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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

The most successful brands define their category/function, like Xerox for "print". According to research NPD released today, for many business decision makers "tablet" means "iPad".

"The iPad, just as it is in the consumer market, is synonymous for 'tablet' in the business market, leaving Apple poised to take advantage of the increased spending intentions of these SMBs", says Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis. Those spending intentions are on the rise, with 73 percent of businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees planning to buy tablets -- eh, iPads -- during the next 12 months. That's up from 68 percent in second quarter.

Leading PC chipmaker Intel announced this week that its third generation Atom mobile processor, formerly code-named "Cedar Trail" is now available, and that systems using the platform will be available in early 2012.

Though Intel is concentrating on "ultrabooks" (i.e. thin and light notebooks with at least a 10" screen) as the latest growth platform for PCs, the company is not letting netbooks disappear just yet; and these Atom chips are smaller and less power consumptive.

The Windows event logs can be a mine of useful information about the state of your PC, and understanding what they contain is often key to troubleshooting any problems you might have.

And so it’s a shame that the standard Windows Event Viewer makes accessing this data so awkward: it’s a bulky applet, horribly slow and with an intimidating interface that means even expert users can take a while to find the information they need. There are simpler alternatives around, though, and the Windows Inspection Tool Set includes a particularly appealing example.

Today is unofficially "Dump Go Daddy Day", as people across the Internet express their outrage at the registrar's open support (retracted six days ago) for proposed legislation Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. I still contend there's hysteria here, by singling out Go Daddy and ignoring other SOPA supporters. But the registrar is easy target, in part because people can so easily protest SOPA by moving their domains, and there is founder Bob Parsons' lingering public image problems -- if for no other reason than the "elephant incident".

My decision has little to do with the anti-Go Daddy mob but several considerations, SOPA being just one. While Go Daddy customer service has been good, I never liked the idea of moving my domains there. The garish website and other attributes about the business bothered me. But Go Daddy offered cheap domains compared to Network Solutions. Then came Parsons' elephant hunting video in March, and that really bugged me. SOPA support added to my displeasure. Finally, after calling NSI yesterday, I got an acceptable transfer deal that makes good economic sense right now.

In both the home and work environment, there are numerous uses for remote access tools. For home users, the ability to not only access the files stored on a computer housed in another room but also take full control of it as if you sit in front of it can save a great deal of legwork reviewing a document you need to read or checking the status of a download, all without having to run up and down stairs. Used for work, the possibilities are almost limitless. Network administrators can control their entire network from almost anywhere -- homeworking becomes a possibility for a far larger number of people; the list just goes on and on. There are a number of remote access tools available for iOS, LogMeIn is not only one of the best known, it is also one of the best. And the great news is that it is now completely free of charge.

The app was previously available for $30, and while many people could see the benefits of using such a powerful and useful tool, the price was a little off-putting. With the launch of a free version of the app, which is mercifully light in the restrictions department, the world of VPN has opened up to a whole new audience who are now able to take advantage of remote access from a well-known name without having to part with any cash.

Leading online retailer Amazon.com has never been forthcoming with exact sales figures for its Kindle e-reader platform. Instead, the company uses ambiguities like "the current generation Kindle is selling twice as many units as the previous generation," or that the current generation is the fastest-selling model yet.

For the first time, Amazon has given a more concrete idea about how many Kindles are selling. In a roundup of its 2011 holiday season sales, the company said it was selling "well over" one million Kindle devices per week in the month of December, and that the best-selling, most gifted, and most wish-listed product across all of Amazon's product listings is the low-cost Kindle Fire tablet.

It's only fair. When iPhone 4S customers complained about poor battery life, I raked Apple for ongoing design problems. Now that I'm having problems with Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket and AT&T, the Android camp deserves its due. Perhaps with different AT&T customer service you wouldn't see this post at all.

There's a problem with the Skyrocket I purchased on November 8 from AT&T. Battery life sucks. But it wasn't always that way. During the first 3.5 weeks, battery life was exceptional -- on par with what I had with iPhone 4. Then something dramatically changed, quite suddenly, like someone cutting the electric lights and replacing them with candles. My experience went from bright to dim, and I don't like living in the darkened room.

Since so many blogs and news outlets today reported the Grey Lady's email system had been infiltrated by hackers, a story correcting the record is appropriate (since you won't likely read it as a headline at many of the sites misreporting the incident).

The reported hacking also is another sign that news gathering has gone all to hell in this era of posting first and checking facts later on. What people will remember is the headline about the New York Times being hacked. Hence, I decided to go with opposite headline for that reason. What I find funny: Many of the headlines I originally saw that read something like or exactly "The New York Times was hacked" now have question marks. Another is "[Updated]" and adds "possibly". Unless the Times is lying, which I doubt, there was no hack.