Remember when we tested Zite last year? CNN owns that now
Fifty Betanews readers and I were among the very first people to test a content discovery engine called Zite last year. It was a solid idea --harvesting keywords from your Twitter feed and Delicious bookmarks to learn the things you might be interested in, and subsequently finding and suggesting news articles to you-- but it still had a long way to go.
That service eventually grew into an iPad magazine in the vein of Flipboard, but with the underlying content recommendation engine that we saw very early on in the Zite beta. After the positive reception it received as a standalone iPad app, CNN Worldwide president Jim Walton today announced that CNN has acquired Zite.
Google, Microsoft block DigiNotar for fake SSL cert, company halts all certification sales
Users of some of Google's SSL-encrypted services in Iran were the subject of man-in-the-middle attacks earlier this week, the search giant reported. The attacker was using fake SSL certificates from certification authority DigiNotar who does not officially certify Google sites. Google and Microsoft promptly blocked DigiNotar's certificates, and today it has suspended its sale of SSL and EVSSL certificates.
"We plan to disable the DigiNotar certificate authority in Chrome while investigations continue. Mozilla also moved quickly to protect its users," Heather Adkins, Google Information Security Manager said yesterday. "This means that Chrome and Firefox users will receive alerts if they try to visit websites that use DigiNotar certificates."
Be an email voyeur with POP Peeper 3.8
Mortal Universe Software has updated its free email preview tool, POP Peeper, to version 3.8. The latest version, the first update for almost a year, includes a number of major new features as well as the expected slew of minor tweaks and bug fixes.
POP Peeper is designed to allow users to safely preview mail while it’s still on the mail server, allowing them to cut download time and improve security by deleting unwanted messages, including spam and virus-laden emails, before they’re downloaded to the user’s computer.
Download.com responds to angry devs, removes bloatware wrapper
Last week, we heard a report that CNET's Download.com had recently begun enclosing all its downloadable software in a proprietary "wrapper" unless the developer paid a premium subscription to have his software available unaltered.
In my brief article about the issue, I quoted a comment posted by independent developer Stephen Greenberg, maker the GSpot Codec appliance (a five-star application in Fileforum), who said he was pulling his software from Download.com because of the change.
'Windows Ribbon is like an overstuffed refrigerator, a maze only navigable by your home's primary cook'
Daniel Havens shared that sentiment in a Google+ comment yesterday. His viewpoint reflects that of many others. The votes are in -- 1,204 as I post -- and the majority of respondents to our poll either hate or dislike the Ribbon.
Yesterday, I expressed my strong negative reaction to something long rumored but definitely confirmed by Steven Sinofsky, Windows & Windows Live president, in a wave of usage statistics: Microsoft is bringing the Office Ribbon to Windows, as primary means of navigating the file system. Microsoft has its stats. We have ours. I posted a poll last night asking you about the Ribbon.
Apple rolls out beta of iTunes Match for developers
iTunes Match, the iTunes portion of Apple's iCloud was rolled out as a developer beta last night. The service scans a user's local library of music files and mirrors the content on an iCloud server so it can be accessed on any connected device. The service will cost $24.99 per year and let users store as many as 25,000 songs.
In the message Apple sent to developers last night (embedded below), the company noted that developers participating in the beta of iTunes Match will receive "an additional 3 months for free with their 12 month paid subscription."
Anti-Malware 6 beta is 450% faster
Austrian security company Emsisoft has launched a public beta test of Anti-Malware 6, its flagship antivirus tool. And the focus this time around has clearly been performance, with the company claiming a new multi-core optimised scanning engine is on average 450-percent faster than the previous version.
The next benefit comes from a new scheme for identifying trustworthy files. These then don’t have to be scanned in the future unless they’ve changed, providing another speed boost. And, the company claims, further optimizations have “drastically” reduced Anti-Malware’s impact on the boot process.
Amazon tablet will 'completely disrupt the status quo'
If Amazon's rumored Android tablet ever indeed becomes a reality, it could quickly become one of the bestselling tablets on the market. That's the claims of Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, who expects the tablet to sell up to five million units in the fourth quarter of this year.
At that rate, sales of the Amazon tablet would surpass the 4.19 million iPads that Apple sold in the first full quarter of its availability from July through September 2010. Amazon would roughly be doing that in about two to three months.
Microsoft killed my Windows 8 enthusiasm
The cardinal rule in good user interface design: Keep it simple, stupid. Windows 8 will break that rule in the worst ways, unless Microsoft customers and developers knock some sense into the company's product managers. They'll have their chance next month, at the Windows BUILD conference.
In early June, I sang Windows 8 praises, posting: "It took 4 min 34 sec to get me really excited about Windows again". The video introducing the new user interface stunned me, as it did many other people. Finally, Microsoft achieved the kind of simplicity, elegance and good taste more typically associated with Mac OS. But beneath the breathtaking desktop is a file-system nightmare: The Office Ribbon is taking over Windows.
Could Samsung save webOS from HP executioners?
Despite its denials, Samsung still appears to be making a move for HP in some form. Reports had surfaced last week that the South Korean electronics maker was interested in purchasing HP's consumer PC business. The company quickly denied the rumors in a terse statement, calling the reports "not true".
The same publication that first published those rumors -- Taiwanese technology daily DigiTimes -- has come back saying that Samsung has hired a former HP executive to head its PC business, and also may be interested in HP's WebOS platform.
Microsoft takes comedic jab at VMware on day one of its big conference
Today, VMware kicked off its VMworld convention in Las Vegas, and dozens of companies have announced new products supporting VMware's various virtualization services, including Dell, Wyse, Citrix, NEC, Huawei, and Cisco, to name just a few.
In response to the convention and the support from hardware companies, Microsoft, a major competitor to VMware in the enterprise virtualization space, has released a hilarious caricature of VMware in video called "Don't get stuck in the IT past" which shows the exploits of IT salesman Tad and his company VMlimited.
Job-hunting site Venturocket doesn't want your stupid résumé
After steadily gaining popularity among professionals and receiving a $3 billion valuation in its IPO, LinkedIn has become the gold standard of work-related social networking.
But LinkedIn isn't really well-tailored for finding jobs and employees without becoming a paid member. It's more about posting résumés and creating a network of contacts exclusively for professional purposes.
Google+: Where everybody knows your name [poll]
"Sometimes you want to goWhere everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came
You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows Your name"
-- Theme song from TV show "Cheers"
Google+ real names policy continues to generate controversy. Last month I strongly urged Google to resist calls for pseudonyms or to allow people to be anonymous. The policy of using real names is sensible and the best approach long term. But, clearly, not everyone agrees. So it's time for a poll and to ask for more reader reaction.
Argument repeatedly made against real names: Some people need to protect their identities. Perhaps they live in a country with oppressive regime, don't want to disclose gender choices or whistleblow on governments or their contractors, among other reasons. But I look at Betanews comments or other forums around the web, where trolls run wild. They hide behind anonymity and attack others. Their presence pollutes the discussion and makes forming real communities -- people who share common interest -- difficult, if not impossible.
Prototype of first virtualized ATM: Diebold calls it 'a game changer'
Diebold, the United States' largest manufacturer of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) will be unveiling its prototype of a virtualized ATM today, the first day of the annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas.
Like most of the products coming out of VMworld this week, the virtualized ATM was developed jointly by Diebold and VMware. Unlike the traditional standalone ATM model, the virtual ATM has no onboard computer driving it, and it is effectively a thin client tied to a central management server.
Samsung to challenge Apple's iMessage with new ChatON service
Samsung is expected to launch a new cross-platform mobile chat service called ChatON* this week at the IFA Conference in Berlin. Like Apple's new iMessage, ChatON will be very similar to RIM's BlackBerry Messenger, letting users set up individual or group chats that support multimedia messaging, as well as location, calendar and contact sharing.
The service will also include some unique features, such as Animated Message Service (AMS), short animations which can be sent like e-cards; and Interaction Ranking, a metric that shows how often you interact with certain contacts.
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