The evasi0n iOS 6.x jailbreak now available
The lack of an untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.x has been frustrating for many iPhone/iPod touch/and iPad users desperate to liberate their devices, install all their beloved jailbreak apps, and apply their favorite tweaks. A friend of mine is keen to buy an iPhone 5, but hasn’t purely because he’s been waiting to make sure of an iOS 6 jailbreak.
Well the good news for him, and other users keen to remove the limitations on their Apple devices, is the evad3rs team has rolled out its highly anticipated evasi0n hack for all Apple hardware running iOS6-iOS6.1.
Enterprises embrace Apple like Microsoft
During the mainframe era, you could hear phrase: "No one is fired for buying IBM". In the 1990s and 2000s, the same could be said about Microsoft. As the so-called Post-PC era pushes forward, soon same can be said about Apple, if some IT organizations don't already. Gartner predicts that by 2014, enterprises will accept the fruit-logo as much as Windows, which is something scary for the company owning that market segment.
Consumerization of IT -- or bring your own device to work -- forced Apple on unwilling IT organizations. Now, after tasting the fruit, they like it. More of them than ever are willing to deploy Macs, which encroach on territory Microsoft seeks to claim for Windows 8.
The stripped-down Model A Raspberry Pi now available in Europe
The Model B Raspberry Pi is hardly expensive, costing just $35 (plus local taxes and shipping/handling fees). But if that’s a little too much for you, or you don’t need fancy features like Ethernet, and 256MB of RAM sounds more than adequate, you can now get your hands on the Model A Raspberry Pi for a bargain $10 cheaper.
Available from Premier Farnell/Element 14 and RS Components, the Model A version of the popular credit card-sized ARM GNU/Linux computer will cost just $25. Although it’s currently only available in Europe, it will be rolling out to the rest of the world shortly. If you live in the US you can pre-order one, but there will be a slight delay before the order can be fulfilled.
Vodafone UK customers get a taste of Windows Phone 8
On Monday, the United Kingdom arm of the global telecommunications company Vodafone revealed that, starting February 6, it will carry a Windows Phone 8 smartphone lineup. In merely two days, Vodafone UK customers will have access to five devices sporting Microsoft's new mobile operating system.
The UK carrier covers the market from top to bottom, with the Nokia Lumia 920 and the HTC Windows Phone 8X taking the role of the flagship Windows Phone 8 smartphones. The former ships in black and yellow, while the latter comes in California Blue or black.
Keep your passwords safe from prying eyes with KeePass 2.21
Open-source password management tool KeePass 2.21 has been released. Version 2.21, also available as a standalone portable build, adds a number of new features, including a hex viewer mode, support for a user-defined group separator in the Generic CSV Importer and various tweaks, improvements and bug fixes.
KeePass is designed to act a single, central repository for a user’s sensitive data, from logons to credit card details. This information is encrypted with a single, master password, allowing the user to securely lock away their personal details when not required.
Attribute Changer lets you tweak file attributes, date stamps, metadata and more
When Windows Explorer doesn’t immediately provide all the information you need on a file or folder, a quick right-click > Properties will give you easy access to assorted other low-level details: attributes, date stamps, metadata and so on. But the standard Properties dialog has several limitations. It doesn’t show all the file attributes, for instance (Hidden and System are missing, others are a little hidden), while details such as file stamps are displayed, but can’t be edited.
If you’d like to take better control of your file and folder properties, then, you’ll need to get a little help from a third-party tool. And Attribute Changer‘s lengthy feature list suggests it could be a great place to start.
Microsoft Research's Blink adds burst-shot mode to Windows Phone 8
In the camera department, Windows Phone 8 is an interesting piece of kit -- users have access to a high number of customizable options and there is even support for add-ons, or lenses, as Microsoft likes to call them. But one major feature is still missing to nail that perfect picture, namely burst-shot mode.
The software giant's research arm, Microsoft Research, has introduced a new app for Windows Phone 8 devices, dubbed Blink, that fills the gap in the otherwise competent camera bag. Blink works both as an individual app as well as a lens, and allows users to snap a significant number of shots, all in one go, and save the best one afterwards.
'Infinite' cloud storage service Bitcasa set to leave beta
There are no shortage of services that can backup your data to the cloud, but now the likes of Carbonite and Crashplan have a bit more competition in the market.
Over the weekend, Bitcasa, which has generated a lot of buzz recently, sent out an email to its early testers to alert them that the service would be leaving beta on Tuesday February 5th.
British Telecom cuts its broadband prices and announces BT Cloud, a new online storage service
BT has said it will end traffic throttling, remove usage caps on all but its entry level broadband packages, and slash the price too.
Its new Totally Unlimited Broadband offering will be priced from £16 a month for 16Mbps copper broadband, £23 for 38Mbps Infinity, and £26 for 76Mbps Infinity. New customers will also get the first six months free.
Lock down almost any PC with Deskman
If there’s an aspect of your PC which you don’t like then it can normally be changed very quickly: a right-click option here, maybe launch a Control Panel applet there, install a new program perhaps, and the system should soon be more suited to your needs.
But while this configurability is great on your own computer, it’s a real problem when you want a PC to be much more restrictive: a system which you’ll install in a school, say, or a business. What you’ll probably want to do then is set up some basic configuration, and make sure your users can’t do anything to change it -- and that’s where Deskman comes in.
'House of Cards' is just that for big media companies
The new made-for-Netflix drama "House of Cards" is aptly named for what it represents -- a fundamental shift in entertainment creation, distribution and consumption. The political thriller is by no means the first made-for-web TV show. But the production values, storytelling and intrigue meet, and in some ways surpass, those found from cable network productions. Yes, even Showtime's popular "Homeland".
I predict that Netflix has here what HBO did with "The Sopranos" in 1999, an industry-changing series. The D.C. drama, starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, shows how the entertainment industry is a house of cards new media distribution can topple. Good content can go to the web first, or only there.
avast! 8 beta is available -- get it NOW!
AVAST Software has released the first public beta of avast! 8 (or the first official one, anyway). Downloads are available for avast! Free Antivirus, avast! Pro Antivirus, avast! Premier Antivirus andavast! Internet Security.
The immediately obvious change is avast’s clean new GUI. The home page presents a simple front end to each product, dividing its functionality up into six tiles, but clicking one of the tabs at the top of the screen allows you to quickly drill down into the detail.
Twitter hacked -- approximately 250,000 accounts affected
If you've just received an email from Twitter warning that as a precautionary security measure the micro-blogging site has reset your Twitter account password, and inviting you to create a new one, you should take it seriously. Very seriously.
According to Twitter the service recently "detected an attack on our systems in which the attackers may have had access to limited user information -- specifically, your username, email address and an encrypted/salted version of your password (not the actual letters and numbers in your password)".
Android is winning the mobile platform wars
Some days the sorry state of news reporting really baffles me. Today I read numerous headlines claiming that Android tablet share surged past 50 percent in Q4, usurping iPad -- all using numbers I wrote about a day earlier. The one on CNN -- "IDC says Android is the new king of tablet market share" -- got to me. Immediate reaction: "What did I miss?" But in looking over the numbers, nothing really jumped out that IDC said any such thing. Sure iPad shipment share fell to 43.6 percent from 51.7 percent annually and from 46.4 percent sequentially. I chose to ask the analysts rather than follow the feeding frenzy.
"Android actually passed the 50 percent mark in 3Q 12", Tom Mainelli, IDC research director for tablets, says. Whoa, there's no new king at all. Android took the crown last summer. Still, that's a phenomenal achievement, setting me to write a story I couldn't imagine a year ago.
Best Windows 8 apps this week
Fourteenth in a series. Microsoft continues to publish updates for the apps that ship with Windows 8 natively. Both the finance and weather application have been updated this week. However, it is not clear what changed as Microsoft did not update the release notes yet.
As far as total numbers of applications go: the Windows Store in the US lists 21,208 free apps and 6,074 paid apps as of this morning for a total of 27,282 apps. That's an increase of 970 apps this week, which falls in line with past performances. While we have seen slower weeks, app numbers consistently grow by about a 1,000 each week.
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