Few hours remaining in ZoneAlarm ForceField one-day giveaway
You have until 3:00 am EDT 9:00 am EDT Wednesday morning, August 13, to download ZoneAlarm's ForceField browser virtualization envelope and receive a license key good for a one-year subscription to the product on one PC.
The basic premise of ForceField is to build a kind of virtualization envelope around the active Web browser, where essentially anything to which a browser would normally connect is divided from the operating system by one layer of abstraction. When a malicious tool tries to leverage a security hole in some other product by way of communicating with the browser -- as was the case with last year's exploit of Apple QuickTime, which relied on Mozilla Firefox -- it won't find that hole because it doesn't appear to exist within the abstraction layer.
Internet firms admit to tracking users' behavior for advertising
Responses to a congressional inquiry into targeted online advertising indicate that some companies were indeed tracking their users without first asking their consent.
In letters to the House Energy and Commerce Committee released Monday, several companies admitted to the practice. Altogether, some 33 companies were queried last August 1 about their position and actions surrounding targeted advertising.
Old musicians want their download money
Four Allman Brothers band members sued Universal Music Group for more than $10 million in royalties from both hard-copy sales and downloadables.
Greg Allman, Jai Johanny Johanson, Butch Trucks, and Dickey Betts filed suit in the Southern District of New York saying that UMG has refused to pay the correct royalties for sales of songs contained on the "Capricorn Masters."
New iPhone app makes it a wireless storage device
With a multitude of applications now available from the App Store, few stand out. Vieosoft's DataCase may be one of those that does.
The $6.99 app was released on Monday, and essentially leverages the flash memory of the iPhone as a wireless storage device. Currently the application supports Microsoft Office, PDF, Text, image, HTML, audio, and video file transfer.
Facebook users unite in outrage over changed layout
Some don't like it when others clean out their houses while they're gone on vacation, and a few might hate it when someone else cleans up. Facebook is now cleaner, brighter, and whiter, and tens of thousands are unhappy.
Nearly 140,000 Facebook accounts have been entered into a group in support of an online petition opposing, for one reason or another, the service's new Web site layout unveiled late last month. And that's just one group; another, entitled "People Against the New Facebook System," has garnered close to 33,000 accounts; and another, "The New Facebook Layout Sucks," gathering nearly 8,000 as of Tuesday afternoon.
Liberty Media signals interest in AOL's dial-up business
Yesterday's Liberty Media Q2 earnings call was liberally dosed with rather frank disclosures from chairman John Malone about potentially big business moves, including swapping its majority stake in Time Warner for AOL's dial-up business.
During Liberty Media's second quarter earnings call Q&A yesterday, chairman John Malone was asked if he'd consider a transaction that may not have "strategic merits for the rest of the Liberty Enterprise, but makes financial sense in the context of LCAP (Liberty Capital Group, the company's non-interactive or entertainment properties)."
Twitter sets 'following' limits to combat spam
Twitter's new limits, which some are discovering just today, seems to have been made effective since the middle of last month, but don't appear to be fixed in stone.
The way Twitter works, each user's chain of posts may be "followed" by others, and a user selects the feeds, or "twitters," he chooses to follow. For the average user, it would appear the limit on the number of feeds he can follow is 2,000, although that number may increase as more users follow his own feed. Some with high traffic, but whose follow-to-follower ratio is more balanced, appear able to follow more feeds.
New Dell Latitudes promise 10 to 19 hours of battery life
In an announcement that harks back to Dell's roots, when during the 1990s it tested a number of its laptops during four-hour flights, the company said its new Latitudes will add continuous battery life for as long as 19 hours straight.
At a Dell press event in San Francisco this morning, its Senior Vice President for the business products group, Jeffrey Clarke, filled in the biggest missing element in Dell's description of its completely redesigned Latitude product line to this point: Dell, he says, has developed a proprietary power cell technology that will enable Latitudes to run continuously while unplugged for at least 10 hours, and intermittently for as much as 19 hours straight.
MobileMe mail service goes down for the count again
A new batch of problems for the already plagued service seem to have started in the late morning for some, including intermittent timeouts and issues accessing the accounts on desktop mail.
The majority of the problems seemed to be for most between about 3:00 and 6:00 pm EDT Monday. During that period, a message also appeared on the MobileMe status page, saying "MobileMe members may be unable to access MobileMe Mail. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience."
New Visual C++ refresh has tools for Office, IE 'look and feel'
Download Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 from FileForum now.
This contains the latest Feature Pack for Visual C++, which updates the "refresh" of the final beta, which was released last April.
Google 'feels your pain' after the latest Gmail outage
Yesterday, many Gmail users found themselves unable to access their mailboxes, as Gmail returned a "Temporary Error (502)." Google later posted an apology in the official Gmail Blog that gave a clue as to how big the outage was.
"We don't usually post about problems like this in our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted," Gmail Product Manager Todd Jackson posted. About 20 million users visit Gmail daily, and there are more than 100 million accounts in total.
Visual Studio 2008 SP1, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 released
Download .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 from FileForum now.
This is the redistributable package for Windows users to be able to run .NET programs.
This afternoon, Microsoft unveiled a slate of new enhanced releases, including an updated .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 that had been in beta only since February, and the first service pack for Visual Studio 2008 only six months after its premiere.
Commercial antivirus software rendered useless in hours
At the Race To Zero contest at DEFCON 16 in Las Vegas last weekend, seven sample viruses and three sample exploits were reverse engineered to the point where they could bypass anti-virus software. The task took one team just over two hours.
Race to Zero is a contest where a series of malicious code samples are given that must be modified to be able to circumvent five anti-virus engines, each sample more difficult than the last.
Microsoft to stop boxed sales of Money
Although it has been offering its financial suite in a downloadable version for quite some time, beginning with the 2009 version of Money Plus, it will no longer be sold through retail channels.
Microsoft pointed to the fact that last year's sales of its Money personal finance software outpaced in-store sales for the first time in the products history, and more than 50 percent of sales of Money now come from online downloads.
MIT students barred from presenting Boston subway fare loophole
The three students were set to highlight security holes in the automated fare collection system used by the city's transit service, at a security conference on Sunday.
Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan, and Alessandro Chiesa were set to give the talk at the DEFCON Conference in Las Vegas (PDF of full presentation available here from MIT). The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority complained that the students were going to show attendees how to exploit the hole, without first giving it a chance to fix the problem.
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