Microsoft Office 2010 Hits Stores

Office 2010 features updates to the familiar Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications, plus free, online versions of those same apps. Office 2010 is available in the box, as a download, and also as preloaded software on new PCs. Computer buyers can purchase a key card at major retailers to activate the software on new systems.

The online version of the software, Office Web, includes Internet-based editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Users in the U.S, UK, Canada and Ireland can now access Office Web applications through Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive portal. Office Web Apps are tailored specifically for the online environment. For instance, the Office Web version of PowerPoint does not include some of the desktop version's high-performance video editing tools.

The boxed, Professional edition of Office 2010 is priced at $499, while the download is $349. There's also significant price discrepancies between boxed and download delivery for other versions as well. For the Home & Student version, it's $149 vs $119. For Home & Business, it's $279 vs $199.

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Windows XP SP2 users face end of Internet Explorer patches

Although Microsoft has told Windows XP SP2 users several times this year that it will retire the 2004 operating system on July 13, users may not realize that they will also not receive any Internet Explorer (IE) security updates after that date. Microsoft confirmed that users running Windows XP SP2 will receive no IE6, IE7 or IE8 patches after July 13.

"Customers will need to install [Windows] XP SP3 in order to leverage the extended support (which includes security updates), which will run through April 2014," a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

To continue to receive IE security updates, users must upgrade to Windows XP SP3, shift to a newer edition of Windows, or manually download the browser updates from Microsoft's site. The latter, however, is not supported.

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AT&T : security gap exposed Apple iPad e-mail addresses, IDs

AT&T has said that a security breach had exposed the e-mail addresses of Apple iPad users. They said that the problem had been fixed and that it would inform customers of the breach, which also exposed their iPad identification numbers used to autheticate a wireless user.

The hacker group that breached AT&T's network obtained the e-mail addresses of top level politicians, television reporters and business executives and 114,000 e-mail addresses were exposed.

“The issue has escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses,” AT&T said in a statement.

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Security Advisory for Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Acrobat

A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-1297) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat. This advisory will be updated once a schedule has been determined for releasing a fix.

Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2, 9.0.262, and earlier 10.0.x and 9.0.x versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris
Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX

Note:
The Flash Player 10.1 Release Candidate available at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ does not appear to be vulnerable.
Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.x are confirmed not vulnerable.

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Customize Your Google Search Page

Google will now let users add personal photos to the background of the traditionally minimalist search page. In what is perhaps a transparent effort to out-feature Microsoft Bing, Google is ditching its boring white background and letting users upload their own photos. The Microsoft Bing search site features a different, Microsoft-chosen background picture every day.

Users are given three methods for customization--they can upload a photo from their computer, they can choose a photo from their Google-run Picasa photo album, or they can choose a photo from the public Picasa photo album. To change your Google background photo: click on the link in the lower left corner of the Google search page.

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Quit Facebook Day flops

Just 34,100 of Facebook's more than 450 million members pledged to quit over privacy concerns. The low number is probably more a reflection of how hard it is to break the Facebook habit, rather than signifying acceptance of the simplified privacy controls introduced by the social network last week after much criticism, as Quit Facebook Day explains.

Facebook has weathered a series of privacy controversies in its short lifespan of just six years. The latest controversy kicked off in December with a privacy roll-back that meant users' profiles become public by default, whatever the previous settings.

In other Facebook news, last weekend became the third successive week to witness a run of hacker attacks.

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Google Names Facebook Most Visited Site

Google has publicly released a list of the top 1000 websites in the world, raking the Facebook social networking site as the leading Web property by unique users. According to Google's AdPlanner stats, Facebook scores more than 540 million unique visitors per month, reaching a sizable chunk of 35.2 percent of the Internet population and has totaled more than 570 billion page views.

A noteworthy entry on the 18th spot in the AdPlanner rankings is Twitter (#18), with 98 million unique visitors per month and destination portals such as Yahoo.com (#2) and MSN.com (#5) are also high on the list, probably due to the fact that many people use these sites as their home page.

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Man Infects Himself with (Computer) Virus

Dr. Mark Gasson, a cybernetics expert at the University of Reading, deliberately infected himself (by way of an RFID chip implanted in his wrist) with a benign computer virus. This was part of an experiment designed to show how implantable bionic devices are susceptible to computer viruses.

The device in Gasson's arm is an RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip that emits a signal and allows him to access certain parts of the University of Reading laboratory, as well as operate his cell phone. In other words, the chip functions as an internal swipe-card.

Gasson and his colleagues then created a virus for the chip. They put it on the chip and Gasson went into the lab and when the lab's computers read the code, the virus implanted itself into the database and began to replicate. This experiment shows that viruses can be transferred wirelessly from implant devices to the computers they communicate with.

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