwork for future changes''. On his blog, Chief Technical Officer of Mozilla Messaging Dan Mosedale said that many of the improvements will help support the new global database search engine. Based on these comments, more betas of Thunderbird 3 are expected. The interface and behavioral changes in this beta are significant and should be easy to spot for longtime 'bird-watchers. The biggest is that Thunderbird now supports e-mail tabs. If you've checked out the highly unstable Shredder version of Thunderbird, or Postbox, a competitor that's based on Thunderbird's own open-source code, you've known that this feature has been due for a while. Hitting Enter or double-clicking a message will now open it in a new tab and make it your focus. Middle-click an e-mail to open it in a new tab but retain your focus on the current tab--usually the folder pane. You can switch tabs via the hot key combo CTRL+Tab, and the new tab menu button on the right side of the tab bar will help you manage your tabs. Another new feature is the message summary view, which you can see when you select multiple messages at once. They'll open in the message preview pane. Changes to folders include a Smart Folders mode, which gives users the ability to combine inboxes from multiple accounts, and the new ability to customize column headings on a per-folder basis. Gmail integration has existed in Thunderbird for a while, but improvements to the feature in this beta include better recognition and integration of Gmail's special folders. These include Sent and Trash, and non-English versions of Gmail. All Mail defaults in Thunderbird to the Archives folder. The account setup wizard has been overhauled. Reachable under File, then New, Mail, and Account (Quick Setup), Thunderbird now looks to mozillamessaging.com to look for additional information on how to configure the account. Mosedale stressed in his blog that only the domain name from your e-mail address gets sent to Mozilla's servers, and that the entire process falls under the Mozilla's privacy policy. Nevertheless, it's a move that's likely to cause some concern among privacy advocates. The compact header mode has been deleted, which is sure to annoy those who like using Thunderbird on smaller-form computers like netbooks. Mosedale cited bandwidth issues as well an ongoing need to improve the design and configurability of the feature. In my own experiences with Thunderbird 3 beta 3 for half a day, users with large inboxes should be careful to note that Thunderbird now adds all your messages to its search archives. This can hamper performance until it's completed. Also note that the calendar extension Lightning isn't compatible with beta 3 unless you're using the nightly build. Labels: Software, Thunder Bird |
| by Sajin George on 11:03 AM
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| Google Wave Opens to Select Users this Fall |
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Are you looking forward to the day when Google Wave, Mountain View's all-in-one communication and collaboration tool, goes public? Well, for a select group of users, that day is coming this fall. Google announced in a blog post earlier this week it will open up Wave to 100,000 people on September 30. To get on the early bird list, you have to volunteer to be part of the Google Wave testing community. Google didn't say whether it's too late to sign up now, but if you're interested you might as well try. Just head over to Google Wave's Website, provide your e-mail address, and make sure you check off the option that says, "Enlist me! I'll report bugs and give feedback (e.g. user surveys)." You also need to let Google know how you want to use Wave, and then write a short message to the Wave development team -- Google says haiku, sonnets, and ASCII art submissions will be accepted. What is a wave? A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Labels: Google Wave |
| by Sajin George on 8:10 AM
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| First USB 3.0 Motherboard on the Way |
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The long-awaited arrival of USB 3.0, which offers speeds as much as ten times faster than 2.0, is almost over as ASUS has revealed the first motherboard to feature the faster standard. The P6X58 Premium board features both 3.0 and 2.0 ports, allowing for greater functionality with USB devices both old and new. ASUS has also made it super easy to tell the new ports from the old, with the USB 3.0 connectors sporting blue connectors. No word on when or how much this board will set you back — but it's official, USB 3.0 is on its way. Labels: USB, usb 3.0 |
| by Sajin George on 7:54 AM
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| Gmail Offers Auto-Unsubscribe Feature for Newsletters |
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 Ever sign up for a newsletter and then regret it later and feel too lazy to go back to the source and unsubscribe? Well, instead of just marking the messages as spam and hoping the problem goes away you, can use a new Gmail feature to solve the problem. Google has added an auto-unsubscribe feature to Gmail that will unsubscribe you from mailing lists that you may have signed up for but then decide you don't want after all. Here's how it works, according to a post on the Gmail Help site: ...when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam you'll see the unsubscribe tool. You can click "Report Spam" or, if you never want to receive another message from that list again, you can click "Unsubscribe." Google will then send a message to the sender to have your email address removed from the list. It will not work for all mailing lists and it can take several days for the request to be processed, Google said. Also, Gmail won't display "unsubscribe" for lists that are known to be spammers so that you don't get more spam from them by accidentally verifying that your address is legitimate. Labels: gmail |
| by Sajin George on 7:36 AM
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| Windows 7 RTM Code Available Next Month |
| Wednesday, July 22, 2009 |
 Microsoft on Tuesday detailed how its partners and business customers can get their hands on Windows 7 RTM (release to manufacturing) code, which will be available next month on different days for different sets of users.The company also confirmed in an entry on The Windows Blog that it would release a rumored "family pack" of the Windows 7 Home Premium edition of the OS for households with multiple PCs, allowing for installation of the software on as many as three PCs. Microsoft did not give details on pricing of the pack, however, saying that would be available later. ISV (independent software vendor) and IHV (independent hardware vendor) partners and developers with MSDN subscriptions will be able to download Windows 7 RTM from Microsoft Connect or MSDN on Aug. 6. Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members will be able to download Windows 7 RTM in English through the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Portal starting on Aug.16, according to the blog entry. However, the RTM code in other languages won't be available to partner program members to download until Oct. 1. Microsoft Action Pack Subscribers will be able to download Windows 7 RTM in English starting Aug. 23, with the remaining languages for them also available for release by Oct. 1. OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) will receive Windows 7 RTM software images beginning about two days after the code is officially released to manufacturing, as Microsoft requires time to release and distribute these images, the company said. The time should allow them to prepare images and ship Windows 7 PCs in time for the Oct. 22 general release, according to Microsoft. Business customers who are also volume-license customers with existing licenses for Software Assurance (SA), Microsoft's upgrade program, can download Windows 7 RTM in English starting Aug. 7 via the Volume License Service Center (VLSC). The rest of the languages will be available two weeks after that, Microsoft said. Volume License customers without an SA license will be able to purchase Windows 7 through Volume Licensing on Sept. 1, as Microsoft announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference last week. Microsoft IT Professionals have several options for acquiring Windows 7 RTM. Like ISVs, IHVs and developers, TechNet subscribers can download the English edition on Aug. 6 and remaining languages by Oct. 1. IT Professionals with volume-licensing contracts can download Windows 7 RTM code at the same time as other volume-licensing customers, Microsoft said. Beta testers who subscribe to TechNet can receive Windows 7 RTM the same way other subscribers can; however, testers who are not subscribers can continue to use the release candidate of Windows 7 that is now available until March 1, 2010, though they will still have to wait until the worldwide general availability of the OS on Oct. 22 to get the final code. Microsoft also plans to release an evaluation of Windows 7 Professional for IT Professionals via its Springboard Series program shortly after the August RTM. More than 40 percent of beta testers are IT Professionals and can get the code this way, according to Microsoft. People also can continue to pre-order Windows 7 through various online retailers, including the Microsoft Store, though the company's early discount for the OS, which was nearly 50 percent off the regular price, has expired. Windows 7 is the follow-up to the disappointing Windows Vista release, which was widely panned by users and skipped by many business customers. Labels: News, Windows 7 |
| by Sajin George on 8:54 PM
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| Air Cursor Software Coming for Windows, Linux |
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A Web cam and Air Cursor software from Taiwan's publicly funded Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is all a user will need to control their computer cursor with simple hand gestures in the air. ITRI developed the software to work with common computer hardware so people won't have to buy anything new to get set up, said Ming-Wheng Lin, deputy director of ITRI's Human Computer Interaction Technology Center, at an exhibition on Wednesday. The software is compatible with currently available editions of Microsoft Windows, as well as Linux, he said. ITRI is looking for partners to start distributing the software. "The software is ready. We want people to start using this," he said. The software will be demonstrated at the upcoming Taipei Computer Applications Show, which opens July 30. ITRI is partly funded by the Taiwan government. The organization develops new technologies but does not market or sell them on its own. Labels: News |
| by Sajin George on 8:48 PM
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| IEEE 802.11n Heads for a Finish in September |
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The IEEE 802.11n standard is likely to be approved in September, making the high-speed wireless LAN technology official after about seven years of wrangling and refinement. The 802.11 working group, which has developed all the major wireless LAN standards, voted on Friday to send Draft 2.0 of the 11n standard on to the upper levels of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for final review and publication, according to a blog entry by Matthew Gast, chief strategist at Trapeze Networks and a member of the task group. There was only one dissenting vote, Gast wrote. Final approval will be up to the IEEE Standards Board Review Committee, which examines all standards that come out of the organization, Gast wrote. Its next meeting will take place Sept. 11. IEEE standards typically don't undergo major changes or debate in the final stages of approval. The 11n standard defines a way to use multiple antennas to achieve throughput of more than 100Mb per second (Mbps), up to a maximum of 600Mbps. A high throughput study group within the IEEE began exploring faster technology in 2002 and later became Task Group 11n. But opposing camps that had already begun shipping their own high-speed products got embroiled in fierce disagreements about the proposed standard, and in 2006, the first draft failed to get the 75 percent vote in the task group that was required to move on. The Wi-Fi Alliance, which certifies 802.11 products for standards compliance and interoperability, decided in 2006 it couldn't wait out the lengthy 11n process and would start certifying products based on a draft version. After Draft 2 got a 75 percent vote in the 11n task group in 2007, the Alliance started certifying products under that draft. It cited the flood of pre-standard products already coming from several vendors and the danger of consumer confusion. More than 600 products have been approved as "draft 11n" since then. Coincidentally, the first meeting of the High Throughput Study Group that spawned 11n took place on Sept. 11, 2002, Gast noted. "If approved, the 802.11n effort will have taken exactly seven years, at least by one measure," Gast wrote. However, he noted that the IEEE isn't sitting on its laurels. There are already two groups looking at possible standards for 1Gbps wireless LANs, called 802.11ac and 802.11ad. The 802.11ad group is studying 60GHz technology, which the WiGig Alliance is also pushing for fast wireless connections. Labels: News |
| by Sajin George on 8:45 PM
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| Firefox 3.0.12 Patches Five Critical Problems |
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"We strongly recommend that all Firefox 3.0.x users upgrade to this latest release," Mozilla said on its developer blog. "If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting 'Check for Updates...' from the Help menu." Version 3.0.12 fixes five critical problems and one high-level security problem, according to the Mozilla security advisory site. Mozilla is trying to move people to the newer Firefox 3.5, which offers faster JavaScript program execution, new privacy features, and a handful of technologies geared for more powerful Web applications. And Mozilla is pushing the new browser hard. Security and stability fixes for the 3.0.x series will end in January 2010. Labels: Firefox |
| by Sajin George on 7:57 PM
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| Yahoo Launching Front Page Open to Others' Content |
| Tuesday, July 21, 2009 |
 A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company's search page will follow suit starting next month. Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president for consumer experiences. These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up. "We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first." The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo's effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo's profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft's online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.
The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user. The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo's search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft's Bing, too. Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation. Long-coming changes
Newer Web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly. Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo's. It began "bucket testing" it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert. New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company's developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday. The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said. Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they'll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/try new or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.
 Labels: yahoo |
| by Sajin George on 10:43 AM
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| Iolo Announces System Mechanic 9 |
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Iolo has taken the wraps off System Mechanic 9, the latest version of its PC maintenance and tune-up suite. System Mechanic provides a number of system tools, such as a disk defragmenter, a registry repair tool, and a suite of privacy tools. System Mechanic 9 adds various new features, including Department of Defense-grade file-shredding, bolstered registry error detection, and a new sidebar gadget that provides a quick overview of your PC’s overall health and security. System Mechanic 9 features what Iolo calls Tune-Up Definitions. Tune-Up Definitions are, as Iolo puts it, like virus definitions, but for detecting and repairing PC performance problems. Iolo has a collection of 10,000 Tune-Up Definitions so far, which identify various issues which could may cause your PC to feel sluggish. Iolo updates this list on an ongoing basis, so as new issues arise, System Mechanic 9 will be able to adjust accordingly. Also new: EnergyBooster, which ties in with Tune-up Definitions to identify and disable any non-essential background processes; the idea is to free up more system resources for heavy-lifting tasks such as gaming or graphic design. System Mechanic 9 is a free update for existing users. New users can purchase System Mechanic 9 for $40 for a three-system, one-year subscription. A free trial, of course, is also available. Labels: Software |
| by Sajin George on 7:48 AM
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| Internet Explorer Modified -- Nudged by Antitrust Charge? |
| Monday, July 20, 2009 |
 Microsoft last week bowed to critics involved in the company's European antitrust case who have accused it of silently changing users' default browsers, a move that may be aimed at Brussels-based regulators Artwork: Chip Taylor Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) will no longer replace a PC's default browser when a user selects the already-checked "Use express settings" option in the setup screen, Microsoft said. Both Opera Software and Mozilla had hammered Microsoft in May over the tactic, accusing the company of force feeding Internet Explorer 8 to users with Windows Update, and silently changing the default browser on PCs.
Opera and Mozilla, the makers of Opera and Firefox, respectively, are among the parties that have sided with the European Union's (EU) antitrust agency, which has charged Microsoft with "shielding" IE from competition by bundling the browser with Windows. Microsoft, however, only alluded yesterday to Opera's and Mozilla's criticisms and the EU charges, saying instead that, "We heard a lot of feedback from a lot of different people and groups and decided to make the user choice of the default browser even more explicit." In a blog post peppered with screenshots, Microsoft's IE team spelled out changes to the browser's setup when users receive an upgrade offer to IE8 via Windows Update, or when they download and install IE8 on their own. Specifically, Microsoft will change the screen that gave people two choices -- "Use express settings" and "Choose custom settings" -- at the beginning of the IE8 setup process. IE8's setup will no longer automatically set IE8 as the PC's default browser during the configuration process when users pick 'Use express settings," which was the basis for Opera's and Mozilla's complaint. That part of the process has been ditched. Instead, when users select "Use express settings," which is the first of the two choices, they'll next see a frame asking, "Do you want to make Internet Explorer your default browser?" Previously, that dialog box only showed up when users picked the "Choose custom settings" option during IE8 setup. Users who already have IE set as their default browser won't see the "Do you want to make Internet Explorer your default browser?" box, Microsoft said. Microsoft won't re-release IE8 to make this change, but will instead "use dynamic updates in order to deliver this change," the IE team's blog said. Sometime around the middle of August, Microsoft will add the change to the process that occurs before the configuration dialogs appear, when setup asks users whether they want to grab the latest Windows and IE8 updates from the company's servers. "Over 90% of users who run IE8 setup opt-in to dynamic updates in & setup," the IE team's blog post claimed. The change applies not only to users installing IE8 on Windows XP and Vista, but also when people who run an IE rival -- Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, for example -- upgrade to Windows 7. Microsoft will later push the change to businesses installing IE8 or upgrading their PCs to Windows 7. "We will make this change available in the next cumulative security update for Internet Explorer," said the IE team, "so administrators that regularly deploy security updates throughout their organization can easily incorporate this new behavior." Microsoft's next scheduled security updates are set for release on Aug. 11, although it's not a given that the company will deliver an IE bug fix next month. Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesman said only "no comment" when asked whether the change was a result of Opera's and Mozilla's beef with IE8's setup, or if it was related to the changes Microsoft's already made under pressure from EU antitrust officials. Gartner analyst Michael Silver, however, said that the move smacks of a reaction to rivals' complaints and the EU antitrust charges. "[Microsoft] wouldn't do this because they wanted to," said Silver. Mozilla's CEO, John Lilly, applauded the move. "Good change: Microsoft does the right thing (finally) with IE8 updater," Lilly said in Twitter post last night. Microsoft began pushing IE8 to consumers via Automatic Updates in mid-April, and will do the same to enterprises through Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) on Aug. 25. The company has already made unilateral concessions to the EU over IE. Five weeks ago, Microsoft announced it would ship Windows 7 minus Internet Explorer 8 to EU markets. Most analysts read the move as an attempt by Microsoft to head off antitrust regulators, who may still force the company to take more drastic measures. European officials have strongly hinted that they may order Microsoft to offer a "ballot screen" the first time they try to get on the Internet from a Windows 7. The screen would offer users several browser choices that would then either be activated -- if all were pre-installed on the machine -- or downloaded and installed. Microsoft opposes such a screen. Last week, Microsoft said it would disable IE8 on Windows 7E machines, but that it would keep much of the browser's code on the hard drive, citing its need by its own software and that created by third-party developers. Opera, the Norwegian browser maker that filed the December 2007 complaint that sparked the EU charges, said Wednesday called that a "minor technical tweak" that did not go far enough to level the playing field. Labels: IE 8 |
| by Sajin George on 9:45 AM
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| Firefox 3.5.1 Fixes Critical Security Flaw |
| Friday, July 17, 2009 |
 The Mozilla Corp. has released Firefox 3.5.1, a new version of their Web browser. The new release corrects a security problem the company acknowledged earlier this week as "critical." Firefox is available for free download from the Web site.Firefox 3.5.1 corrects the security flaw identified in Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2009-41: a problem with the software's "Just-In-Time" (JIT) compiler used for JavaScript. A crash could result in an exploitable memory corruption problem that could, under certain cases, be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code, like malware. Several stability improvements have also been made. Mozilla first outlined plans to release Firefox 3.5.1 earlier this month. Labels: Mozilla, Mozilla 3.5 |
| by Sajin George on 10:38 PM
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| Google Launches 'My Favorite Places' for Maps |
| Thursday, July 16, 2009 |
 Google launched a personalized mapping service, My Favorite Places,
Think of Google's My Favorite Places as an extension of the customization of iGoogle, which has added themes as well as the option to let famous celebrities configure your iGoogle home page according to their own templates. My Favorite Places allows users to select from famous celebrities and trend setters - such as Moby, the barman at the Ritz hotel in Paris, Tokyo blogger Danny Chu, and Al Gore - and see what sort of favorite restaurants, cafés, and other sites that they prefer. It also allows users to do the same, building a collaborative database of local businesses that they frequent. "We have been really excited to help people to use these tools more efficiently," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president of search products and user experience at Google. 'We've also realized that maps aren't just about finding things, they're about community." Google's press conference in San Francisco was attended by both Regina Dick-Endrezzi, executive director of small business for the city of San Francisco, and its mayor, Gavin Newsom, who said that he welcomes Google's launch of its service in the company's "own backyard". "I'm very enthusiastic about these partnerships," Newsom said. "I'm here to support all these companies in these endeavors to get them online and market themselves." And that was the message of the press conference: those companies with a presence on the Web can better connect with customers, and the assumption went, earn more business. The service was launched with partners like CitySearch and Yelp, both intimately involved with local search Bob Partrite, vice president of operations for the Wipeout Bar & Grill said that local Bay Area surfer Grant Washburn had recommended the bar as a good local hangout. "We get a lot of business through word of mouth, day in and day out, so being on the Google Maps site is great," Partrite said. The bar is opening a sister location in Greenbrae, across the bay. The fact that Google was supplying the additional recommendations came as a double bonus for Laci White, client relations director for Pinkies Nail Salons: it's advertising, and it's free. White, who also said she handles SEO optimization for the chain of five salons, said given the economy, she's being asked to do as much as she can "on a zero-dollar budget". Both Yelp and CitySearch charge additional fees for additional advertising searches, she said. On the back end, Google's Local Business Center offers local businesses a number of free directed tools to better understand where customers are coming from - in one case, quite literally. Small business owners have an opportunity to see the map search queries that are driving customers to their sites, and Google also provides the ZIP code of the origins of Google Maps driving directions requests, so that a San Francisco business could see that a majority of customers were driving in from Marin, for example. Labels: Google Earth |
| by Sajin George on 10:45 PM
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| Firefox 3.5 Vulnerability Confirmed |
| Wednesday, July 15, 2009 |
 Mozilla yesterday confirmed the first security vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, and said that the bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company's newest browser. A noted Firefox contributor called the situation "self-inflicted,"introduction to the new version.) and said it was likely that the hacker who posted public exploit code Monday became aware of the flaw by rooting through Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug- and change-tracking database. The vulnerability is in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that debuted with Firefox 3.5, said Mozilla. "[It] can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code," the company's security blog reported Tuesday. Secunia, a Danish security company, rated the bug "highly critical," the second-highest threat ranking in its five-step system, and added that the vulnerability is in TraceMonkey's processing of JavaScript code handling "font" HTML tags. Older versions of Firefox, including Firefox 3.0, are not vulnerable, according to a message posted by Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, in a comment to the company's blog. "Mozilla developers are working on a fix for this issue and a Firefox security update will be sent out as soon as the fix is completed and tested," said that same blog. In lieu of a patch, users can protect themselves by disabling the "just-in-time" component of the TraceMonkey engine. To do that, users should enter "about:config" in Firefox's address bar, type "jit" in the filter box, then double-click the "javascript.options.jit.content" entry to set the value to "false." The popular NoScript add-on will also ward off attacks. The hacker who published exploit code on the milw0rm.com malware site Monday was not the first to uncover the vulnerability: Mozilla developers first noted the flaw last Thursday, and were in the middle of working on it when the attack code appeared. "Looking at the exploit code and our test cases, I think this is self-inflicted and we should have hidden the bug earlier," argued Andreas Gal on Bugzilla. Gal is a project scientist at the University of California, Irvine, where the technique called "trace trees" was developed. Firefox 3.5's TraceMonkey engine is based on that technique, and builds on code and ideas shared with the open-source Tamarin Tracing project. Another contributor agreed. "It would seem that the milw0rm exploit code is based on the test cases for this bug," said someone identified only as "WD" in the same Bugzilla thread. "When you look at the crash details in a debugger, it's pretty clear that it's exploitable with a heap spray to the access violation address in question." The fix has been slated for Firefox 3.5.1, a fast-track update originally scheduled to release in the last two weeks of this month. That update will be accelerated to plug the just-gone-public hole, said Daniel Veditz, a security lead at Mozilla. "[The bug] was checked in yesterday, a few hours before we learned of the milw0rm posting," Veditz said Tuesday night in a comment on the Mozilla security blog. "This fix was going to be in the 3.5.x update we had scheduled for the end of July, but obviously now we have moved up the schedule for release." Labels: Mozilla 3.5 |
| by Sajin George on 10:57 PM
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| IBM tops Green500 Supercomputer List |
| Tuesday, July 14, 2009 |
Big Blue's supercomputers are among the greenest in the world. An IBM supercomputer won first place in a new list ranking the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers. The June Green500 list, announced June 30 and published by Green500.org, also showed that 18 of the top 20 greenest supercomputers in the world are made by Big Blue. The group also said that the average efficiency of the supercomputers rose by 10 percent, even as the aggregate power of the machines on the list increased 15 percent. A key factor in determining a supercomputer's energy efficiency is the number of operations per watt. Winning the title as most energy-efficient system was an IBM supercomputer based on an IBM BladeCenter QS22 located in Poland at the Interdisciplinary Center for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw. The computer produces more than 536 Mflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt of energy. The world's fastest supercomputer, the IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratories, came in fourth for energy efficiency, producing over 444 Mflops per watt of energy. "Modern supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance," said David Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. "To be commercially viable these systems most also be energy efficient. IBM has a rich history of innovation that has significantly increased energy efficiency of our systems at all levels of the system that are designed to simultaneously reduce data center costs and energy use." The Green500 group also noted that the No. 5 supercomputer, GRAPE-DR of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, is "arguably" the first on its list with more than a million processing elements--in this case, 2.1 million. Unveiled in 2007, the Green500 list is published two to three times a year by Green500.org. It typically serves as a follow-up to the Top 500 list of worldwide supercomputers announced by Top500.org. In the most recent Top 500 list revealed last month, the Los Alamos supercomputer built by IBM hit a peak performance of 1.105 petaflop/s (quadrillions of floating point operations per second). Labels: IBM, Super Computers |
| by Sajin George on 10:18 PM
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| Google updates Gears for new Firefox 3.5 |
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 For those who use Firefox 3.5 but also want to use Gmail with no network connection, Google has an answer: a new version of its Gears plug-in. Gears endows browsers with some new abilities, including accessing some Web applications even while a computer is offline and juggling multiple simultaneous tasks more effectively. And using Gears, Google last week began letting people see their location on Google Maps by clicking the small circle below the navigation controller and above the zoom controller. Major updates to Mozilla's open-source browser often break add-on compatibility, and the earlier version of Gears wouldn't work with the newly released Firefox 3.5. The new Gears 0.5.29.0 fixes that. Users of Mac OS X and Windows can click the "install" button at Google's Gears Web site. The new version is spreading to Mozilla's add-on site, too. Labels: Google, Mozilla |
| by Sajin George on 10:15 PM
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| Ghost's operating system comes alive |
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 In the middle of the desert between Israel and Palestine, Ghost's high-tech Virtual Computer is set to launch Tuesday. After three years of work, Ghost finished the development of its Web-based operating system that uses "cloud computing" to let users access their desktop and data from any computer worldwide. Ghost, short for Global Hosted Operating System, was founded in 2006 by Zvi Schreiber, whose goal was to create the Virtual Computer that works with third-party Web applications like Google Docs, Zoho, and Flickr and joins them together into one online service and can be accessed from any computer with the Internet. Users can also access their personal desktop, files and applications. Based in the West Bank town of Ramallah, with a smaller team of employees in the Israeli town of Modiin, Schreiber was interested in creating a company that shows the world that Israelis and Palestinians can work together. Since the Israeli government forbids most travel between Israel and Palestine, the majority of their work is done through phone and video conferencing. The alpha version of Ghost's Virtual Computer was launched in May 2008 and can be previewed on its Web site. Users can get an extra 10GB when they use the promotion code "launch." To celebrate this accomplishment, Ghost's Palestinian-Israeli team will be joined by former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair at Tuesday's launch. Labels: ghost, News |
| by Sajin George on 7:11 AM
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| New Zero-day Attack Doubles Concern for IE Users |
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Microsoft today warned of a serious security vulnerability in a Spreadsheet ActiveX control that could allow for a drive-by-download attack against vulnerable PCs. The news means there are now two critical, unpatched holes involving flawed ActiveX controls (the first was disclosed last week) that could make IE users vulnerable to drive-by-download attacks if they simply view a poisoned Web page. Microsoft's advisory doesn't specify whether IE 8 might mitigate the new threat, but it does list these software components as installing the flawed ActiveX: - Microsoft Office XP Service Pack 3
- Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3
- Microsoft Office XP Web Components Service Pack 3
- Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components Service Pack 3
- Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components for the 2007 Microsoft Office system Service Pack 1
- Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 Standard Edition Service Pack 3
- Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 3
- Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006
- Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 Supportability Update
- Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 Service Pack 1
- Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006
Office 2000 Service Pack 3 and Office 2007 are not at risk by themselves, according to the advisory, but Office 2007 users could be vulnerable if they have installed the Office 2003 Web Components package listed above. While Microsoft will be releasing its monthly patch batch tomorrow, it's highly unlikely that it will include a fix for this flaw. So if you have (or think you might have) any of the affected software installed on your PC, head to Microsoft's fix-it page and click the Fix it button under "Enable Workaround." Then run the downloaded .msi file to disable the flawed add-on while we wait for a real fix from Microsoft. And if you haven't yet applied the similar Fix-it solution for last week's equally dangerous ActiveX zero-day hole, you'll find the link on this Fix-it page. Labels: Microsoft, vulnerability |
| by Sajin George on 12:23 AM
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| Five New Server Chips from AMD |
| Monday, July 13, 2009 |
Advanced Micro Devices added five more chips to its line of Six-Core Opteron processors on Monday, offering a boost in performance with lower power consumption that current models.
The new additions include three Six-Core Opteron HE processor models are manufactured using a 45-nanometer process and can be used in serves with four, six or eight processors. The six-core chips consume 55 watts of power, on average, compared to 75 watts and 105 watts, for other models, according to AMD.
The new low-power chips -- the 2GHz Six-Core Opteron 2423 HE, 2.1GHz Six-Core Opteron 2425 HE, and 2.1GHz Six-Core Opteron 8425 HE -- are priced from US$455 to $1,514 each, in 1,000-unit quantities, according to AMD's most recent price list.
Lowering power consumption with the HE variants of the Six-Core Opteron allows servers based on chips to be packed more closely together inside a server, reducing the space it takes up. It also helps contain rising power costs as companies pack more servers into data centers.
The new Six-Core Opteron chips are already available in ProLiant G6 systems from Hewlett-Packard. Other vendors, including IBM and Dell, are readying servers to be released over the next month or so.
In addition to the introduction of the three Six-Core Opteron HE chips, AMD added two more chips to the lineup: the 2.8GHz Six-Core Opteron SE 8439 and 2.8GHz Six-Core Opteron SE 2439. Both chips consume 105 watts of power, according to AMD.
They are priced at $2,649 and $1,019, respectively. Labels: AMD |
| by Sajin George on 10:55 PM
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| Microsoft Previews Office 2010 to Developers |
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 At its Worldwide Partner Conference Monday, Microsoft unveiled the next generation of one of the most popularly used pieces of software in history, Microsoft Office, delivering a "Technical Preview" to partners and developers. Key new capabilities in Office include lightweight, Web-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, co-authoring in Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote, new e-mail management and viewing capabilities in Outlook, basic image and video editing along with web publishing in PowerPoint, and "Sparkline" in-cell graphing in Excel. The Office 2010 desktop software will be made available to conference attendees, and PCMag.com has obtained an early look: Our preview of Office 2010 is already online for readers to familiarize themselves with the new features. The Web apps will be coming later this summer as part of a different Windows Live technical preview. When they go live, users will simply need a Windows Live account to use them. Alternatively, businesses will be able to host the services on their own SharePoint servers or using Microsoft-hosted SharePoint servers. "Office 2010 is the premier productivity solution across PCs, mobile phones and browsers," said Chris Capossela, senior vice president, Microsoft Business Division. "From broadcast and video editing in PowerPoint, new data visualization capabilities in Excel and co-authoring in Word, we are delivering technology to help people work smarter and faster from any location using any device." The online versions of Office 2010 apps are certainly aimed squarely at Google Docs, which has long offered hosted word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation apps. Such apps not only save users from having to buy, install, and consume local resources with desktop applications, but also avail them of easy sharing and document collaboration. A key requirement of these online apps has been compatibility with Microsoft office file formats, and the company itself is in the best position to provide complete compatibility. The Web versions of Office 2010 also represent something that users have long craved: A free version of the standard document creation and editing tools. Not only will these Office 2010 web applications provide easier ways to share documents, but so too will the installed desktop applications. Word users will be able to edit documents simultaneously in the desktop apps if their company uses SharePoint, and a "conflict resolution" mode is intended to prevent confusion. Excel users will be able to sync their offline edits with the server once back online, but only the Web version will allow simultaneous editing. OneNote will allow simultaneous editing whether the participant users are using the Web or desktop version. Excel 2010's Sparkline feature means that visual clues such as trendlines and bar graphs can appear in cells right next to the number data, making spreadsheets more skimmable. PowerPoint 2010 includes new SmartArt graphics, animations, and 3D slide transitions. It also lets users insert videos into presentations and do basic editing. Its Backstage view replaces the file menu, a co-authoring capability streamlines collaboration, and the ability to broadcast slideshows doesn't require viewers to have PowerPoint installed. In terms of packaging, Microsoft has cut down on the number of editions of Office from eight to five. But pricing has not yet been determined. The final versions are scheduled to be released in the first half of 2010. Corporations are being primed for the new tools through a program called "Ignite," intended to get them up to speed with the latest versions of SharePoint Server, Office, and Exchange. More information is available at Microsoft's Partner site. More info on Office 2010 in general can be found at www.microsoft.com/Office2010. Labels: Microsoft, Office 2010 |
| by Sajin George on 10:37 PM
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Name: Sajin George
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