Latest Technology News

After a couple of days of rumors, microblogging service Twitter has officially come forward and announced that it has acquired popular third-party Twitter dashboard TweetDeck.

"TweetDeck is a great example of a third-party developer that designed tools for the incredibly important audience of Twitter power-users and, in turn, created value for the network as a whole," Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said on Wednesday. "As Iain's [Dodsworth, TweetDeck founder] journey suggests, there is significant opportunity for developers who deliver insights that foster a more engaged Twitter user base."

That sure took long enough. After reports surfaced last week about Apple's denial, the company has come clean in a support document. Mac Defender is real malware targeting Mac OS X, and Apple will issue an update to plug the hole. Yes, but will it be little more than a finger in the dike?

The answer to that question has already generated fierce debate among Mac defenders -- not the malware, but Apple fans -- and PC stalwarts about whether Mac Defender is start of a troubling trend: Increased number of attacks against Mac OS X. The Mac defenders brush off Mac Defender, arguing there is no OS security problem but one of social engineering. It's a bogus argument, considering social engineering also is the main mechanism by which malware infects PCs. According to research released last week by Microsoft, 1 in 14 programs that are downloaded are later determined to be malware, and in most cases, the malicious software was installed by good old-fashioned social engineering.

Piriform makes some of the best free Windows utilities around, and issues new versions on a regular basis.  But although the programs will alert you to the new builds, they won't update automatically -- you'll have to download and install the latest versions yourself.

CCAuto Updater is a compact and portable tool that can change all that. In a click or two you can have the program launched when your PC boots, or schedule it to run at the date and time of your choice.  It then checks for updates to CCleaner, Recuva, Defraggler and Speccy, silently downloading and installing any new builds it finds, finally displaying a pop-up alert to tell you of the upgrade when the process is complete.

Storing your data in the cloud has its pros and cons, but one of the biggest drawbacks has to be the speed at which you can both upload and download data from your storage pool. Not all online storage providers are equal, but there's also factors unique to your PC and Internet setup to consider too.

If you're in the market for signing up for online storage with the likes of Box.net or DriveHQ, it goes without saying you'll want to know which ones are quickest when it comes to making a decision. This is where a new freeware tool, currently in beta, comes into play: Online Drive Benchmark is designed to let you know which provider performs best on your computer.

Trend Micro has released a public beta of Titanium Maximum Security 2012, the latest incarnation of its feature-packed security suite. As is often the case with betas, it has a few issues to contend with. There's no firewall just yet, for instance, and we found application launch times seemed to lengthen considerably once the beta had been installed.

The program's interface proved straightforward, though, providing easy access to on-demand scans, and a lengthy list of the tools that are available in this version: parental controls, data theft prevention, encryption, secure file deletion, antispam, antiphishing, browsing protection, and more.

Lacie Inc has released a major new version of its online backup and sync client: Wuala "Hottingen," which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux as well as selected smartphones, includes new features, a redesigned user interface and extended functionality.

Perhaps most interesting to existing free account holders: Wuala has now extended all "Pro" services, including automatic backup, sync, file versioning and time travel, to all users. This brings Wuala into line with other online backup and sync services such as AVG LiveKive, SpiderOak and SugarSync.

After working for nearly three years on a solution for delivering Android applications on systems with x86-based processors, Silicon Valley company BlueStacks today has officially "opened for business" with $7.5 million of series A funding.

BlueStacks started simply enough. After playing with her father's Android phone, the child of one of BlueStacks' founding engineers asked if she could get those apps on her MSI netbook.

Opera fans command reverence and loyalty that even Apple must be jealous of. Opera has survived just about every conceivable market share abuse -- from Internet Explorer's crushing monopolistic dominance to wily new competitors like Chrome and Safari -- and loyal fans are major reason. Well, they, and Opera pushing new features at rapid pace. But competitors are imitating Opera's development innovation, too.

It's with this mindset that I set out to give Opera mini 6 for iPad a hard lookover late today. Little more than a year has passed since the browser released for iPhone, quickly achieving 1 million downloads. Clearly somebody wanted an alternative to Apple's WebKit-based Safari browser. Opera mini 6 released today -- for iPhone with updated features (such as support for retina display) and for iPad, supporting the larger screen size. I tested the software on a 64GB WiFi iPad 2.

Just two days ahead of the 37th G8 Summit, world leaders met in Paris on Tuesday with private sector technology leaders for the first ever E>G8 Forum. The "explicit goal" of the forum is to gather the leading players of the digital ecosystem for plenary sessions, town hall meetings, and workshops to inform the heads of the G8 nations, and enrich their discussions at the Summit.

The overall theme of the Forum is "The Internet: Accelerating Growth," and included sessions today about the Internet's effect on economic growth, society, education, intellectual property, and culture.

Quick update to this one: The Samsung Tab pre-release party will be taking place at 620 Jones (at...620 Jones Street, San Francisco). We've also got the full list of prizes to be raffled off:

o 5 Galaxy Tab 10.1 Voucher (products will be sent June 8th)

Apple has beefed up its patent portfolio, apparently obtaining the rights to about 200 patents formerly held by Freescale Semiconductor. The patents cover a range of technologies, from Wi-Fi to cellular data and data encoding, some filed as late as 2010.

It is not clear how Apple may have obtained the patents, although patent law blog PatentlyO -- which first reported the news earlier this week -- believed it involved a cash transaction.

The release of Opera Mini 6 for iOS has seen the app transformed into a universal app that has been optimized to take advantage of the iPad's larger screen. iPhone 4 users can also benefit from the fact that the app has been redesigned to add support for retina display. The overall look and feel of the app has also been updated and performance has been improved.

Opera Mini is well known for its web page compression that helps to reduce the size of the sites you visit and enable them to load faster. When navigating a website, you will find that the pinch-to-zoom gesture works very smoothly and when opening new pages you now have the option to use background tabs.

Today, Andy Lees, president of Microsoft's Windows Phone division, boasted about 18,000 applications in 7 months. He can only wish for this kind of future: 500,000 applications approved to Apple's iOS app store in about three years. This isn't even a fair fight. The elephant in the room could squash the mouse just too easily.

But there is hope for Microsoft. Apple crossed the 10,000 apps threshold four months after App Store launched. The number of Windows Phone apps is about the same as iOS apps during similar timeframe from store launch. So maybe there's more to Lees' boasting, if Microsoft is using Apple's success as measure of one possible Windows Phone future.

Barnes and Noble on Tuesday unveiled its new touchscreen Nook Simple Touch e-reader, the company's first Nook to lack a color screen and Android branding.

Yesterday, e-reader company Kobo introduced the Kobo eReader Touch Edition which is bound for Borders in the U.S. and Indigo in Canada later this month for $129.99. Today, Barnes and Noble revealed its answer to that device, with very similar specs and a price only $10 higher.

Did you miss today's Windows Phone VIP event, where Microsoft showcased upcoming features for "Mango," codename for the next version? We've got you covered -- as does Microsoft. In the video, Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows Phone, highlights some of the exciting new features coming in Windows 7.5.

The strong undercurrent of Belfiore's Mango introduction is Microsoft's "glance and go" philosophy -- the idea being: The smartphone shouldn't be the center of your life, but instead enable you to live better. Related: