Will Windows 8 affect the antivirus market with its new security features?

Microsoft is tweaking its Windows Defender tool, which has been part of the last few versions of Windows, by essentially adding some of the more robust features from its free Security Essentials product. Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, said "we've taken Defender, and we've actually built a whole new range of protection, all the way up through anti-malware, antivirus, all that is built into Defender."

This may not be a good idea since it could be a false sense of security for Windows 8 users who may have normally installed third party security products on their computers. It may also make for a focus point for virus and spyware creators to try and bypass. Roel Schouwenberg from Kaspersky Lab thinks this could be dangerous. "From a technical perspective this would mean malware authors will make sure their creations go undetected by MSE/Defender before deployment".

Researchers at Symantec examined an early build and confirmed that the new Windows Defender definitely is just a repackaged version of Microsoft Security Essentials. Test results by major independent labs show Microsoft Security Essentials rated good but not great.

The protection consumers need is more comprehensive than what basic antivirus offers these days thanks to more advanced tactics from malware creators. A pre installed antivirus product doesn't compare to the type of robust solutions you see today.

Microsoft and Google cloud services experience outages

Cloud computing services from both Microsoft and Google experienced outages in the past several days. Microsoft's online services infrastructure experienced an issue that affected some customers in North America online last Wednesday, causing interruptions in Office 365 and various Windows Live services for a few hours. That same day, Google's cloud productivity service, Google Docs, went offline for about an hour.

While none resulted in the loss of data, each stoppage caused services to be unavailable to users for hours at a time. The issues encountered over the past week raise questions about just how dependable cloud based services really are.

Microsoft said it experienced network connectivity issues at one of its data centers that services some North American customers. The Google outage was caused by a change designed to improve real time collaboration within the document list," Google said in its Enterprise Blog. "Unfortunately this change exposed a memory management bug which was only evident under heavy usage"

China Has Renewed Its Google Content Provider License

The Chinese government has renewed Google's Internet Content Provider license, giving the company another year to operate its local website in China. The license for the China based site Google.cn, must be reviewed annually. China regulates Internet content in part through issuing licenses and overseeing companies like Google and its chief Chinese competitor Baidu Inc. Chinese authorities block or limit access to websites based overseas.

Google scaled back its China operations last year after a disagreement with authorities over its concerns about censorship and hacking. Google said they would would stop filtering its content as required by local regulations. This caused users to fear the company would discontinue its Chinese language services entirely, or that the government would retaliate by banning its websites within the country. Rather, Google began redirecting users from its Chinese domain address, Google.cn, to a website in Hong Kong whose search results Google doesn't filter.

Internet Explorer will drop to an under 50% share by mid 2012

Microsoft's Internet Explorer i headed towards losing its place as the #1 browser by the middle of 2012, according to statistics published by Web metrics company Net Applications.

In August, IE lost almost a percentage point in usage share, falling to 55.3%, a new low for the slowly declining browser. In the last year, IE has dropped 6.9 points. On Windows 7 IE9 accounts for 20.4% of all browsers globally, and 27.7% on Windows 7 in the U.S. IE9 runs on Windows 7 and Vista, but does not work on Windows XP. IE8 is currently the most popular version, with a 30% share overall and 54.4% of all editions of IE.

Almost all IE's decline over the last year is thanks to Google's Chrome browser. In the last 12 months, Chrome has increased by 7.8% points to 15.5%. Firefox on the other hand is in danger of losing its 2nd place spot which it has held for years. If Firefox and Chrome keep to the pace they have been on, Chrome will overtake Firefox about the same time IE falls to under 50%.

Facebook to Debut Music Service in September

According to Mashable, Facebok will join hands with MOG, Rdio, and Spotify to create a Facebook music service that will be announced at the F8 Facebook developer conference in September. Facebook and its partners, however, downplayed any relationship. Spotify also declined to confirm the report. Spotify already offers to share music with friends via Facebook, including playlists, as does Rdio and MOG. All three services provide a free tier, then charge additional fees for unlimited streaming and mobile playback.

It’s also believed that Facebook will use a Music Dashboard that will work with a persistent play/pause music control button that will appear at the bottom of the screen near the Facebook Chat icon. The Music Dashboard will keep a summary of all the songs you listened to on each service and fill flag up any songs that your friends have recently listened to.

Steve Jobs resigns from Apple

Apple's leader Steve Jobs turned in his resignation on Wednesday as Apple's chief executive. This leaves many wondering whether Apple can continue its success under new leadership.

The shock among Apple fans was widespread even though it was well known that Jobs had serious health problems. Jobs' resignation may have been a surprise, but it wasn't unexpected. Jobs had taken a leave of absence.in 2009 a liver transplant and in the beginning of the year he again stepped away for medical reasons. Jobs did not give a specific reason for resigning but it appears to be health related. Jobs recommended that Apple's board of directors name Tim Cook as the next chief executive. Cook has taken over the leadership role at Apple several times while Jobs was on medical leave.

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, and was then kicked out of the company in 1985. He then returned in 1996, when the firm was in serious financial trouble. Soon after that things started picking up and out came the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Windows 8 will support USB 3.0 and 10 billion devices

The upcoming Windows 8 OS will fully support USB 3.0 and still retain backwards compatibility with the 10 billion existing USB 1.0 and 2.0 devices still in use. USB 3.0 will offer a 10x speed increase over USB 2.0 (up to 5 Gbit/s). USB 3.0 will provide 80% more power than USB 2.0 and allow for faster charging and remove the need for those “Y" cables used by external drives and other high power devices.

As of now there are no chipsets with USB 3.0 controllers onboard and the manufacturer of the motherboard has to use a third party chipset to enable USB 3.0 support. By 2015 all PCs sold will come with USB 3.0 ports, and there will be over 2 billion USB 3.0 devices sold that year as well. Microsoft is promising that Windows 8 will have robust USB 3.0 support.

Other work done to prepare for USB 3.0 included extensive hardware testing and creating a custom tool called MUTT (USB Test Tool) which can test 1000 USB devices for various compatibility issues.

Microsoft To Reveal Windows 8 Details

Microsoft will announce new details about the architecture and capabilities of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system in the coming weeks to prepare developers and users for what it calls the most significant overhaul of its OS since it released Windows 95.

"Windows 8 re-imagines Windows for a new generation of computing devices, and will be the very best operating system for hundreds of millions of PCs, new and old, used by well over a billion people globally" said Windows division president Steven Sinofksy. Microsoft also said that, with the introduction of Windows 8, for the first time the OS will run on x86 chips from Intel and AMD and also on ARM's system on a chip architecture for tablets and smartphones.

Developers will get their first hands-on look at the OS next month at Microsoft's BUILD conference in Anaheim, CA.