Latest Technology News

The new, targeted, high-tech, military grade malicious code such as Stuxnet, Duqu and Flamer dominates security news. So imagine our surprise when an AutoCAD worm, written in AutoLISP, the scripting language that AutoCAD uses, suddenly showed a big spike in one country on ESET’s LiveGrid two months ago, and this country is Peru.

We have seen other small number of infections of ACAD/Medre.A in other countries, but they are all in regions that are near Peru or have a large Spanish speaking contingent. The odd one out in the infection table would be the People’s Republic of China, but not quite so weird when we started to analyze the worm based on this sudden spike. More about China will follow later.

Continue reading →

There was nothing really wrong with Tumblr’s previous iOS app. It offered all the features you’d expect, such as the ability to access your dashboard, create a post, manage multiple blogs and view and reply to messages. The interface was straightforward, intuitive and unmistakably Tumblr.

Version 3.0, however, is just so much better in every way. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up, so is faster, sleeker, easier to use and more in line with its Android counterpart, which itself was updated a couple of months ago.

Continue reading →

FireTrust has today revealed MailWasher 2012 Free, a new version of its popular spam filter. The latest release will provide all the features of the full commercial MailWasher Pro edition for its first 10 days of use, but after that introduces four main restrictions.

There’s no Recycle Bin, which means you can’t browse or restore deleted emails. Preview options are limited, so it may be more difficult to manually determine whether a particular message is spam. Technical support is unsurprisingly reserved for paying customers. And, probably most crucially, the program will be limited to checking 1 email address only, perhaps a deal-breaker for many people.

Continue reading →

The Metro user interface is without doubt the most controversial feature of Microsoft's upcoming operating system Windows 8. When you dive deeper into the criticism that Metro faces, you notice that one argument stands out among the majority of critics: Metro is for tablets and touch-devices and not the desktop.

While it is possible to use Metro with a mouse and keyboard, its big buttons and controls, like the Charms menu and swiping motions, do cater to an audience that uses touch-devices. When you look closer, you will also notice that Metro does not really offer anything that desktop users can't do on the PC or on the Internet as well, oftentimes even better.

Continue reading →

Hometalk, a year-old home improvement-themed social network, underwent a total redesign and re-launched on Thursday in hopes of making its content easier to access, and to keep its roughly 100,000 members stuck to the site longer.

The site is designed for homeowners to share pictures, videos, ideas, and conversations about general design and repair themes, including (but not limited to) topics like flooring, gardening, remodeling, painting, and more. This is done in very much the traditional social networking fashion, with user profiles building up networks of friends/followers, and sharing posts based heavily upon photographs. With this redesign, Hometalk has clearly taken note of Pinterest's success, and it includes a new feature called, simply, "Saving." With this feature, users can save any post or photo from other users on a "Virtual Clipboard," similar in both name and design to Pinterest's "Virtual Pinboard."

Continue reading →

Microsoft’s Hollywood announcement Monday of its two Surface tablet computers was a tactical triumph but had no strategic value for the world’s largest software company because the event left too many questions unanswered. If I were to guess what was on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s mind it was simply to beat next week’s expected announcement of a Google branded tablet running Android. Microsoft, already playing catch-up to Apple’s iPad, does not want to be seen as following Google, too. So they held an event that was all style and no substance at all.

This is not to say that Microsoft shouldn’t make a tablet and couldn’t make a good one, but this particular event proved almost nothing.

Continue reading →

Microsoft on Thursday released the Xbox SmartGlass Software Development Kit (SDK) to partners that have agreements to develop Xbox games and entertainment applications for the Xbox 360.

The device-agnostic SmartGlass application was first revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo earlier in June, showing how users will eventually be able to pair their tablet or smartphone with their Xbox 360 for enhanced content consumption and gaming. Now that Microsoft's Surface and Windows Phone 8 initiatives have been revealed, the SmartGlass project has begun to take clearer shape.

Continue reading →

Most free recovery tools focus on undeleting files only. As its name suggests, though, Eassos PartitionGuru Free goes a little further: the program can recover anything from individual files to entire partitions, and it has a few other useful features thrown in, too.

That’s the theory, at least. In practice the free edition of the program is a little restricted, and can’t recover data on USB keys, GPT disks, or regular drives which don’t use 512-byte sectors. If that’s not going to affect you, though, PartitionGuru does otherwise have some interesting functionality which you might find very useful.

Continue reading →

It’s been public knowledge for a while now that Mozilla intends to provide a uniform interface for Firefox across all platforms. The aim of the Australis project is to ensure that the browser looks and feels the same just about everywhere (as much as possible, anyway), and you can read more at MozillaWiki.

This is no longer just theory, though. Jared Wein, a Software Engineer at Mozilla, has written a blog post with an image of the new Australis design (or the new curvy tab shape, anyway), which he says aims to bring “more customizability in a cleaner and fresher user interface”. And if that’s not enough, he’s also created a test Firefox 16.01 build so that you can view it for yourself.

Continue reading →

Something at Microsoft has changed, and it's rather startling. The company so long risk-adverse takes some really big ones -- with Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Surface tablets high among them. Windows 8 radically changes the user interface, which already irks some long-time customers, particularly in businesses. Windows Phone 8 is incompatible with every WP handset ever sold, even two-and-a-half-month old HTC Titan II or Nokia Lumia 900. Surface competes with OEM partners, and some already complain Microsoft blind-sided them. This isn't your father's Microsoft, or elder sibling's.

For years, Microsoft sought to preserve the status quo, and still does. But no longer is CEO Steve Ballmer and his top guns willing to stand still while the market moves forward. IBM chose status quo during the computing-era transition from mainframe to PC -- cater to existing customers and preserve existing revenue streams. For years, Microsoft followed similar course during the early transition from the PC to the cloud-connected device era. No longer. Microsoft takes big risks to preserve its computing relevance, and they'll either sink the company or preserve its place in the new world order. The question: How does it all affect you?

Continue reading →

Already one of our favorite free disk imaging tools, Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 Free has today been improved further via a maintenance upgrade.

The headline addition this time around is support for Windows 8. There is a wrinkle in the small print, where Paragon say “Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012 Free edition has been tested on Windows 8 Developer Preview and Consumer Preview” -- so presumably if you’ve moved on to the latest Release Preview then there’s still the possibility of issues. (Although, to be fair, if you want guaranteed data security then you probably shouldn’t be using the buggy and unfinished Windows 8 in the first place.)

Continue reading →

Microsoft revealed its plans for the next generation of Windows Phone on Wednesday, which includes broadening hardware support, revising the user interface, and adding a couple of new features that bring Windows Phone up to speed with the Android platform.

Unfortunately, though, no current Windows Phone devices will receive an upgrade to the new operating system. Instead, they will receive the graphical overhaul of the new Start screen in a sub-update called "Windows Phone 7.8."

Continue reading →

After seeing the latest information about Microsoft's new Surface tablet computers and also reading Joe Wilcox's latest article about them, I finally get Microsoft's mindset -- and I am impressed. So what does this Windows developer think of Surface? Need a tablet to appreciate what it is all about.

I don't have deep pockets, so I try to use my computers as long as possible, but after hearing about Windows 8, I knew I needed to get a tablet as soon as possible. Something big was afoot! Fortunately Microsoft made is easier for me when the Microsoft Store had an amazing deal on an ExoPC Windows tablet for only $399. I jumped on that deal, and I think it was the right one.

Continue reading →

Is your hard drive a little messy, cluttered with files that aren’t where you’d like them to be? You’re not alone, and a part of the problem is that Windows really doesn’t make it very easy to clear up. No matter how many times you drag and drop a ZIP file into your Archives folder, say, Explorer never learns that’s where they’re kept, and so you have to move them there manually. Every. Single. Time.

Don’t give up just yet, though – help is at hand in the shape of QuickMove, a simple free tool which aims to speed up your file management. Teach the program where you’d like to keep particular files or file types and you’ll be able to move them all to their destination, in just a couple of clicks.

Continue reading →

At the Windows Phone Summit in San Francisco today, Microsoft provided the first look at its upcoming update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8.

Microsoft has unveiled just a few of the banner features that will be included in the next versions of Windows Phone 8. Conveniently, there are eight major parts of the company's announcement today.

Continue reading →