It's tough at the top for anti-virus products
Results of independent tests by AV-Comparatives looking at the real world protection offered by leading packages show that competition is as fierce as ever.
The tests use 569 real-world malicious URLs. 138 of these are blocked by a Windows 7 system with all its patches up to date, leaving 431 to be intercepted by security software. The tests use MS Security Essentials as a baseline providing a 95.4 percent level of protection. You can see the full results on an interactive chart but it’ll come as no surprise that it's all pretty close.
Dropbox update delivers performance improvements, better notifications
Popular cloud backup and storage tool Dropbox 2.2.4 FINAL has been released for Windows, Mac and Linux. The app, also available on iOS and Android, allows users to backup, sync and share data across a wide variety of devices via a central Dropbox folder.
Version 2.2 comes with a new notifications badge, a refactored core sync engine, improved memory usage, start-up performance improvements and Finder icon overlay enhancements.
Sex and internet rank above food and shelter for 42 percent of UK men
Network products maker TP-LINK has released the results of a survey into the importance of the internet amongst UK consumers. It shows that reliable access to the internet is now among the highest priorities of many people.
Amongst men 42 percent rank sex and internet access as more important than shelter and food. Though this may well tell us more about British men than it does about the web. More interesting is that 51 percent of respondents say that thanks to internet access they've strengthened their friendships and a quarter say that it gives them an enhanced sense of belonging. However, only seven percent say that the web has brought a positive change to their love lives -- so much for all those online dating sites then.
Sandboxie adds full 64-bit protection, improves compatibility
Sandboxie 4.02 is the latest edition of the powerful shareware sandbox, which allows you to run programs in an isolated environment where they’re unable to affect your main system.
The new build enhances security by dropping the use of unofficial kernel hooks. Programs running under Sandboxie now have no permissions and can’t access or manipulate any objects out of their own memory space.
Freemium developers are doing it all wrong
Am I naive in thinking that Freemium-based games should blow your socks off with an amazing gameplay experience during your first taste of the free game period?
This certainly doesn’t seem to be the case given nearly all the titles I'm seeing so far. What I’m invariably experiencing is a title that’s unremarkable, often tedious and bland by all measures, with the expectation for you to pay money to make it slightly more bearable.
Macrium Reflect Free improves Explorer integration, updates recovery builder tool
Paramount Software UK has released Macrium Reflect Free 5.2, a brand new version of its free-for-personal-use drive imaging tool for Windows. Version 5.2 makes the tool easier to use from within Windows itself thanks to tighter shell integration, plus updates the recovery builder tool to support the latest version of Windows PE.
Macrium Reflect Free allows users to create, restore and browse disk images of entire partitions or disk drives. Thanks to recently added support for Windows PE, users can also easily use the program outside of Windows, enabling them to recover images even when their computer won’t boot.
So long Google, Digg Reader marches forward
With the looming death of Google Reader, services are tripping over one another to fill the rather large shoes that the search giant has elected to leave behind. Today Digg announces its latest move towards the RSS future with an update, and included information regarding what the company's progress has wrought.
Digg lets us know that "for our first public release, in time to (just) beat the shutdown of Google Reader, our aim has been to nail the basics: a web and mobile reading experience that is clean, simple, functional, and fast. We’re also introducing a tool that allows users to elevate the most important stories to the top".
Walmart to sell Chromebooks next to motor oil and pregnancy tests
Today, Google announces that it has partnered with additional brick-and-mortar retailers to sell its Chromebooks. Walmart and Staples are being announced as immediate new partners, while select Office Depot, OfficeMax, Fry’s and TigerDirect stores will be coming later. Walmart is only carrying the Acer C7, while the other retailers will sport a mix of brands, including Acer, HP and Samsung. This is a good move for Google as it is sure to increase awareness of the company's ChromeOS and Chromebook line of computers. Currently, in the USA, Best Buy is the only physical retailer selling Chromebooks.
Google has also added new retail partners outside of the USA -- Tesco in the UK, Mediamarket and Saturn in the Netherlands, FNAC in France, Elgiganten stores in Sweden and JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman in Australia.
Adobe Creative Cloud launches Windows 8 apps
Adobe caused a fair amount of controversy over forcing users into subscription services, while Microsoft Office continues to provide an option to its customers. Now Adobe rolls out its latest Creative Cloud model, in the form of Windows 8 apps -- yes, you still need to pay a subscription fee.
The new rollout comes with several options, including the flagship Premiere Pro CC, which packs in new features for video editors, such as enhanced GPU support, redesigned timeline with new shortcuts and new selective paste attributes, new closed captioning capabilities and additional codec options.
Skype video messaging emerges from beta
A big reason that video phones never took off was that many people didn't want the person calling to see them. It's understandable really -- no one wants to take a call from their boss while wearing nothing but their underwear.
Skype somewhat solves this problem with the ability to schedule a call for when you are looking your best, and now the Microsoft-owned communications app allows users to send video messages for those times when it isn't convenient to chat face to face.
Caesium can batch compress JPEGS by up to 90%
When you save a JPEG it’s easy to just accept your default image options, click File > Save and get on with your next task. But that probably means you’ll always be using the same JPEG compression level, and unless you’ve tuned this to an optimum figure, your final images could be anything up to ten times larger than they need to be.
Could this be a problem for you? The open source Caesium provides an easy way to find out. Point the program at a selection of images (PNG, BMP and WMF are supported, as well as JPG) or an entire folder, and it can quickly recompress them all with a lower quality setting, before reporting on any savings it’s achieved.
Microsoft beefs up Windows Phone speech recognition -- twice as fast, more accurate
Despite its limitations, the Windows Phone voice assistant has at least one good thing going for it. The speech recognition service quickly understands words, sentences and commands, with answers to questions like "What is the weather in New York" popping up in a matter of seconds.
Microsoft still hasn't tackled the feature set but, today, the software giant announced that the Windows Phone voice assistant is now even "more accurate and twice as fast". According to the Bing Speech Team, DNNs (Deep Neural Networks) fuel the under-the-hood improvements, which have quietly rolled out over the past couple of weeks.
WYSIWYG Web Builder 9 adds ribbon interface, Google Web Fonts support
Pablo Software Solutions has released WYSIWYG Web Builder 9, a major new version of its DTP-style web building tool for Windows users. Version 9 debuts a completely redesigned user interface based on the ribbon found in Microsoft Office and other products. It also adds support for Google Web Fonts, bundles new and improved navigation objects, animations and transitions and supports CMS plug-ins for the first time.
The tool, which costs $45, aims to make web design easier by providing a desktop-publishing style approach to building web pages. In all, over 150 new features have been added to this release.
Find out how safe your PC is with OPSWAT Security Score
OPSWAT has released the final version of its free Security Score product, a simple tool which scans your PC, reports on any security issues it finds, and provides basic advice on how to resolve them.
The program is exceptionally easy to use. There’s no complex interface to figure out, no settings to consider, almost nothing to do at all: just launch Security Score, it scans your PC, and returns with the details in just a few seconds.
Microsoft Surface Pro gets even stiffer competition from new 11.6-inch Apple MacBook Air -- which one would you buy?
To the untrained eye, this comparison appears to be moot. After all, the Surface Pro is a tablet and the 11.6-inch MacBook Air is, indeed, an ultrabook. Traditionally, the two types of devices rarely have anything in common. Tablets offer touchscreens, portability and great battery life while ultrabooks usually fail to deliver the same level of versatility. So how can one pit the Surface Pro against the smaller MacBook Air?
As my colleague Joe Wilcox explained almost seven months ago, the two devices actually have a great deal in common. The Microsoft-branded tablet kicks off at $899, can be coupled with a dedicated keyboard, has expansion ports, runs a fully-fledged operating system and, to its disadvantage, delivers pretty appalling battery life. The Apple-branded ultrabook packs similar hardware specifications, starts at $999 but offers a built-in keyboard from the get-go. And, in the meantime, the fruit company upgraded its device to Intel "Haswell" Core processors which provide a tremendous bump in battery life. Now, more than ever, choosing between the two is a very tough call.
© 1998-2024 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.