Paragon Software has released Image Backup for Windows 8, a simple backup tool that runs on Windows 8/ Server 2012 and supports Microsoft’s new Resilient File System, ReFS.

If you’ve used any recent Paragon backup product then you’ll feel at home right away, as the new product uses Paragon’s standard front end menu, which quickly points you to the features you need.

I love underdogs. Whether it’s David vs. Goliath, Rocky vs. Apollo Creed or Microsoft (circa 1992) vs. IBM, I enjoy rooting for the plucky upstart. Which is why I find the resurgence of interest surrounding Research in Motion's beleaguered PlayBook tablet all the more satisfying: Here is a product that stumbled out of the gate and was left for dead, only to slowly crawl its way back into the ring of respectability through a combination of raw talent and sheer force of will.

Make no mistake: The PlayBook was an impressive device when it first shipped in April, 2011. Bristling with class-leading technology, RIM’s first foray into the tablet market should have been an instant hit. However, the software half of RIM’s winning formula still wasn’t fully baked, with some glaring omissions (email, calendar) and few third party apps to speak of. And, in a truly ironic twist, many early critics actually panned the device for its smallish 7-inch form factor.

Who doesn’t love a good tweaking tool? Everyone likes the idea of being able to boost the performance of their computer without having to shell out on potential expensive hardware and Auslogics BoostSpeed is an extremely accomplished utility that enables you to do just this. The latest version of the program is a major upgrade that sees not only added support for Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 but also new options that make the app and even more powerful tool for cleaning up and optimizing your computer.

The imminent release of Windows 8 is big news for all software developers, and the latest release of Auslogics BoostSpeed not only supports the operating system, it also allows for control of Metro processes as added new tweaks to the Tweak Manager (Yes, we know Microsoft dropped the Metro name). The existing cleanup tools have been enhanced so you will notice that there are new categories available in the Registry Cleaner, Track Eraser and Disk Cleaner making it easier than ever to protect your privacy and delete sensitive data -- these improvements extend to the wiping of USB drives.

Modders everywhere rejoice: CyanogenMod 9 (CM9) is now a “stable” release for popular Android smartphones, according to a blog post by CyanogenMod team. CyanogenMod 9 is developed from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), having Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as its starting point.

The guys behind the project announced that the stable release “will be the end of the line for the ICS branch” and that they will only fix critical bugs from now on. As well, the team will focus only on CyanogenMod 10 and maintaining the CyanogenMod 7 (based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread) codebase. The other great piece of news comes from the development on CyanogenMod 10, which is based on Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean.

In May we read that game maker Blizzard, developer of a series of popular games including World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Starcraft, was hacked, but that turned out to just be individual compromised accounts from some of its users. Now we read, from Blizzard itself rather than a third party, that they have been hacked and information compromised on their networks. So how are they doing with the breach?

"This week, our security team found an unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard", the company says. So did they respond well? It seems they got the jump on things and responded quickly, a smart move: "We quickly took steps to close off this access and began working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate what happened."

If you frequently wail and gnash teeth at the prospect of opening two separate windows whenever you want to copy one file to another, than a dual-paned file manager is a must. They’re not exactly thin on the ground, but if you’re a multi-platform user you might prefer to stick to a single solution that will run across all your computers, be they Mac, Linux or Windows.

The solution in question is an open-source tool called muCommander 0.9.0, which has just received its first major update in over two years.

Detecting rootkits and similar stealthy malware is always a challenge, so it can be a good idea to equip your PC with third-party tools which may be able to help.

And the latest candidate is the rather geekily-named Ring3 API Hook Scanner, a new NoVirusThanks release that will scan your system for some user mode hook types (inline, IAT, EAT) and report on anything it finds.

If you’re looking for a powerful image editing tool, the likes of Photoshop are going to spring to mind first. But there are plenty of much lower cost tool available that are more than adequate for the job, and one of these app is Pixelmator. This is an image editing package that has been around for some time, and the seemingly minor update to version 2.1 brings about the introduction of a number of important new features and options.

It makes sense for any image editing app to offer the best possible visual performance, and this is something that is greatly helped by the addition of support for Retina Display. This means that you can view the images you are working on greater detail than ever before and the UI is also made more accessible due to the clearer buttons and toolbars. There’s also support for Mountain Lion now, but there are more changes and additions to explore.

Sharing details of the hack that “wiped his life” has earned Mat Honan a place in the annals of information system security; the specific interdependence of flawed authentication systems that cost him so dearly -- encompassing Apple, iCloud, Amazon.com, Gmail and more -- would probably still exist if Honan had not gone public. Wired has the full story for those who have not been watching it unfold on Twitter.

As news spread last weekend about how much of Honan’s data the hackers had wiped out -- by social engineering Apple Support into wiping his iPhone, iPad and MacBook -- the company quickly moved to suspend over-the-phone resetting of Apple ID passwords. Amazon also reacted and, according to a follow-up report in Wired: “handed down to its customer service department a policy change that no longer allows people to call in and change account settings, such as credit cards or email addresses associated with its user accounts”.

Google Translate for Android, today available as v2.5, packs some smoking new features: voice-to-text and text-to-voice translation in more than 64 languages and -- get this -- photos.

New features to this version include live/instant language translation results as you type. Allowing you to get the translated text sooner. For people who use the speech-to-translation option, you can now choose your dialect preference for your speech/voice input. For Japanese language users there is now support for handwriting multiple characters at once, allowing for words to quickly be written in for both travelers and native Japanese people.

The news has already broken. Three days ago in Beijing, Lenovo unveiled the latest ThinkPad ultrabook, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Last night, the company repeated its performance in a ceremony in New York city to simultaneously celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ThinkPad line of notebook computers, and officially unveil to the U.S. some new products. Chief among the new devices was the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

The X1 Carbon is a 14-inch Ultrabook that weighs less than three pounds thanks to its carbon fiber chassis. It offers an eight hour battery, optional 3G mobile broadband, 720p face-tracking camera, fingerprint scanner, backlit keyboard, and a glass multi-touch touchpad. The base specs of the device include a 1.7GHz Intel Core i5 CPU with 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD for $1,299. While modest specs for a baseline, they can be upgraded to an Ivy Bridge Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.

Social media analytics company Simply Measured released a study this week that illustrates the importance of brand presence on Facebook's photo-sharing social network Instagram. According to the survey, the nearly two- year old social network, with its 80 million users, has managed to attract the attention of 40 percent of the top 100 global brands.

Instagram’s adoption accounts for 40 percent of the Interbrand 100, which is actually the lowest in the study, but it has the most impressive adoption rate, when considering the background of the company. Instagram is currently owned by Facebook, through a $1 billion deal announced 4 months ago. The reason why a billion dollars was significant was because Instagram only had a dozen or so employees, and hadn’t generated any revenue.

NASA's Curiosity rover landed on the surface of Mars on Sunday night, and almost immediately began transferring back to Earth the first images of the Martian surface. But for its reported $2.5 billion price tag, the images have a little less clarity than you might expect.

Curiosity's cameras have a maximum resolution of two megapixels. For perspective's sake, modern smartphones typically are 8MP or more. The result will be images that are sharper than those of Martian rovers past, yet lack the clarity that would be expected of a modern research craft.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly unvield a new partnership with the Microsoft Corporation. Working together, New York Police Department and Microsoft developed a crime prevention and counterterrorism information analysis platform they call Domain Awareness System. When fully deployed, the new system will provide NYPD investigators and analysts a comprehensive view of potential threats and criminal activity. DAS will help aggregate and analyze public safety data in real time.

DAS takes tips, emergency response calls, and other live incident and safety reports and automatically ties them to richer amounts of information. A network of smart CCTV cameras, license plate readers, speed cameras, and pre-existing cross-agency database information is filtered to relate to those incidents and tips that match. Law enforcement can then develop live real-time incident reports that can be transmitted to police in the field.

So, you’ve made your choice between Mac and PC and decided that OS X is the operating system for you. But whatever personal choice you may have made, there are various reasons why you might need to turn to Windows software from time to time. While it is less common with big-name applicaions these days, there are still numerous titles that are not available for OS X. If your work requires you to use such a program, PlayOnMac could be just what you have been looking for.

Working much like the likes of Wine -- in fact the software is based on Wine -- this is an emulation tool that enables you to run Windows software on your Mac. This is not a unique piece of software by any means, but PlayOnMac is designed to be easier to use than Wine, and it does not have a price tag like the comparable Parallels does.