Author: jitheshb

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Google Updates Mobile Phone OS Android SDK

Android

It’s the Google’s first update since the SDK was released in November and includes changes requested by developers.

Google highlighted a couple of changes in the updated SDK, which was released midweek. It has a new user interface that the search giant said is still a work in progress.

In addition, developers can now support additional file formats in the Android media player. Also, applications can translate an address into a coordinate and the reverse, in location-based programs.

Even though developers said that the first version of the SDK was thin, Android has managed to gain momentum. Four chip makers, including Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, showed off prototypes that support Android this week in Barcelona at the annual Mobile World Congress.

Still, Android faces competition from the established mobile operating systems as well as companies that have rallied behind LiMo, the consortium that is developing an open Linux mobile operating system. At the conference in Barcelona, LiMo announced 18 phones that comply with the operating-system specification that are either on the market already or will be.

source:pcworld 

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Sony leaks PS3 messaging images

 sp3

Sony appears to have leaked some future plans for improving the in-game functionality of the PlayStation 3 on the company’s own official site.

Recently spotted and snapped by a US site user, a slightly blurry banner image appears to advertise voice and video chatting functionality of the PS3.

msg
The text says: “Talk to others during game play, say hello anytime you’re online, or have a video chat with an Eye camera, USB Camera or headset”.
In-game Xross Media Bar access has been confirmed for the PS3 in 2008, so this apparent leak would suggest PS3 owners will see it sooner rather than later, with an announcement at Game Developers Conference at the end of the month hotly tipped.

source:pocket 

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A New Dualpix “Chat and Show” Webcam

cam

Hercules announced, it will be adding the “Dualpix Chat and Show”; a new flagship high-end webcam to its range, this month.

The new webcam boasts never-before-seen features designed to make online video communication a far more engaging experience by allowing users to both video chat and show off photos simultaneously.

With Chat and Show, Hercules says users can interact with their contacts as if they were in the same room. Users can show photos or slide shows while still viewing their contact via a video window that is run during chat and presentation sessions.

There is even a hand-shaped pointer which allows users to pinpoint detail on pictures in real time.

Hercules claims that the whole process is intuitive and simple with no lengthy downloading of images or time-consuming conversion required prior to sending the images as it all works in real time.

The Hercules Dualpix Chat And Show will be available mid-February with a price of £34.99.

Features:

– 5 Megapixels in photo mode (with interpolation)
– 1280 x 1024 megapixels in video node
– Embedded Microphone and additional microphone headset
– USB 2.0 video class (UVC) compliant
– 3 photo modes – single shot, burst and self-timer
– Face tracking
– Automatic file transfer

source:pocket 

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New Microsoft Forums

MS-Logo

Microsoft has been running newsgroups and forums to provide community support for its products.. incidentally, many MVPs come from forums where they are TOP contributors to the forums..

but this isn’t about MVPs today 🙂

it is about MS forums… to begin with Microsoft used Community Server from Telligent to host its forums. And now they are revamping the same on to its own code.. in the background, there seems to be an entire Community Platform emerging with blogs, tags, forums & wikis within Microsoft.. (very much in line with MSs focus on community)..

The new forums are available at:
http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/

http://forums.technet.microsoft.com/

http://forums.community.microsoft.com/

source:reuters 

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Hackers Attack Code For Works Bug Using Microsoft Products

MS-bugs

No sooner had Microsoft issued a massive set of security patches for its software than hackers started posting code showing how to exploit one of the flaws.

The proof-of-concept code, posted Wednesday to the Milw0rm Web site, exploits a bug in the Microsoft Works file converter software that is part of Office 2003 and can be used to run unauthorized software on a victim’s computer.

The flaw also affects Works 8 and Works Suite 2005. To fall prey to the attack, a victim would first have to open a malicious Works attachment.

Hackers have uncovered many of these file-format bugs in recent years and they are generally not used in widespread attacks. In fact, security vendor Symantec predicts that we’ll see fewer of these attacks in the months ahead as online criminals increasingly rely on browser bugs to do their dirty work.

Still, Periman expects criminals to try out this latest attack code. “It’s so simple,” he said. “All you have to do is get someone to open the document.”

The software vendor released 11 sets of patches this week, fixing 17 flaws in its products, but this is the first exploit code to pop up following the updates. A second program exploiting one of these vulnerabilities — this one in an ActiveX control used by the Visual FoxPro database — was posted to Milw0rm in September, months before Microsoft patched the issue.

source:pcworld 

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The Web Is Scarier Than Most People Realize- Google

Hacker

The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.

The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.

These Web-based attacks, called “drive-by downloads” by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.

In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.

Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim’s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim’s PC. “The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,” said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.

In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.

Google’s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. “You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,” he said.

But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. “I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,” for the problem to go away, he said.

source:pcworld 

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Philips 9@9j First AAA-powered cell phone

 Philips

Yes, 9@9j really is the name of Philips’ upcoming mobile phone. It’ll be fun going into Carphone Warehouse asking for that… But the candybar handset does have one innovation – there’s a slot for a AAA battery in the bottom.

“It has a standard lithium ion rechargeable battery, but it has the option to put a AAA battery in, and it’ll give you three hours extra talktime. If your lithium ion battery goes dead, the backup battery kicks in, and starts to charge the lithium ion battery, so you can start using the phone straight away.”

The technology comes from Israeli firm Techtium, and it’s called Backupower. The 9@9j is the first phone to have it inside. Battery firm Energizer is involved too.

source:ohgizmo 

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Firefox 3.0 Beta: It was Having Hundreds of Memory Leaks Before

Mozilla

Firefox 3.0’s memory consumption is “dramatically improved,” claimed Mozilla Corp.’s chief engineer Thursday, because developers have aggressively attacked the open-source browser’s notorious memory “leaks.”

“We’ve been working on memory leaks for years,” said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering. “But it really started to come together in the last six months.”

Another milestone, however, might have been three months ago, when a member of the Mozilla board of directors said attention had to be paid to Firefox’s memory allocation if the browser was going to compete in the RAM-tight mobile market.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” said Schroepfer. “Our memory usage is significantly improved, and dramatically better than Internet Explorer 7.”

But the work’s not finished. “Most of the big memory issues are resolved, and we’re seeing some pretty good numbers on memory consumption, but some additional work is one reason why we felt we needed Beta 4.”

In the run-up to releasing Beta 4, Mozilla acknowledged that it would take the time to do at least one more beta build. According to Schroepfer, Beta 4’s code freeze date — when all work stops in preparation for the build to enter final testing before release — has been set as Feb. 26.

 

source:pcworld
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‘Apple MAC’ Next Major Target For Hackers & Crooks

MAC

A web poll of 355 computer users, conducted by security firm Sophos after the discovery of the first financially motivated malware for Mac OS X, has revealed that 93% believe Apple Macs will be targeted more in future. Not surprisingly, however, half of those polled said they did not believe the problem would be as great as that faced by users of Microsoft Windows.

The survey results, revealed in a Sophos podcast entitled “Big Mac attack or super-sized hype?”, purportedly show that Apple Mac users are becoming less optimistic about the likelihood of their computers being attacked in future. According to Sophos, a similar survey two years ago, found only 79% believed that Macintosh computers would become more commonly targeted by hackers. However, as neither survey identified how many Mac users were among the respondents, it is difficult to see how a conclusion about the optimism of Mac users concerning their computer security can be drawn.

In the latest Sophos web poll, the following questions were asked between 9 January-7 February 2008 with the resulting responses:

The first financially motivated malware for Macintoshes has been discovered. Do you think in the future Macs will be targeted more often?

Yes, but not as much as Windows        50%
Yes                                                            43%
No                                                            07%

“Yes, the Macintosh malware threat is a concern – but it’s important to put it in perspective. Sophos’s podcast discusses the history and evolution of Macintosh malware, helping IT administrators better understand the problem and protect their systems.”

Last month Sophos published its annual Security Threat Report, which described how financially motivated hackers had targeted Apple Mac computers with malware for the first time.

 

source:itwire
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New Survey Says DVRs Makes People To Watch TV More

tv

New report by Nielsen indicates that the time-shifting devices have actually extended the amount of TV people are watching. Nielsen’s numbers show people watching television further into the night with DVRs, when prime time programming has wrapped up.

The company compared its figures from November 2005, before it measured DVR homes and when penetration was low, to figures from November 2007 when both of those factors had changed. It found a three percent spike in viewing at 9:00 PM and a five percent spike at 11:00 and midnight.

“DVR playback has added to TV usage, particularly during the most watched hours of the day, as viewers take advantage of their ability to watch their favorite shows according to their own schedules,” said Nielsen’s senior VP of insights analysis and policy, Patricia McDonough, in a statement.

Besides turning up facts about the amount of television people watch, the report also uncovered what programs are most frequently time shifted using DVRs. According to Nielsen, dramas, talk shows, soap operas and reality TV shows are DVR favorites, while users prefer watching news, sports and movies live.

source:digitaltrends