Latest Technology News

While cloud storage may have taken off in a big way, most backup tools are yet to catch up: if you can save your target files to anything more than an FTP server then you’re probably very lucky.

Some backup utilities are now giving you more options, though, and Duplicati is a great example, with the program supporting backups to Amazon S3, Windows Live SkyDrive, Google Docs, Rackspace Cloud Files, WebDAV and FTP servers, as well as local and network drives. And that’s just the start of the program’s many configuration options.

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Your desktop wallpaper may be something you don’t give much thought to, but whether you have chosen to stick with a stock image, or have adorned your desktop with a photograph of loved ones or a favorite place, this is an image you are going to be seeing on a daily basis. It is easy to become bored of constantly seeing the same image, and being bored is not a mood that is conducive to being productive, whatever you are meant to be doing. Kuvva is a free app that helps to alleviate the boredom by providing you with a new wallpaper every day.

This is not exactly a new idea as there are numerous wallpaper changing applications available; but Kuvva is a little different. Rather than relying on your providing a series of images that can be rotated as your desktop wallpaper, Kuvva gets its images from an online repository that is constantly updated by artists, designers and photographers. The app takes care of changing your wallpaper for you, so when you switch on your computer in the morning you can be greeted by a new and inspiring work of art.

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Sony Electronics rang in 2012 with a surprising discount that may foreshadow much about the tablet market this year. Overnight I received email from a Sony spokeswoman saying the company "has permanently dropped the price of the Sony Tablet S by $100 starting today". This follows what seemed like a temporary $50 discount right before Christmas. If you paid $499.99 or $599.99 before Santa's sleigh ride, 16GB Sony S is now $399.99 and 32GB 499.99.

SonyStyle Store doesn't yet list the new pricing as permanent, merely "save $100 instantly". "On top of these savings, Sony is also currently offering (for a limited time) a store credit and five free Video Unlimited movie rentals, five free PlayStation Store game downloads and 180 days of free Music Unlimited service with the purchase of a Tablet", the spokeswoman says.

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BetaNews reader-appreciation week continues with a third contest. We'd like to give one lucky reader the Google-branded, Samsung-manufactured Galaxy Nexus. But you'll have to work for it, by, first, offering New Year's resolutions that Google should make in 2012. We're giving away a Google phone after all.

Earlier today, Colleague Ed Oslwald offered resolutions for Apple, and I'm working on my annual list for Microsoft. Google will come from you, and we ask that you make serious resolutions -- things that could improve the core business, Google products and services and relationship to customers, among others. This is your chance to tell Google execs what you want from the company this year and possibly win Galaxy Nexus in the process.

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This is the first year Apple will operate without its co-founder and leader Steve Jobs. To move forward without him, what does the company need to do in the new year? While I've never fancied myself a prognosticator, I do have a few suggestions on what the Cupertino, Calif. company needs to do.

Some have to do with changing the way Apple works and does business; others require some hard decisions on Apple's product lines. Either way, 2012 will give us the first glimpse whether or not Apple can move on from its past and iconic leader.

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Most programs can be relied on to act with reasonable decency when asked to remove themselves from your computer. That’s what the built-in uninstaller is for, after all, but sometimes it’s not so straightforward.

What do you do when you’ve exhausted all normal avenues for removing unwanted software from your computer? You turn to this feature -- a showcase of the best free tools for removing stubborn apps from your Windows-powered PC.

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So much for Apple's voice command/response technology Siri.

Among this year's holiday presents, our family received a gift card for Italian eatery Buca di Beppo, which my daughter gladly used to go out to dinner with a friend. So last night, they're ready to drive but no one knows to where. She pulls out her iPhone 4S and speaks "directions to Buca di Beppo", which Siri can't understand and repeatedly gives meaningless results when she tries again.

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Microsoft's Internet Explorer team announced on Friday that IE9 has passed both Firefox and Chrome in market share, and will soon be the number one browser among Windows 7 users according to data from Net Applications.

Though data from the month of December is not yet complete, the Internet Explorer team expects IE9 to close out the year with a quarter of the browser market as users upgrade from Internet Explorer 8.

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Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday is not until January 10, but the company is not waiting to patch a critical flaw in computers with the ASP.NET framework installed. The issue affects all currently supported versions of Windows, according to a security bulletin from the company.

According to Microsoft's description of the flaw, an issue exists in how the framework handles certain web request. If an attacker sends a request in a certain way, it could allow for elevation of privilege that may result in the execution of arbitrary code. The flaw is not easy to exploit, however, as the attacker needs to know some information about the victim.

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Hardware failure, malware, human error or software bugs: your files are at constant risk from a whole host of potential calamities. So it’s really a very good idea to create regular backup images of your system.

Of course with the wrong backup software that can be a constant hassle, but install O&O DiskImage 5.6 Professional and the program will create complete images of individual partitions or complete hard drives in just a click or two. And while it would normally cost you $29, Downloadcrew’s Giveaway site offers the entire package, no charge at all, for this New Year’s Eve only (or more specifically, from 23:59 Central European Time on December 30 2011, to 23:59 on December 31).

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Verizon's claim of being the nation's most reliable network sure took a hit this month. At least three separate outages occurred during December, frustrating customers. The carrier's statement, however, could not be more non-committal, as it blames the outages on the perils of building out its 4G LTE network.

"Being a pioneer comes with growing pains", the carrier says in a statement. "The recent issues that affected our customers' 4GLTE service were unforeseen despite careful, diligent planning, deployment and ongoing upgrade programs". Each of the three outages were blamed on different issues, which engineers have since remedied to prevent those issues from occurring again.

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Blending multiple images of a scene into a single panorama is one of those tasks that might seem easy -- at first, anyway. After all, if you could just align one image over another at a point where they share some common feature then that’s the job almost finished. Right?

If you’ve ever tried to do this manually, though, you’ll know the reality can be far more complex. There are barrel distortion, vignetting, and many other camera and lens issues to consider. And you’ll need to take account of variations in image exposure, alignment, and the list goes on. Although, of course, if this seems too much like hard work, then you could just get the open source Hugin application to handle everything for you.

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It's another day, and another giveaway. Actually, it's a day late. We received so many submissions to the HP TouchPad caption contest, featuring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that we delayed the followup contest by a day.

This new contest ends at 11:59:59 am ET on Saturday December 31, 2011. We'll announce winners some time next week. I'm being iffy on when because we'd rather announce caption contest winners first. But given the number of really good submissions, from which one winner will be randomly chosen, we don't want to rush that one too fast. To qualify for the new contest, you must follow BetaNews on Twitter.

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Care2.com, a site dedicated to environmental awareness, petitioning, and charitible donation with more than 17 million members has been hacked, according to a message from the company Friday morning.

The message to users on Friday was from Care2's Founder & President Randy Paynter. It said:

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It’s barely two weeks since Italian security vendor NoVirusThanks released a bunch of small tools as freeware, but it seems the company is still feeling seasonally generous -- another two of their utilities are now also entirely free to use.

Fast Raw File Copier Pro, for instance, is an apparently simple file copying tool: point it at one or more files, select a destination, and it’ll transfer the specified data at a click. Which sounds ordinary enough, but this program has a twist. It figures out where your files are located on the disk, then accesses the clusters directly, without going through Windows, and that means it can copy anything -- even files that would normally be protected.

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