TechBlog

If you’ve updated iTunes to the latest version, 9.1, you may have noticed that iPad and iPhone apps are now separated by a tab at the top of the page. Switch tabs and you will pull up device-specific views of the App Store, which renders the entire experience a bit more elegant and better-organized than before. This is a slight change from the old method, which previously divided apps into categories like “New and Noteworthy” and “Staff Favorites.” There is a downside to the new design, however: If you are browsing a category of iPhone apps and want to begin looking at similar apps for the iPad, you have to start your search over on the front page. ...

It was only a matter of time before the merest of “iPad” mentions on sites such as Twitter would result in autospammed messages like this: These bots will fire a message claiming “we need someone to test and keep one iPad” (or simply “Free iPad here”) to anyone discussing the latest gadget to hit the streets, sending you to various promotional sites like the one below: ...

For those of you armchair mayors who cheat with your Foursquare checkins, your time has come. The mobile social network has announced that checkins outside the immediate vicinity of the venue in question will no longer net points, badges or mayorships. Foursquare is now using your mobile phone’s GPS location (other tactics are used for phones without GPS) to verify your whereabouts to reward only those that happen near the actual place in question. Checkins that appear to take place far from the venue users are trying to checkin to trigger the “cheater code” and block incentives. ...

Hong Kong-based security firm Network Box reported that Korea was the country of origin for 31.1 percent of the malware on the Internet in March. In February the country only pumped out 8.9 percent, leading researchers to theorize that there has been a huge increase in infected machines there pushing out phishing spam. Network Box includes phishing in its calculations of monthly malware statistics. They also include North and South Korea as one country in their categories, but say the lack of public computers in the North means that South Korea is the country of origin for the bulk of the statistic. ...

BlackBerry users rejoice, Google Maps for mobile just got a huge update that adds support for voice search, Google Buzz and more. Google Maps for BlackBerry has always been a feature rich application, but the additions to Google Maps 4.0 bring it more in line with their offerings for the iPhone and Google’s own Android platform. Here are some of the highlights of the new version: Search by voice: Google’s voice search feature is now supported by all BlackBerry devices, meaning users can search using phrases or even addresses, just as users can on the iPhone or Android. Google Buzz: Google Buzz for mobile is also now available with a heavy focus on Buzz’s geolocation feature. This means that you can see what’s going on nearby and also post your own public Buzz messages. This instantly adds some Yelp-like functionality to the app. Personalized searches and starred item support: If you have Web History enabled on your Google Account, you can save time typing search queries in maps.google.com because Google will provide you with suggestions based on your previous searches. So if you found a place at home but didn’t write down the number, you can just type in a few letters on your phone and it will pop right up. You can also synchronize your starred items between your computer and your phone, which is great for keeping track of places you want to visit or need to get directions to. Labs: Google Maps 4.0 supports Labs features like the terrain layer and scale adjustments. Find nearby businesses: You can view nearby businesses by selecting a point on a map or your current location. ...

Oh dear — looks like it’s time to add FarmVille to the list of internet addiction scares after a 12-year-old UK boy has amassed £905 in FarmVille debt. About £288 of that came from the boy’s own savings, while £625 was billed to his horrified mother’s credit card. The debt — which is equivalent to about $1400 USD — was racked up in all of about two weeks’ worth of gameplay. In the popular casual Facebook game, players can spend real money to accrue virtual currency and items. It’s a business that’s booming enough to garner the game’s developer Zynga an estimated valuation as high as $5 billion. ...

Farmville has been launch in June 2009 and after month it has been rated at #8 in Top 25 Facebook Games. Farmville has become the most popular games on Facebook. It has been rank at #1 Facebook Game on August 2009 up until now. Farmville users can’t get enough of farming. They make impressive hay bales art farm just like the Image below. Fake AV gang launches its attack to the Farmville users by poisoning Yahoo and Google search results using the following keywords (see Image 1): ...

Just after the launch of iPad, Apple has just announced iPhone OS 4.0 Event at 8th April 10 AM PT. A lot more speculations are being made about the upcoming features of iPhone OS 4.0 Following are some most closest guesses on the features of apple iPhone OS 4.0 Key Features iPhone OS 4.0 There will be multi-touch gestures support everywhere on iphone OS 4.0 Multitasking will be there to allow to run third party apps in background Many graphical and UI changes to make navigating through iPhone OS easier and more efficient. The update will be most probably available for only the iPhone 3G and 3GS There might be some new way to sync contacts and calendar applications. Lets what all out of these features listed above to be come out as truth, on 8th April 2010 at iPhone OS 4.0 Event ...

“Shadows in the Cloud” hang over the otherwise sunny PRC A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign ministry has tried to minimize a report from investigators in Toronto that hackers based in China breached computers of the Indian Government and others and downloaded classified material. The Information Warfare Monitor and the Shadowserver Foundation extensively documented an eight-month investigation that revealed a network of infected government and military computers. The net was controlled from servers in China and stole a variety of classified documents. They posted their 52-page report, “Shadows in the Cloud: investigating cyber espionage 2.0” today on scribd.com ...

A blog contributor who goes by the name of “jeremy” has continued to research the possibilities inherent in the recently discovered .pdf-file weakness that could enable the execution of code. Jeremy posted earlier this week that he had created a proof of concept .pdf file that could spread to other .pdf files on a system or network (which makes it a worm). “Within the proof of concept I infected a single benign PDF file from another PDF file, but this proof of concept could easily be modified to recursively traverse a users computer directories to find and infect all PDF files on that users computer and/or accessible to that user at the time of execution with any payload of my choosing.” He wrote on the SudoSecure.net site. ...