Need a quick-and-easy image viewer? Try ACDSee Free
ACD Systems has announced the release of ACDSee Free, a simple and speedy PC image viewer.
The program supports the most important image formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TGA, TIFF, WBMP, PCX, PIC, WMF, EMF), and really does seem to be fast, loading and displaying just about anything at very high speed.
Anonymous targets Ukraine for Demonoid torrent tracker takedown
This week, the loosely connected online activist and hacking community Anonymous began a new "operation": attacking the Ukrainian government.
In retaliation to Ukraine's take down of popular BitTorrent tracking site Demonoid, Anonymous is seeking "revenge against all criminals responsible" in the country's government.
Apple price matches iPhone, but it's nothing new -- should you wait anyway?
Here come the iPhone price cuts. With the launch of the iPhone 5 likely a little over a month away, retailers are beginning to drop prices on iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S models in stock in order to make way for the new device.
There's a key difference here over previous pricing changes, and that's the adjustments are originating with the carriers first and trickling down to retailers. AT&T and Verizon's pricing on the iPhone 4 and 4S remain at $99 and $199 for the 16GB model: however Sprint has lowered the price of the 4S to $149.99.
Chinese 'kidney for iPad' trial starts
Nine people have gone on trial in the central province of Hunan, China, accused of illegal organ trading and intentional injury after a 17-year old high school student sold one of his kidneys to buy an iPad and iPhone. The teenager, identified in a report by the state-run China Daily as Wang Shangkun from the Anhui province, was allegedly recruited through a chat room by one of the defendants, and paid 22,000 Yuan ($3,456) for the organ, which was removed in an illegal transplant operation by a team from a local hospital. The kidney was sold by the gang behind the trade to an unknown buyer for 150,000 Yuan ($23,566) and a further $10,000 in cash, netting them a profit of around $30,000.
While to Westerners $3,458 seems a shockingly low price to sell a kidney for (especially considering how much the recipient was willing to pay), it’s important to put that figure into context. The average wage paid to workers assembling Apple products at Foxconn is around 2,200 Yuan ($346) a month, so the figure Wang received would have equated to nearly ten months’ salary for someone working at the plant -- a colossal amount of money to a young man still in full-time education.
Legendary fiber optic cable ship burns to a crisp on Skeleton Coast
France Telecom-Orange on Friday announced that an unexplained fire had erupted on its cable ship, The Chamarel, off the Skeleton Coast of Namibia in the Atlantic Ocean. After battling the blaze for several hours, the crew abandoned ship. The vessel was returning from a mission to repair the Sat3/WASC/Safe submarine cable which connects Portugal and Spain to nine West African countries, circles around the southern tip of Africa, and connects to India and Malaysia.
The entire crew of 56 escaped the Chamarel safely, and were recovered by a Namibian fishing vessel and returned to Walvis Bay, Namibia. No injuries were reported, but this is the second incident in a single month where a ship has caught fire in Namibian waters. On August first, a South African Tuna fishing boat caught fire and sank outside of Namibian port city Lüderitz.
Paragon releases Image Backup for Windows 8
Paragon Software has released Image Backup for Windows 8, a simple backup tool that runs on Windows 8/ Server 2012 and supports Microsoft’s new Resilient File System, ReFS.
If you’ve used any recent Paragon backup product then you’ll feel at home right away, as the new product uses Paragon’s standard front end menu, which quickly points you to the features you need.
4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook makes iOS and Android devices feel about as sophisticated as my daughter’s old 'Speak & Spell'
I love underdogs. Whether it’s David vs. Goliath, Rocky vs. Apollo Creed or Microsoft (circa 1992) vs. IBM, I enjoy rooting for the plucky upstart. Which is why I find the resurgence of interest surrounding Research in Motion's beleaguered PlayBook tablet all the more satisfying: Here is a product that stumbled out of the gate and was left for dead, only to slowly crawl its way back into the ring of respectability through a combination of raw talent and sheer force of will.
Make no mistake: The PlayBook was an impressive device when it first shipped in April, 2011. Bristling with class-leading technology, RIM’s first foray into the tablet market should have been an instant hit. However, the software half of RIM’s winning formula still wasn’t fully baked, with some glaring omissions (email, calendar) and few third party apps to speak of. And, in a truly ironic twist, many early critics actually panned the device for its smallish 7-inch form factor.
Auslogics BoostSpeed 5.4.0.0 supports Windows 8, IE10
Who doesn’t love a good tweaking tool? Everyone likes the idea of being able to boost the performance of their computer without having to shell out on potential expensive hardware and Auslogics BoostSpeed is an extremely accomplished utility that enables you to do just this. The latest version of the program is a major upgrade that sees not only added support for Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 but also new options that make the app and even more powerful tool for cleaning up and optimizing your computer.
The imminent release of Windows 8 is big news for all software developers, and the latest release of Auslogics BoostSpeed not only supports the operating system, it also allows for control of Metro processes as added new tweaks to the Tweak Manager (Yes, we know Microsoft dropped the Metro name). The existing cleanup tools have been enhanced so you will notice that there are new categories available in the Registry Cleaner, Track Eraser and Disk Cleaner making it easier than ever to protect your privacy and delete sensitive data -- these improvements extend to the wiping of USB drives.
CyanogenMod 9 hits stable release and now you can update OTA
Modders everywhere rejoice: CyanogenMod 9 (CM9) is now a “stable” release for popular Android smartphones, according to a blog post by CyanogenMod team. CyanogenMod 9 is developed from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), having Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as its starting point.
The guys behind the project announced that the stable release “will be the end of the line for the ICS branch” and that they will only fix critical bugs from now on. As well, the team will focus only on CyanogenMod 10 and maintaining the CyanogenMod 7 (based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread) codebase. The other great piece of news comes from the development on CyanogenMod 10, which is based on Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean.
Blizzard hacked for real this time -- change your passwords NOW!
In May we read that game maker Blizzard, developer of a series of popular games including World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Starcraft, was hacked, but that turned out to just be individual compromised accounts from some of its users. Now we read, from Blizzard itself rather than a third party, that they have been hacked and information compromised on their networks. So how are they doing with the breach?
"This week, our security team found an unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard", the company says. So did they respond well? It seems they got the jump on things and responded quickly, a smart move: "We quickly took steps to close off this access and began working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate what happened."
Looking for a better file manager? Try muCommander 0.9.0
If you frequently wail and gnash teeth at the prospect of opening two separate windows whenever you want to copy one file to another, than a dual-paned file manager is a must. They’re not exactly thin on the ground, but if you’re a multi-platform user you might prefer to stick to a single solution that will run across all your computers, be they Mac, Linux or Windows.
The solution in question is an open-source tool called muCommander 0.9.0, which has just received its first major update in over two years.
Add Ring3 API Hook Scanner to your security toolkit
Detecting rootkits and similar stealthy malware is always a challenge, so it can be a good idea to equip your PC with third-party tools which may be able to help.
And the latest candidate is the rather geekily-named Ring3 API Hook Scanner, a new NoVirusThanks release that will scan your system for some user mode hook types (inline, IAT, EAT) and report on anything it finds.
Pixelmator 2.1 supports Retina Display, iCloud sync
If you’re looking for a powerful image editing tool, the likes of Photoshop are going to spring to mind first. But there are plenty of much lower cost tool available that are more than adequate for the job, and one of these app is Pixelmator. This is an image editing package that has been around for some time, and the seemingly minor update to version 2.1 brings about the introduction of a number of important new features and options.
It makes sense for any image editing app to offer the best possible visual performance, and this is something that is greatly helped by the addition of support for Retina Display. This means that you can view the images you are working on greater detail than ever before and the UI is also made more accessible due to the clearer buttons and toolbars. There’s also support for Mountain Lion now, but there are more changes and additions to explore.
The problem with cloud security is...
Sharing details of the hack that “wiped his life” has earned Mat Honan a place in the annals of information system security; the specific interdependence of flawed authentication systems that cost him so dearly -- encompassing Apple, iCloud, Amazon.com, Gmail and more -- would probably still exist if Honan had not gone public. Wired has the full story for those who have not been watching it unfold on Twitter.
As news spread last weekend about how much of Honan’s data the hackers had wiped out -- by social engineering Apple Support into wiping his iPhone, iPad and MacBook -- the company quickly moved to suspend over-the-phone resetting of Apple ID passwords. Amazon also reacted and, according to a follow-up report in Wired: “handed down to its customer service department a policy change that no longer allows people to call in and change account settings, such as credit cards or email addresses associated with its user accounts”.
Google Android app translates photos
Google Translate for Android, today available as v2.5, packs some smoking new features: voice-to-text and text-to-voice translation in more than 64 languages and -- get this -- photos.
New features to this version include live/instant language translation results as you type. Allowing you to get the translated text sooner. For people who use the speech-to-translation option, you can now choose your dialect preference for your speech/voice input. For Japanese language users there is now support for handwriting multiple characters at once, allowing for words to quickly be written in for both travelers and native Japanese people.
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