Latest Technology News

When CyberMatrix released Clipboard Magic 4 it was one of the better clipboard managers around, effortlessly capturing every text item copied to your clipboard and retaining them in a list for easy re-use later.

That was back in 2005, of course, and the intervening years have seen several significant issues appear with the program. If you’ve used it in the past, though, or just need a clipboard extension tool right now, then the good news is that CyberMatrix has finally released the first beta of Clipboard Magic 5.0, and it’s packed with fixes and valuable new features.

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Today, the Bluestacks team put out a quick announcement that they are accepting their first round of Beta testers to have a look at the next version of App Player, the Android virtualization environment for Windows and beyond.

This round of testers will be limited to just 100 who manage to sign up and get accepted into the program.

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Malware takes a variety of forms, starting with the humble virus, but one of the most recent strands is known as ransom malware. As the name suggests, this type of malware can block access to your computer, or offer only limited functionality, until some form of ransom is met -- this could be paying a ransom charge via SMS. The way these infections work mean that they can block access to your computer to the extent that you are not able to run your standard malware software. This is where Kaspersky WindowsUnblocker can help.

This is a free security tool from security experts Kaspersky and can be used even if your computer has been infected to the point that it cannot be booted in the usual way. The Kaspersky website details of how you can use the ISO file that you can download from Downloadcrew to create a bootable CD, DVD or USB drive that can be used to start your machine and then check for and remove ransom malware.

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Not since Office 2003 has Microsoft taken such an "ambitious undertaking" to reinvent the productivity suite. Today, PJ Hough, CVP of development for Microsoft's Office division, announced the "technical preview" for the suite's next version and then rudely announced it's "already full". Oh yeah? Why the frak tell us about it then?

It's that ambitious undertaking thing: "First time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project and Visio", Hough claims. There's more to that boast than marketing. Microsoft is prepping Office for the cloud-connected, post-PC era. Suddenly Office 15 is going to be a big release.

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Monday, Microsoft began the technical preview program of "Office 15," the next generation of Microsoft's Office ecosystem, which will include cloud services, servers, mobile and desktop clients. The big thing about Office 15 is that all these separate forms of Office will be simultaneously updated.

The Technical Preview period is when a very small group of users have access to the software in the understanding that they will not disclose any information about the early software. The beta testing period is expected to roll around some time in the summer, so somewhere in the range of four to five months from now.

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We've all been sharing minutes in our family plans. This worked in an age where our phones were dumb, and the most we did was text and occasionally check the web. Times have changed though with all these smartphones in the wild, but the carriers have not. Where's our shared data plans?

Color me shocked, but Verizon is joining that charge. The nation's largest carrier said last month that it was introducing pooled data plans this year, and a new post on Engadget indicates this may be coming sooner than we think. A new section lists "account level data plans". Like your minutes you pay an account level charge, then a per line charge.

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A group of fifteen technology and email providers announced plans Monday that aim to curb the spread of phishing e-mails by making it more difficult for scammers to impersonate legitimate e-mails. The agreement calls for the use of preexisting standards to authenticate messages on a much wider scale than ever before.

Currently, PayPal is one of the few companies using the technologies, known as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). Its work only has limited effectiveness though as so far it only has working partnerships with Yahoo and Google.

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Sales may be down, but don't write off the netbook yet. It's still a viable form factor for Windows PCs. Netbooks have a few key advantages going for them, and computer manufacturers should just stop and take a moment to consider them.

The three mobile PC form factors are netbook, notebook and tablet. I own all three now, and I like each one for different reasons. As a software developer, I saw the need to move away from the desktop and to finally get mobile. Since mobile PCs are the future, I felt this was the year for me to get some portable Windows computers so I could better test my software on these form factors. It's not rocket science: There's a big difference between laptop and desktop user experiences (there will be even more so with Windows 8). I needed to see how my software feels on these devices.

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Even though Yahoo remains one of the most popular sites on the Web after nearly seventeen years in the business, the company faces an uncertain future with nebulous branding, improper monetization, and unsteady restructuring efforts.

Yahoo has been attempting to streamline and reorganize in various ways to stay on top, but on Friday it announced it will be ending support for ten of its mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.

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Online password manager Lastpass has been updated to version 1.90.1. The cross-platform, multi-browser plug-in, also available as a separate download for 64-bit versions of Windows, adds one major new feature to this release: the ability to capture and securely store WiFi passwords for transferring to other computers.

The password manager allows users to securely store all their various online login details through one convenient, central location, encouraging them to use strong, unique passwords for each site they frequent for security purposes.

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It doesn’t take long to fill your PC’s desktop. Open a browser here, a word processor there, keep a copy of Explorer running in the background, Notepad maybe, and soon it’s starting to take a real effort to locate and switch to the application you need next.

WindowsPager could make your life a little easier, though, with its lightweight support for virtual desktops. Launch the program and you’ll see four new buttons on the taskbar, one for each desktop, and simply clicking the one you need will switch to it right away.

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Charles Duhigg and David Barboza’s recent New York Times article, "iEconomy: Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad", has created quite a firestorm. The article is a blistering expose of Apple and its Chinese manufacturing partners. For those that haven’t read it, please do. This is important, necessary journalism.

Apple apologists are quick to defend the company's behavior as "Me too". Critics call for boycotting Apple products. Holding Apple accountable is the right thing to do for all tech companies. We must see the apologist arguments for what they are -- fallacies that disempower us from action -- and hold up Apple as standard-bearer reformer for all Western technology manufacturing in China.

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Intel may still be a rookie in the mobile space, but its security software subsidiary McAfee has got Intel's Android project covered. On Monday, the security company launched its second-generation McAfee Mobile Security suite for smartphones and tablets, which includes compatibility with Intel-based Android devices.

The $30 subscription-based application supports Google Android 2.1–4.0, BlackBerry 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, and S60 3rd and 5th Edition, as well as Symbian ^3, and provides a suite of anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-theft, tools for mobile devices.

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We’ve reached the end of the first month of 2012 and this has been another busy week for software releases. If it seemed a little quiet on the browser updates recently, things changed this week with the release of Opera 11.61 FINAL as well as Opera Portable 11.61. Fans of cutting edge software may be more interested in Opera Next 12.00 build 1256, which is the first update to the beta channel of Opera for quite some time.

When browsing the Internet, speed is often the most important consideration, and Pale Moon is a speed optimized version of Firefox that includes support for extensions. This week saw the release of not only Pale Moon 9.1 and Pale Moon x64 9.1, but also portable versions in the form of Pale Moon x64 9.1 Portable and Pale Moon 9.1 Portable.

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For a company left for dead a little over a decade ago, Apple's return to relevancy and in some cases supremacy is stunning. Love or hate the company, few others have accomplished a similar feat. Now one of the last dominoes left to fall -- the enterprise sector -- is set to embrace the platform.

Forrester Research finds that one out of every five IT employees use one or more Apple products at work. This is not completely by their own request: half of all corporations of 1,000 employees or more now issue Macs to at least some of their work force, with an average of a 52 percent increase in deployments slated for 2012.

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