Latest Technology News

Following Photo Editor by Aviary, that was released earlier this month, yet another picture editing app is now available on Windows Phone 8 -- the Microsoft-developed FreshPaint. The new offering arrives on the tiled smartphone operating system six months after the launch of its Windows 8/RT sibling.

According to Microsoft, FreshPaint for Windows Phone 8 "lets you make original works of art, or turn your photos into beautiful paintings with just a few taps". The app is quite easy to use, allowing users to snap pictures, add filters on-the-fly (users can choose between three distinct ones when taking a photo) and create new digital paintings, as the main highlights.

I love free software but I’m not a huge fan of all the junk that often gets bundled with programs -- toolbars and the like -- or the changes that the software sometimes wants or tries to make to my search provider. The order, as far as I’m concerned, should always go like this -- Google first, Bing second, Ask never. But so long as the extras are clearly labeled, can be deselected without problem, and easily uninstalled afterwards if I accidentally miss one, I don’t have a real issue with this bundling. It provides a way to get the software for free and funds future development.

However, I’m a savvy computer user and as part of my job I install and uninstall a lot of free software, so I know what to look out for. For the less technically astute, it’s easy to get caught out and end up installing a lot of crap you don’t want. Which takes me to the point of this article -- Oracle and the Ask Toolbar.

The release of Windows 8.1, complete with the more tightly interwoven SkyDrive, brings Microsoft's cloud storage service to the fore. In a new blog post, Mona Akmal from the SkyDrive team explains how the service is able to make files available on all of your devices without eating up too much bandwidth. How is this done? It's largely down to "placeholder" files.

The obvious solution to making all SkyDrive files available on all of your devices would be to simply sync everything. But when it comes to tablets and phones, it is entirely possible that the amount of available local storage is far lower than the amount of cloud storage space that has been used. Placeholders are essentially "ghost" files that take up a fraction of the space of the original.

Information security consultancy MWR InfoSecurity is set to release drozer, its new open source Android testing tool, at Black Hat Arsenal in Las Vegas on August 1. Allowing dynamic analysis of applications running on Android devices, drozer is able to compromise a device using publicly available exploits so that organizations can understand how mobile exploits can threaten their business.

Based on the company's previous Mercury tool, drozer adds a number of new features, most notably the ability to get it on to an Android device remotely. Tyrone Erasmus, Senior Security Consultant at MWR InfoSecurity, says, "It is a major step forward as previously, various remote Android exploits were scattered across the internet and in some cases were not very reliable. Taking up Mercury's lead, drozer unifies these publicly available exploits into a single framework and improves the quality of the exploitation code and payloads available to the penetration tester".

Earlier today, following the "something BIG" teaser, Finnish maker Nokia took the wraps off a 4.7-inch, entry-level Windows Phone 8 handset, called Lumia 625. The new device features the largest panel that the company ever offered alongside the tiled smartphone operating system.

The Lumia 625 packs a 4.7-inch display with a resolution of 480 by 800 (201 pixels per inch density), that can be operated using gloves, and is powered by a 1.2 Ghz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, 512 MB of RAM and a non-removable 2,000 mAh battery. The device comes with 8 GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot (can extend the capacity by a further 64 GB).

The Linux community has been clamoring for a truly open-source Linux-based smartphone. While Android is a Linux based operating system, core Google apps are not open-source. And so, Canonical started development of a mobile operating system to meet the needs of the Linux community -- Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu Touch (sometimes called "Ubuntu Mobile" or "Ubuntu for Phones") has been available as a preview to testers. It has successfully been installed on devices such as the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus.

Unfortunately, Canonical is very limited in what devices can run its mobile OS -- most devices have locked bootloaders which prevent alternative operating systems. A locked-down phone is also in conflict with Linux-ideology. Today, Canonical officially launches a crowd-funding effort on Indiegogo to create its own phone without those roadblocks called Ubuntu Edge. There is only one problem -- it needs (in Dr. Evil’s voice) $32,000,000!

AT&T GoPhone allows customers to pickup no-contract phones, including smartphones, on a pre-paid plan. Now the mobile carrier is adding the Nokia Lumia 520 to the program beginning July 26.

The handset, which was announced back in February, has a four-inch screen, 8 GB of storage and is running on a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor.

On Monday, Finnish maker Nokia teased that "something BIG" will be unveiled tomorrow, on its blog, at 9 AM BST. At a first glance, the message can only mean one of two things -- either the company will announce a large device or reveal a pretty important upcoming app release.

Judging by the posted teaser (you can see the attached photo here), that is called "orange", the Finnish maker could also be hinting at an orange-colored version of one of its existing handsets.

After installing the latest Windows Phone 8 update (codenamed "General Distribution Release 2" or "GDR2"), which started rolling-out late last week, a number of HTC Windows Phone 8X users are reporting that their devices became unresponsive, with the screen turning black.

According to user reports, the issue presents itself while playing music on the Windows Phone 8X. And, at least for the moment, there appears to be no universal fix to cure it, with the usual reset methods yielding mixed results -- most affected users claim this does not help, with just one of them actually managing to "resurrect" the unresponsive device.

NirSoft has updated BlueScreenView, its "blue screen of death" troubleshooting tool, to version 1.52.

The program now includes three Google Search options, accessible both from the File and right-click context menus, to help you find out more about the currently selected crash.

The Apple Developer site remains inaccessible after a security breach on Thursday. The company is quick to point out that personal information accessed in a database was encrypted, but goes on to say the possibility that personal data had been accessed could not be ruled out. Apple is taking the intrusion very seriously it seems.

The fact that the site is inaccessible is down to Apple rather than being the direct result of an attack. Apple states that as soon as it was aware of the breach, the site was purposely taken down. This initially saw the site replaced with a message informing visitors that the site was down for maintenance, but was later replaced with a message from Apple that goes into more detail.

It’s spent a lengthy two years in beta, but RIOT 0.5 has finally been released. And it just might have been worth the wait.

The major addition in the new build of the image compression tool is Full Auto Mode. Reducing the size of JPG, PNG and GIF files can be a complex business, and if you’re put off by talk of Chroma subsampling, Encoding and Color Quantization algorithms then that’s now easily avoidable. The program launches in Full Auto Mode, chooses all the options for you, and at a minimum all you have to do is click "Save".

Yesterday my colleague Mark Wilson wrote an excellent article discussing online pornography and the problems of policing it. This came in the wake of UK Prime Minister David Cameron calling for internet companies to do more to block porn on the web.

Today, Cameron announces that every British household will have pornography automatically blocked by their internet provider, although customers can choose to switch off the "family friendly" filters if they so choose.

After spending a number of years working in the educational tech sector, I can safely pinpoint the two camps that make up the meandering discussion about 1:1 computing plans for K-12 education today. On the one side, we have eager innovators who are determined to place a device in each student's hand -- even if that device fulfills nothing more than a checkbox on an administrator's 'five year outlook' plan.

And in contrast, we have the technical neophytes who are well entrenched in their opposition to devices in the classroom. These folks are the ones most likely to be ingrained in the "industrial force-feeding" approach to education, which by most accounts, is falling flat on its face. As the US continues to slide in education, most recently ranked 17th globally, the debate is no longer whether or not we need a wholesale adjustment of how we teach our youngest minds. Much more importantly, the discussion should be laser focused on how we get US education out of its growing rut.

Filtering web content is always something of a sticky topic, and there are two very vocal sides to the argument. In the blue corner (red and blue are not being used in a political sense here -- if only because the blue represents right-wing parties in the UK and the more left-leaning in the US) we have those who advocate freedom of speech online, the right for anyone to say whatever he or she wants. In the red corner are those who feel that there is a need for policing, control and regulation.

It is certainly a difficult balance to strike. It would be all but impossible to draw a baseline level of sensibilities that should be catered to -- whatever form of control may be put in place will be seen as draconian in its severity by some, and pathetically lenient by others.