Ultrabook: Intel's $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game : In an effort to blunt the (ARM-based) tablet threat, Intel wants PC makers to crank out thin and light "Ultrabook" laptops with its chips inside—and it has a $300 million warchest set aside to make it happen. But this is going to be harder than it sounds. How an omniscient Internet "sextortionist" ruined the lives of teen girls : A paraplegic 32-year old hacker terrified teen girls from his neat ranch home in Santa Ana, California by invading computers, taking over identities, controlling webcams, and listening in on computer microphones[......]
Three years ago it was tough to imagine that Google's Chrome browser would snag a significant share of the Web surfing market. It was minimalistic before minimalistic was cool, and without support for extensions, few people took Chrome seriously. Fast forward to today and Chrome, now a hyper toddler at 3 years old, represents 15.5 percent of the browser market[......]
It's hard to imagine an Ultrabook party without Acer in attendance. Like Pink, Acer decided to get this party started and today announced its first Ultrabook model at the IFA consumer electronics show in Germany, the Aspire S3. [......]
If you're one of the brave souls who dares follow me on the Twitters , you probably know exactly where this post is going. I haven't been able to shut up about this thing for over a day. As someone who writes about shiny electronic things for a living and just generally spends far too much time rummaging around the Internet, I've come to be wonderfully adept at spotting up-and-coming awesome crap that no one really needs trends. [......]
For the second time in a year, WikiLeaks has lost control of its full, unredacted cache of a quarter-million US State Department cables—and this time the leaked files are apparently online. The uncensored cables are contained in a 1.73GB password-protected file named cables.csv, which is reportedly circulating somewhere on the Internet, according to Steffen Kraft, editor of the German paper Der Freitag . [......]
As we run out of IPv4 address space, is it time to create an exchange for trading unused address blocks? Ars contributors Iljitsch van Beijnum and Timothy Lee tackle the issue. [......]
I've just about managed to stuff all those gloopy spare bits of brain back into my skull, but it took a while. I blame Harold Ford Jr. [......]
Apparently Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser leads the pack in more ways than just market share. With regards to IE9, socially engineered malware (SEM) barely has a chance of wreaking havoc, according to a study put together by NSS Labs. The study's data has IE9 way out in front of all other browsers tested with a better than 99 percent protection rate. [......]
Three months ago, Microsoft published some statistics pulled from Internet Explorer 9's SmartScreen Filter anti-phishing and anti-malware tool which led the IE9 team to conclude that the browser cuts malware threats by 95% . Today, research firm NSS Labs released a study that backs up Internet Explorer 9's internal statistics, and gives IE9 a block rate of 96.2%, putting it far ahead of Chrome 12, Firefox 4, Safari 5, and Opera 11[......]
MICGadget has some action shots of the Kunming "Apple" store that raised so much Internet ire and mirth a few weeks ago . Although the insides are the same, you'll notice one big difference: the apple is still there but the text has been replaced by a nail-salonesque sign dubbing the shop the "Smart Store." They still sell Apple products, but now they're smarter.[......]
While you're busy grilling cow parts and getting ahead on back-to-school shopping this weekend, Mozilla will spend the next few days spit shining Firefox 6, the next major browser release slated to ship on Tuesday. And though Mozilla is known for pushing back release dates, there doesn't seem to be any cause for concern that Firefox 6 isn't ready for prime time. [......]
The PC world is packed with tools that promise to optimize your system, but most do little or nothing useful. And so the news that Kingsoft Security had released another, their free PC Doctor, didn't exactly fill us with anticipation. The reality was much better than we expected, though. PC Doctor is far more interesting than most of the competition, and while the program is currently flawed, it could already be useful for many people[......]
As of today, Amazon's Kindle e-reader is available on all platforms. The retailer on Wednesday launched Kindle Cloud Reader, an HTML5 Web app that gives users browser-based access to their Kindle library and the Kindle store on platforms that have no dedicated Kindle app, such as Linux and ChromeOS[......]
Perhaps motivated by Duke Nukem Forever shipping after a decade-and-a-half of development and delays, Microsoft decided to finally patch a vulnerability dating back to the 1990s. Included in yesterday's Patch Tuesday bulletin bonanza is a little nugget listed as CVE-2011-1871, which according to ComputerWorld.com is a fix for the dreaded 'Ping of Death,' or at least it was dreaded some two decades ago. Officially, CVE-2011-1871 describes "A denial of service vulnerability [that] exists in the Windows TCP/IP stack that is caused when the TCP/IP stack improperly handles a sequence of specially crafted ICMP messages[......]
Security firms are always keen to release new versions of their products, and the unveiling of a new operating system is as good a reason as any. Mac users who jumped on OS X Lion the moment it was released have found that there are a number of applications that do not work correctly, or at all, and this can be a serious issue when it comes to security software. Symantec has just released two Lion compatible security products in the form of beta versions of Norton Internet Security 5 and Norton AntiVirus 12 for Mac [......]
