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Friday, March 30, 2007

Microsoft tesing Office 2008 for Mac

Microsoft has started private testing of the next version of Office for the Macintosh, which is due out in the second half of the year.

Office 2008 for Mac product is the first version of Office that runs natively on both Intel and Power PC based Macs. The new software also adds support for the XML file formats.

Microsoft has taken longer than its normal 18 to 24 months to come out with a new version of Office for the Mac.

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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Adobe Announces new CS3 Products

Adobe says its new CS3 line unites the best of Adobe and Macromedia product innovation to provide designers and developers with a broad spectrum of creative options for all facets of print, web, mobile, interactive, film, and video production.

There are six new configurations of Adobe CS3, which include Adobe CS3 Design Premium and Design Standard editions; Adobe CS3 Web Premium and Web Standard editions; and Adobe CS3 Production Premium. Rounding out the product line is Adobe CS3 Master Collection, which combines 12 of Adobe's new design and development applications in a single box.

The majority of Adobe CS 3 editions will be available as Universal applications for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs and support Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista.

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Monday, March 26, 2007

IBM chip can download a movie in 1 second

IBM has a prototype optical transceiver chipset which they claim will allow instantaneous movie downloads. The transceiver is fast enough to reduce the download time for a typical high definition feature length film to a single second compared to 30 minutes or more that it would normally take.

The chipset is capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available today and has the ability to move information at speeds of 160 Gigabits in a single second. The chip measures only 1/15th the area of a US 10 cent coin and is capable of transmitting the equivalent of 4 million simultaneous telephone conversations.

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Wednesday, March 21, 2007

China houses largest number of bot infected PCs

China has accounted for 26 percent of the world's bot infected computers, a higher density than any other nation with Beijing as the city with the most bot infected computers in the world.

During the second half of 2006 period, Symantec observed an average of 21,707 new active bot infected computers per day in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The U.S. remains both a center and target of cybercrime. 86% of the credit and debit cards advertised for sale on the digital underground were issued by banks in the U.S.

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Monday, March 19, 2007

SanDisk Introduces 8GB Camera Flash Card

SanDisk introduced an 8GB SD High Capacity version which is twice that of the highest capacity now available in the SD format.

The new card is estimated to hold more than 4,000 high res pictures and as many as 2,000 digital songs or up to 15 hours of MPEG 4 video.

The 8GB SDHC card with USB reader will be available in April in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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Friday, March 16, 2007

Should spyware be illegal?

Members of a committee of the US Congress have received much support for a proposed spyware ban. But some who fear the bill, without some modifications, could harm internet advertisers.

The Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act (Spy Act) would make it unlawful to install software that gathers information, monitors usage, serves up advertisements or modifies browser and other settings on a computer without explicit user consent.

Without some modifications, the bill would "take into account and cover things that are part of the seamless use of the Internet" and which provide advertising-supported content to millions said Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.

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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Google to tighten its privacy

Google said yesterday that it plans to alter its privacy policy and strip certain identifying information from archived Internet searches. The new policy will affect only searches conducted from the Google home page.

Google will continue to store search terms, but after 18 to 24 months it will remove the IP addresses, which can help identify the location of computers that conducted searches. Google will also erase cookies on hard drives after searches are conducted.

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Monday, March 12, 2007

Seagate releases super secure hard drive

The 2.5 inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (full disk encryption) drive will be on sale at the end of March. The drive features on the fly encryption integrated into the drive itself using chip acceleration. The user has the power to set a password to access the drive during system boot, but is otherwise unaware that all data at rest is being encrypted and unencrypted transparently. Data is never in clear text except when it is being used by an application.

The drive will be a 80 GB version with a 100GB, 120GB and 160GB version coming soon, all based on a 3Gb/sec SATA interface and spinning at 5400 RPM.

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Thursday, March 08, 2007

Samsung releases hybrid hard drive

Samsung's hybrids mix flash technology with regular magnetic hard disk drives, are specially optimized for Windows Vista.

The drive is a 2.5 inch hard drive suitable for notebooks and is available in 80Gb, 120Gb and 160Gb capacities, coming with either 128Mb or 256Mb of Samsung's OneNAND memory.

The MH80 is optimized for Vista and is designed to work with Microsoft's ReadyDrive, which is meant to deliver 50% faster boot and resume times, 20 to 30 minutes of extra battery life depending on the notebook as the drive users 70-90% less power than regular hard drives, and greater reliability as the physical hard drive itself will be used less often thanks to the flash memory.

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Monday, March 05, 2007

Microsoft OneCare not your best bet for protection

When Microsoft launched their anti-virus and Internet Security product OneCare, rival companies were concerned that Microsoft was trying to muscle in on their market. But if the results of both a new test by research firm AV Comparatives and previous tests that ranked Windows Defender relatively lowly are anything to go by.

Microsoft's effort has come last with an average of an 82.4% detection success rate. When the top rated software, G Data Security AntiVirusKit, posts a 99.45% average. Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus came in at 96.8%, GriSoft's AVG was 96.3% and McAfee's VirusScan at 91.6%, meaning that while these big names did much better than OneCare.

The report indicates the methodology of the testing for those wanting the details, which involved a big range of viruses, polymorphic viruses, worms, rootkits, Trojans, scripts, backdoors, spyware and dialers.

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Thursday, March 01, 2007

Windows Vista gadgets may pose security threats

Symantec Corp is claiming that the Windows SideBar and gadgets in Windows Vista could pose security threats. The gadgets use static HTML and scripting to allow developers to easily create new plug-ins for the Windows desktop, such as clock or calculator applications.

The gadgets do not automatically execute, but Symantec is concerned that they are automatically authorized to communicate over the Internet, making them an attractive target for attackers.

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