Category: Computers, Science & Technology

I got this email today from the ZeroPC Team. Looks like some good stuff!

“When we look back on the fantastic journey ZeroPC has embarked upon last year, we’re very pleased that we have added and improved so many features for ZeroPC Desktop and ZeroPC Cloud Navigator. We are also very grateful for our supportive user community that provides constant feedback to help us improve our services.

Today we’d like to introduce another set of new features to help you stay even more productive in the ZeroPC cloud workspace:

1. ZeroPC Cloud Desktop Workspace (www.zeropc.com)

* Web Editor: We have included a new HTML text editor that brings common word processor features directly to your ZeroPC. You can create beautiful documents with many styles and insert images from any connected cloud services in ZeroPC. Save it as DOC, PDF, TXT, ODT, MHT or create your beautiful personal blog or web pages directly from our Web Editor.

* Quick Share with Commenting features: You can easily share folders, files and photo albums with the ZeroPC Quick Share feature. Now you have the ability to enable the new commenting feature so your colleagues can comment on the work project files that you shared and your friends & families can post comments to your vacation photo albums. You can also track how many times your Quick Share has been viewed. Collaborate and engage your audience with your Quick Share content. Click here:
(https://c1.zeropc.com/os/qshare/d/cb09f53fa3764232b7cce5c1ddb30179/5656f4ab) to view a sample ZeroPC Quick Share.

* File/Folder shortcuts from any cloud service: Navigating to cloud content from different services can often require many steps and clicks. Now you can easily create a ZeroPC desktop shortcut so it is only one click away. Create a shortcut to your frequently accessed Dropbox folder, a shortcut to your Picasa album, or a shortcut to a file which you have been frequently accessing.

2. ZeroPC Mobile Workspace (ZeroPC Cloud Navigator)

ZeroPC Content Navigator mobile app just got a lot more powerful with many additional features. We have included several new File I/O features so you can manipulate your cloud content on the go.

* Universal cloud uploader – upload local documents, photos, videos or music files to any connected cloud service (e.g. Dropbox, Flickr, Picasa, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Sugarsync, Box, etc.) directly from the mobile app.

* Easy content upload from 3rd party apps – use “Open With” in iOS or “Share via” menu in Android to upload content from 3rd party apps directly to your connected cloud services in ZeroPC.

* Cloud Copy/Rename/Delete – copy your files from Dropbox to Google Drive, photos from Facebook to SkyDrive; manage all of your files on-the-go.

* Download Folder – aggregate all of your cloud download in one convenient place

3. ZeroPC Lab Update

* MiiPC (Coming soon!) – Our designers & developers are working on a new project called MiiPC™. MiiPC is a personal computing device that you can connect to a monitor or TV and instantly turn it into a media, learning and entertainment station. See a sneak preview of the MiiPC initiative. ( https://www.miipc.com )

We hope you enjoy our new features and have more productive year of 2013!

Thanks,

The ZeroPC Team”

Microsoft tried mightily to spin the outages that they are having on Surface Pro as a runaway success. But, was it just that they didn’t build enough?

Surface Pro Demand: Don’t Believe The Hype

“Headlines over the last week have been abuzz with claims that 200 million global workers are clamoring for a Windows 8 tablet, if not for a Surface Pro in particular. The figure is an extrapolation of data collected for Forrester’s 2013 Mobile Workforce Adoption Trends, which surveyed almost 10,000 information workers in 16 countries and found that 32% of respondents want Windows running on their next work tablet.

The figure easily outpaces the proportion of people who said they want an iPad (26%) or an Android device (12%). It has prompted speculation that Microsoft is pushing enterprise mobility across a new Rubicon, one defined by not only touchscreens and thin form factors but also true multitasking, legacy application support and laptop-level computing power. Does this demand mean that Surface Pros will fly off the shelves when they go on sale this weekend, restoring Microsoft to its place atop OS world and erasing memories of the lackluster Surface RT launch?

Probably not.

To be clear, Surface Pro isn’t likely to flop either. But there’s little evidence that Redmond’s new device will achieve more than a modest launch, let alone turn tides industry-wide. Notably, Gartner’s numbers were collected in September and October — before either Windows 8 or Surface RT were commercially available. Microsoft has since sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses but failed to galvanize Ultrabook sales or position its Surface RT as a BYOD favorite. Given these developments, it’s conceivable that Forrester’s respondents liked the concept of a Windows 8 tablet in theory but lost enthusiasm as they investigated actual options.”

Are we sure that there is no market for buggy whips? Yikes! This headline is totally crazy!

AOL’s Dial-Up Subscription Business Produces More Than All Of The Company’s Profit

“AOL just released quasi-profit numbers for each of its divisions for the first time.

As expected, AOL’s dial-up subscription business–the business that powered AOL to astounding global success in the 1990s–still accounts for the vast majority of AOL’s profits.

In fact, AOL’s subscription business generates more than all of the company’s profits, after accounting for AOL’s corporate costs.

On the one hand, this is really bad news, because AOL’s subscription business is still shrinking.

On the other hand…

This shrinking business still throws off an amazing amount of cash–about $500 million a year–that AOL can use and is using to invest in other cool businesses (content and an ad network).

And the shrinking dial-up business is shrinking at a much slower rate than it used to–because AOL is finding ways of adding other value for its subscribers.

In fact, it is not inconceivable that AOL will find ways to add enough value for its subscribers that the subscription business will soon stop shrinking and start growing again. And if that happens…. wow. AOL will have a built-in marketing engine (content and ad network) with which it can market subscriptions at very low cost. And given the profitability of this business, AOL’s profit could suddenly begin to grow very rapidly.”

Get the upgrade!

LibreOffice Web Site

The following notes apply:

• This release is bit-for-bit identical to the 4.0.0 Release Candidate 3, so you don’t need to download or reinstall if you have that version already.
• The distribution for Windows is an international build, so you can choose the user interface language that you prefer. Help content is available via an online service, or alternatively as a separate install.
• Our Windows binaries are digitally signed by The Document Foundation.
• For Windows users that have OpenOffice.org installed, we advise uninstalling that beforehand, because it registers the same file type associations.
• If you run Linux, the GCJ Java variant has known issues with LibreOffice, we advise to e.g. use OpenJDK instead.
• LibreOffice 4.0 drops a few long-deprecated features, including support for legacy binary StarOffice files, export to legacy Word and Excel (version 6.0/95), and legacy ODMA document management.
• Some menu entries have changed or added. If you miss something, that may be due to the use of customised menu settings from your previous LibreOffice installation.

Let’s hope so! This would truly be a “game changer!” For instance, you could listen to Internet radio ANYWERE, across the country, in the car, anywhere!

Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks

“The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.

The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea, analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign from Google, Microsoft and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor.

The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.

If approved by the FCC, the free networks would still take several years to set up. And, with no one actively managing them, con­nections could easily become jammed in major cities. But public WiFi could allow many consumers to make free calls from their mobile phones via the Internet. The frugal-minded could even use the service in their homes, allowing them to cut off expensive Internet bills.

‘For a casual user of the Web, perhaps this could replace carrier service,’ said Jeffrey Silva, an analyst at the Medley Global Advisors research firm. ‘Because it is more plentiful and there is no price tag, it could have a real appeal to some people.’

The major wireless carriers own much more spectrum than what is being proposed for public WiFi, making their networks more robust, experts say.

Designed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the plan would be a global first. When the U.S. government made a limited amount of unlicensed airwaves available in 1985, an unexpected explosion in innovation followed. Baby monitors, garage door openers and wireless stage microphones were created. Millions of homes now run their own wireless networks, connecting tablets, game consoles, kitchen appli­ances and security systems to the Internet.

‘Freeing up unlicensed spectrum is a vibrantly free-market approach that offers low barriers to entry to innovators developing the technologies of the future and benefits consumers,’ Genachow­ski said in a an e-mailed statement.

Some companies and cities are already moving in this direction. Google is providing free WiFi to the public in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and parts of Silicon Valley.

Cities support the idea because the networks would lower costs for schools and businesses or help vacationers easily find tourist spots. Consumer advocates note the benefits to the poor, who often cannot afford high cellphone and Internet bills.”

Ouch! 250,000 compromised Twitter accounts! Not good!

Twitter also hacked this week, up to 250,000 accounts may have been compromised

“It’s been a rough week for security breaches, and Twitter has just announced it was a victim of attacks this week as well. In a blog post, the company states that during this past week it detected ‘unusual access patterns’ that led it to uncover unauthorized attempts to access user’s data. Twitter even discovered one attack as it was happening, and was able to shut it down shortly thereafter. However, Twitter’s post-mortem revealed that the perpetrators of the attack may have had access to account information for approximately 250,000 different users. According to the company, ‘usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords’ would have been available.

Twitter has reset the passwords and revoked session tokens for all such accounts; affected users should be receiving emails notifying them of the reset shortly. Users will be required to create new passwords from scratch.

While no explanation is given for how the vulnerability occurred, Twitter’s post does take a moment to ‘echo’ the recent advisory given by the Department of Homeland Security for computer users to disable Java on their systems for optimal security.

This comes as just the latest in a series of high-profile security breachers that have been revealed this week. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times revealed this week that they had been hacked, identifying hackers from China as the likely culprits. While Twitter does not directly make similar accusations, it does warn that ‘The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.’

‘This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,’ Twitter’s Director of Information Security, Bob Lord, writes in the company’s post. ‘For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.’

Update: We just spoke with a Twitter representative that stressed that the company doesn’t have definitive evidence that the accounts were in fact compromised at this time, and that the steps being taken today are a preventative measure. Twitter’s investigation is ongoing.”

I have always preferred PNG format, not only because it is small, but also it is Open Source! Gotta love that!

The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

“Summary:
The PNG image file format has been created in 1995 as a response to some patent issues around the then-prevailing GIF format. PNG has gained popularity ever since, and it is now used on more websites than GIF.

PNG is now used on 62.4% of all websites, just ahead of GIF with 62.3%. GIF was leading by more than 15% one year ago.

PNG is now the most popular lossless image compression format on the web. Only the lossy JPEG, which is the most appropriate format for photographs, is used on more sites.

While GIF’s patent issues mentioned above are long resolved, it’s the technical superiority that now convinces webmasters to chose PNG over GIF. PNG results in smaller files most of the time, it supports a much wider range of color depths and transparency options. The only feature where GIF still shines is its support for animation. However, most people find that dancing icons on a website make it look like it hasn’t been redesigned in the last 15 years. Animation is mostly used for ads nowadays, and even there, animated GIF’s would be considered the poor mans alternative to Flash.

Interestingly, GIF is still more popular than PNG on the top 1,000 websites (67.9% vs. 66.3%, see our head-to-head comparison), but we can expect that to change also within the next months. The trend is very clear: for every site that changes from PNG to GIF, more than 3 sites make the change in the other direction, see our technology change report.

There are some remarkable geographical differences in the usage rate of PNG: it is very popular in Europe, with over 70% in France, Italy, Spain and Netherlands, but much less in Asia, with 41% in Japan, 34.6% in Korea and only 30.6% in China. Usage is also higher on Unix-like systems than on Windows, and Google seems to be a big PNG supporter, it is used on 95.6% of all Google Servers.

The GIF image format, originally developed by CompuServe more than 25 years ago, was a very important standard in the early days of the web. It will probably be around for another 25 years, but it has been dethroned today.”

I have mentioned FreeNAS before, but it has never “made it” to GSotW before this! Check out the cool features below.

FreeNAS – an Open Source Network Attached Storage Solution

Thin Provisioning
Thin Provisioning is another excellent addition to the FreeNAS® features list. Thin Provisioning allows the administrator to allocate users more space than physically exists in the system. When paired with ZFS, it becomes easy to manage your total data pool size, and quickly and effectively grow to meet your users needs as they use more of their allotted space.

Backup and Restore
Remote Replication allows you to copy a snapshot to an offsite server, for maximum data security.

Command Line Interface
FreeNAS® 8 is based on FreeBSD 8.x, and will update and keep current with the FreeBSD project. So if you’re a savvy user, and prefer to use the command line, no problem! ssh in, and control your FreeNAS™ device from the FreeNAS™ custom CLI.

Driver Support
FreeNAS® is based on FreeBSD 8.3 and features much of the same driver support. This gives anyone building their own FreeNAS device or re-purposing old hardware a wide selection of hardware choices.

Snapshots
If your data is somehow lost, FreeNAS® makes it easy to restore from a previously generated snapshot. With the periodic snapshots feature, you can worry less about data loss, and use your system stress free.

File Sharing
FreeNAS® supports many popular networking protocols, and is easy to set up in most home and enterprise environments. You’ll be up and running in no time, and your users can connect with the protocol of your choice, no matter what operating system they run.

Plugins
In order to support third-party software such as bittorrent clients or media streaming servers, FreeNAS® provides an optional Plugin Jail. Plugins may be installed using a version of the PBI system from PC-BSD® that supports integration with the FreeNAS® Web UI.

Dowmnload it now! This is my very FAVORITE Audio Editor! I literally use it daily! So, I was excited to get this email notice:

“Audacity Team (https://audacity.sourceforge.net/) is pleased to announce the release of Audacity 2.0.3. It replaces all previous versions.

Audacity 2.0.3 now uses the libsoxr resampling library by default, instead of libresample, for higher quality and speed. Time Tracks have been improved and bug fixed, and new effects include an accessible Adjustable Fade. See the 2.0.3 Release Notes for details.”

There has been a lot of talk among security geeks about how insecure Java is, and the problems that they have been having. It looks bad for Oracle. Pundits are recommending that you don’t even USE Java! So, Oracle released a security patch! But, sadly, IT, too, has a security issue!

Java Hacker Uncovers Two Flaws In Latest Update

“The Java vulnerability news isn’t getting better.

Less than one week after Oracle released Java 7 update 11 to patch or mitigate two zero-day vulnerabilities in Java that were being actively exploited by attackers, veteran Java bug hunter Adam Gowdiak of Security Explorations in Poland discovered two new vulnerabilities in Java standard edition.

‘We have successfully confirmed that a complete Java security sandbox bypass can be still gained under the recent version of Java 7 Update 11 (JRE version 1.7.0_11-b21),’ wrote Gowdiak in a post to the Full Disclosure mailing list. As a result, any attacker who used the vulnerabilities would be able to craft malware that tapped the Java runtime environment, thus fully compromising a vulnerable system.

Interestingly, the two newly discovered bugs have nothing to do with Oracle’s partial patch of the ‘MBeanInstantiator’ flaw. This was mitigated by Oracle via changing the default Java security setting from medium to high, which requires that an unsigned Java Web apps be authorized by a user before being allowed to run. ‘MBeanInstantiator bug (or rather a lack of a fix for it) turned out to be quite inspirational for us,’ said Gowdiak. ‘However, instead of relying on this particular bug, we have decided to dig our own issues. As a result, two new security vulnerabilities (51 and 52) were spotted in a recent version of Java SE 7 code and they were reported to Oracle today (along with a working Proof of Concept code).’

Gowdiak has numbered the security vulnerabilities 51 and 52, because that’s the number of Java 7 bugs Security Explorations has reported to Oracle since April 2, 2012. In terms of the latest two vulnerabilities reported to Oracle, Gowdiak said, ‘The company informs us that it will investigate based on the data provided and get back to us soon.’

How bad are the vulnerabilities? ‘[Gowdiak] implies that although it locked the office door in update 7u11, Oracle left the entrance to the building open, which he considered as good as an invitation to find another way in,’ wrote Paul Ducklin, head of technology for Sophos in the Asia Pacific region, in a blog post. But per its disclosure policy, Security Explorations has yet to release full details of the new vulnerabilities, pending a fix from Oracle.

News of two new vulnerabilities being discovered comes on the heels of news that another Java vulnerability, unpatched by Oracle, was being offered for sale on an exclusive cybercrime forum.

The recently discovered Java vulnerabilities have led to widespread confusion over exactly which types of Java are at risk, worries about whether Java itself is safe, and questions over how Java-dependent enterprises should best deal with the vulnerability challenge. (Hint: Start by removing the Java plug-in from browsers, whenever possible.)

Oracle has also come under fire for failing to provide enterprises with a reliable method for updating the Java runtime environment across a large number of managed machines. As noted by one reader, ‘there are loosely published methods to do it via Group Policy or Configuration Manager, but these often fail, and are NOT supported by Oracle.'”