Latest Technology News

Amazon has expanded its support options for its Amazon Web Services cloud offering, giving better free support to all customers and reducing the pricing of paid support tiers. The company is also renaming the paid tiers to better represent its target customers.

These tiers had been named Bronze, Gold and Platinum -- they are now referred to as Developer, Business, and Enterprise. Amazon expanded its paid support options back in January, and added third-party support and Trusted Advisor services in beta to its Gold and Platinum support levels. Thursday's moves take these offerings out of beta, and makes the higher-level support options affordable to a wider range of AWS customers.

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The slow drip of revelations about Flame have kept this piece of malware in the news for more than two weeks so it is worth reminding people that most antivirus programs now protect against Flame (ESET products detect it as Win32/Flamer.A). The coverage of Flame was boosted last week by a conveniently-timed assist from leaks that put Stuxnet back in the headlines.

Frankly, many antivirus experts were underwhelmed by reports that anonymous officials in the US. government were asserting that the industrial-sabotage malware known as Stuxnet was developed as part of attacks on Iran's industrial infractructure sanctioned by the President of the United States (a lot of us already assumed that was the case). There has also been a longstanding presumption of Israeli involvement in Stuxnet and so it was no surprise to hear "Stuxnet is our baby; Obama disclosed it for his reelection campaign" coming from Mossad agents. The third unsurprising revelation is that part of the Flame code is nearly identical to code found in Stuxnet.

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Say, it must be vacation time. The folks from Redmond, Wash. will trek to Los Angeles for a mysterious June 18 event. It's the right month to soak up Southern California sun. Timing surely isn't coincidental -- a week following Apple's swaggering MacBook Pro with Retina Display, iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion announcements and 9 days before Google's developer conference commences. Apple and Google chose San Francisco venues, while Microsoft will get its people out of the clouds into some blue skies (well, once the Marine layer blows off). I'm all for LA, since it's driving distance from San Diego. Not that I received an invitation.

But others who got one have shared the details, of which there are none. Microsoft is being uncharacteristically cagey, a corporate cultural quality that is in too short supply up North. Nothing builds buzz like mystery. With Apple's announcements behind, and Google I/O too far away, Microsoft has given bloggers, commenters, reporters and other pundits something to speculate about. Oh, what could it be?

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Acer America on Thursday announced the price and availability of the Aspire S5-391-9880 ultrabook. This particular PC stands out from the mass of selfsame thin and light PCs because of the interesting design Acer used to hide the machine's extra USB, HDMI and Thunderbolt ports.

With a thickness ranging from 0.44 inches at its thinnest point to 0.59 inches at its thickest, The S5 isn't the thinnest ultrabook going, and at 2.65 lbs, it's not the lightest. Nor is it the most powerful, capacious, or flashy, with a 3rd Generation Intel Core i7-35i7U ("Ivy Bridge") processor, a 256GB solid state drive, and a 13.3 inch (1366 x 768) backlit LED screen, a common feature to many Ultrabooks.

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Skype has just launched Skype 5.10 for Windows, and 5.8 for Mac, and both releases contain small but worthwhile tweaks that should make the upgrade worthwhile.

The Windows client sensibly merges the Facebook and Skype contacts into a single Contacts list, for instance. And if you’ve so many friends and colleagues that it becomes tricky to manage, no problem: it’s now possible to pin your most important contacts to the top, so they’re always immediately accessible.

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It is a dark day for the employees of the world's most-recognized phone maker in Espoo, Finland. Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO, announced today that 10,000 positions will be made redundant by the end of 2013. In what is being called part of a strategy to rescale Nokia's operations after terrible losses over the past four quarters, offices in Finland, Germany and Canada will close. Also executives Niklas Savander, Mary McDowell, and Jerri DeVard will step down.

The market reacted swiftly and painfully, driving down Nokia's share price about 18 percent to $2.30. In early trading, Nokia shares dropped their greatest percentage in 11 years.

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Open-source RTS games aren’t generally known for having quality graphics, even when finished, so you probably wouldn’t expect too much from an alpha build. Which is why 0 A.D. is a real surprise, thanks to visuals that are more impressive than many commercial products.

Okay, it’s true, the program has been in alpha for a very long time (running on Windows, the Mac and Linux must make for a complex development process), but the attention to detail is still impressive. Your citizens are people, not anonymous blobs. Buildings look as though like people live in them, with seating areas, pots and vases scattered around. And they live in a realistic and complex world, so for instance a desert will have sand, rocks, animals, perhaps palm trees which cast true shadows.

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Norwegian browser developer Opera Software ASA has released Opera 12 32-bit and Opera 12 64-bit for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Version 12 of the cult web browser, which is a major player in Eastern European markets, but enjoys more cult status worldwide with around 4 percent market share, introduces several major new features, including theme support and the ability to directly access the user’s web camera from the browser.

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Emptying your Recycle Bin and clearing away temporary files are a good first step in cleaning up your system, but there’s another type of hard drive clutter which is a little less obvious: duplicate files. These can consume a surprising amount of hard drive space, but fortunately tools like Anti-Twin make it easy to detect and delete them.

While there are plenty of duplicate file finders around, Anti-Twin scores points immediately for its lengthy list of configuration options. These don’t get in your way -- the default settings are sensibly chosen, and you can have the program checking your system within seconds – but if you have more complex requirements then Anti-Twin will do its best to fulfil them.

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Surely we can blame Tim Cook for that. Wait. You're too young to remember Compaq? Well, Apple's CEO worked there in the 1990s, and his leadership brings some decidedly bad Compaq habits from Texas to California. So for those of you thinking Apple is different under Cook than Steve Jobs, most definitely.

See, my eyes buggered when reading in iFixit's terrific MacBook Pro with Retina Display tear-down: "Unlike previous generations of MacBook Pros, the MacBook Pro with Retina display is guarded by Apple's proprietary pentalobe screws". Proprietary screws? That sounds familiar. Oh yeah. Compaq!

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Cisco knows that the cloud is worthless without networking, so its Cloud Connected Solution announced on Wednesday shouldn't surprise anyone. The company debuted both new cloud-enabled software for its ASR and ISR routers as well as a virtualized router aimed at extending virtual private networks to the cloud.

This new router software will be found on the ISR G2 platform, and a new Aggregation Services Router (ASR) platform based router, the ASR 1002-X was introduced. Cisco announced new Unified Computing System (UCS) E-Series Server Modules on the ISR G2, which is also on the way.

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I have been testing Windows 8 Release Preview 64-bit for over 10 days now. I have installed it onto a second partition on two computers: Lenovo ThinkPad T61 and desktop clone computer. On both PCs, Windows 7 is also installed as an alternative OS. I set up dual boot using free tool Easy BCD.

My conclusion so far: this is an operating system one can live with, but that hardly justifies upgrading from Windows 7. That is unless you have got a tablet computer and like the new Metro UI. Since I haven't got one, the new Metro UI for me is just a bother -- simply a hindrance for efficient work. Except for this new user interface there is actually hardly anything new, while on the other hand, not one single awkward or archaic concept has been replaced by something new.

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Email newsletters are about a half of a step above spam. If you purchase something online, install some piece of software, or sign up for some service and thoughtlessly breeze past the checkbox that says "Keep me informed about (product)!" you can very easily find yourself getting monthly, weekly, or in the case of the most egregious mailers (like Bed, Bath, and Beyond or Victoria's Secret) daily newsletters or circulars, and those things add up quickly.

Or, if you are a systems administrator of one sort or another, and you receive automatic server notifications in your inbox, you can go from inbox zero to a deluge of semi-important messages in no time at all.

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Not all of Apple’s new and upgraded products were even mentioned in Monday’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote. I was especially interested in Apple’s tower computer, the Mac Pro, which was both upgraded and killed at the same time.

The Mac Pro is Apple’s machine for media professionals. With up to 12 CPU cores, 64 gigs of RAM and eight terabytes of disk storage, it is a very powerful machine aimed at video editors, DNA sequencers, and anyone else who needs a supercomputer under their desk. And on Monday Apple upgraded the Mac Pro for the first time in two years, adding faster processors, better GPU options (it has, remember four PCI Express slots), and interesting SSD options. But what Apple didn’t upgrade was the Mac Pro’s USB ports to USB 3.0.

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Security software company AVG has taken an active role in providing security apps for the popular mobile platforms like iOS and Android, and has garnered approximately 114 million active users across them all.

Today, AVG has released its free alternative Web browser AVG Family Safety for Windows Phone, following yesterday's update to the software for iOS.

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