Heck, you might score something even better.

Earlier this month, CyberLink unveiled the "I Am a PowerDirector" community site and contest to promote it. BetaNews readers get special consideration. In addition to the regular prizes, CyberLink will hold a special drawing giving away 10 copies of PowerDirector 10 to our readers who enter the contest. We told you so 24 days ago and want to remind you before it's too late to participate.

Today we are excited to bring you a free copy of IObit Malware Fighter PRO worth $19.95 to help keep your computer protected against malware in the New Year. But you’ll need to be quick -- this free gift to you is only available for 24 hours, so make sure you head over to the Downloadcrew Giveaway site before 23:59, Central European Time, December 26th.

Malware is a serious problem for anyone that uses the Internet, and as it is not a problem that shows any signs of abating, the best thing you can do is to ensure that you are adequately protected. IObit Malware Fighter PRO is an advanced malware protection tool that weeds out spyware, rootkits, keyloggers, Trojan, spyware and all manner of other nasties that may have found their way onto your system. As well as ben able to hunt down and remove known malware, an advanced heuristics engine means that the program is able to detect new malware by looking out for signs of suspicious activity.

Almost everyone has been busy over the past week making some form of preparation for Christmas and the holiday season. But despite the general pace of the world winding down slightly, the pace of software development continues with its usual speed. Mozilla has been particularly busy this week, releasing numerous updates to its Firefox web browser. The main release branch for the browser has hit version 9. Firefox 9.0.1 FINAL includes numerous tweaks to performance as well as changes to the way add-ons are handled. Startup times have been improved as has the general performance and stability of the browser.

If you like to try out something before most people, Firefox 10.0 Beta has also been updated as has the somewhat more experimental and alpha-like Firefox Aurora 11.0a2. For anyone who wants to be right on the cutting edge of browser development, the nightly builds of Firefox have also entered a new phase. Firefox Nightly 12.0a1 (32-bit) includes a range of interface enhancements and  Firefox Nightly 12.0a1 (64-bit) brings the same experimental version of the browser to users of 64-bit systems. Even more interface changes can be found in Firefox UX 12.01 UX (32-bit). The UX branch of Firefox includes a more streamlined toolbar and a new tab page amongst other new features. 64-bit users should take a look at Firefox UX 12.01 UX (64-bit).

Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is churning up increasing debate as the holidays approach. There's irony here. The very public response about SOPA is freedom the bill, or its Senate sibling PROTECT IP, could take away. Dan Bull's "SOPA Cabana" YouTube music video is example of the grassroots response to the proposed legislation. YouTube is one of the services SOPA would target, likely diminishing freedom of expression like Bull's. The headline to this post comes from his video.

To recap, Senators introduced PROTECT IP in May and House representatives did likewise with SOPA in October. Either bill would give the government broad powers to take down websites, seize domains and compel search engines from indexing these properties. Little more than a request from copyright holders is necessary. It's essentially guilty-until-proven-innocent legislation that would punish the many for the sins of the few, while disrupting the fundamental attributes that made the Internet so successful and empowered so many individuals or businesses to accomplish so much. (Review the bills: PROTECT IP. SOPA.)

"Why did you lose it?" is the first question to ask.

Last week AVG sent a tickler email about its newest "Lost in Transit" survey looking at what people were doing when they lost their mobiles. I waited until closer to Christmas -- time when likelihood of loss increases -- to post some of the results. AVG provided additional data not disclosed in its blog post or infographic (below).

Would you like your PC to be faster? A high-end industrial-strength defrag tool could be just what you need to give it an extra performance boost. And while these normally aren’t cheap, our Downloadcrew Giveaway site is today (up until 23:59, Central European Time, December 23rd) giving away the excellent O&O Defrag 12 Professional Edition, normally $29, for nothing at all.

If you like an easy life then O&O Defrag 12 is the perfect defrag tool to have installed. It can monitor your drive’s condition in the background, automatically defragmenting your drive as soon as it spots any problems, so your hard drive is always running at peak performance. And setting this up is as straightforward as running a simple wizard.

This week’s high-profile hack of the US Chamber of Commerce underscores the inadequacy of today’s security policies and technologies. With the holidays quickly approaching and IT staffs stepping away from offices to spend time with family and friends, we face increased vulnerabilities and security threats. We should be more vigilant than ever, reflecting on national security policies and how we can better protect our sensitive data.

Stories like this continue to point to the fact that we need a broad, across-the-board approach. We need to collaborate and inform when breaches take place. We need diplomatic support to reduce the desire or economic benefit to steal. It is time to have a Y2K approach to cyber protection. That means investment and support from the top down.

The Firefox development merry-go-round has moved on again, with Firefox 10 Beta and Firefox 11 Aurora builds being joined by two separate versions of Firefox 12: Firefox 12 Nightly and Firefox 12 UX, the latter build representing the efforts of a team focussed on delivering improvements to the Firefox user interface.

Despite the lack of any major revamps, there’s enough new features and interface tweaks filtering through the various builds to make the next three planned versions worth looking out for. Get a head’s up on what’s coming and discover which build is best for your current needs with our updated guide to what the future holds in store for Firefox.

It’s annoying when a personal PC won’t start, and you can’t get online or check your emails. When a corporate PC fails, though, the consequences are often much worse. Employees can’t do their jobs, customers may be impacted, and in some cases there could be knock-on effects right across the business. It’s vital to get the problem solved immediately, then -- and O&O Software’s BlueCon 9, released this week, could be just the tool to help.

The program comes in the form of a bootable Windows PE-based recovery environment. Launch this from a CD or USB flash drive and you’ll find a familiar Windows desktop, which has been enhanced by a host of troubleshooting and diagnostic tools.

Earlier this week I sold my Fujifilm FinePix X100, one of the best digital cameras I've owned, since buying my first in 1997. I gave up the delightful X100 for two reasons: I needed cash to pay for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus and because the Google phone is digicam enough for me. I'm not alone, based on survey data NPD released today.

NPD reports a 10 point increase in photos taken with smartphones and nearly corresponding number taken with digital cameras -- that 17 percent to 27 percent and from 52 percent to 44 percent, respectively, year over year. The data is for the United States. What about the nearly 30 percent remaining? Is film still that popular? I asked NPD. Nope. Camcorders and dumb phones account for the remainder. Well, tell that to Lomography!

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday approved the first database of all the unused wireless frequencies known as "white spaces" in the United States and has given the green light to the first hardware that will use them.

White space, or the wireless spectrum that was freed from the transition from analog to digital television, would be available to use without requiring a wireless license, similar to the way wi-fi works today. The problem, of course, is that the wireless frequencies that fall in this white space varies from market to market. This is why the database was required.

Despite having its own mobile platform to support, Microsoft is still understandably keen to keep its fingers in other pies, particularly those tasty iOS desserts. As such it should come as no surprise that there is an app that can be used to access the files you have chosen to store in the cloud in your SkyDrive from your iPhone, iPod or iPad. There is now no shortage of online storage services to choose from, but from the offset this is one that will prove popular with anyone looking to not only store files online, but to benefit from integration with other Microsoft services such as Hotmail.

SkyDrive itself is not all that new a service, but the iOS app is. This means that it is now possible to interact with your SkyDrive account in two ways. Not only can you access the files that you have already uploaded, you can also upload files whilst you are out and about. Ultimately this makes it possible to take photos with your iPhone camera and rather than having to email to yourself or sync with your computer, you can upload the images so that they can be accessed from any computer. This is also a great way to share images with others, but this can also be achieved by attaching them to an email from within the app.

Christmastime is coming soon, Santa's on his way. As jolly old St. Nick makes his rounds of Silicon Valley this weekend, which tech CEOs will be on his "Naughty" and "Nice" lists this year? We here at BetaNews are secret elves, and we'd like to help out the man in red by giving our opinion on who should get what they asked for, and who needs a big lump of coal.

Some of our picks are pretty obvious, while others may surprise you. Our list is intended to make you think and to spur some discussion on the trends in tech during 2011. Either way, we want to hear from you on who you think deserves to be on this list. We'll follow up Friday with your responses.

When you’re looking to optimize a PC’s performance, then defragmenting its hard drive and reorganizing the file layout is generally a very good place to start: it’s easy to do, typically delivers great results, and doesn’t have to cost you anything as there are plenty of excellent freeware defrag utilities around.

Auslogics Disk Defrag 3, for instance, has always been one of our favorite PC freebies. A clean interface makes it easy to use, defragging is fast and the program can rearrange your files to noticeably improve performance. It’s a great product, so when we heard the company would enhance it to produce a commercial version, Disk Defrag Professional 4 ($29.95), we were very interested to see exactly what features might be added.

Open-source software engineering group Linaro has pushed out a build of Android Ice Cream Sandwich for low-cost development boards from Samsung and ST-Ericsson. The build supports hardware acceleration for Systems on a Chip utililzing ARM's Mali-400 graphics processor.

Linaro is a year-old nonprofit group that focuses on optimizing open-source software for the ARM architecture; and besides ARM, its due-paying members include Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments. It creates ARM hardware-optimized middleware upon which developers and OEMs can build their own Android or Ubuntu distributions.