TechBlog

Of course I’m talking about football. When I say football I mean the game that is played with one ball thas is kicked with the foot, not the other game that is known as football in the US even though it’s played using the hands. Anyway I don’t like football at all, it’s too boring fo me. But, at least in Europe, everyone loves football. And one of the best national championships is the Spanish one, with the 2 biggest teams being Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona. Every time they play against each other, millions of people watch that game, and news about it are going around all the time. Last Saturday they played in Madrid, and being this such a popular match, cybercriminals couldn’t miss this opportunity. ...

Although there’s a heated Adobe vs. Apple discussion going on, creative professionals are probably much more excited about the latest version of Adobe’s Creative Suite, which is now officially available. Besides the new versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro and Dreamweaver, Adobe Creative Suite 5 also brings Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR® 2, which are “optimized for high performance on mobile screens and designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer, more immersive user experience.” ...

Every once in a while, you find some odd piece of text in a piece of malware. Debugging the TDL 3 rootkit yields some interesting results. Here are messages that dump in the debug window at various times: Fri Apr 9 09:02:37.495 2010 (GMT-4): You people voted for Hubert Humphrey, and you killed Jesus Fri Apr 9 09:03:01.900 2010 (GMT-4): Ah Lou, come on man, we really like this place Fri Apr 9 11:53:08.715 2010 (GMT-4): Dude, meet me in Montana XX00, Jesus (H. Christ) Fri Apr 9 12:18:27.522 2010 (GMT-4): I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t screw to save it’s species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all those french beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke ...

Many patches are announced for tomorrow: The Redmond company expects to release 11 security bulletins. Of those 5 are rated critical, 5 important and 1 moderate. The patches belonging to the bulletins will close 25 security vulnerabilities in Windows, Exchange and in Office. Adobe plans to deliver security updates for critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat for all supported platforms tomorrow. Additionally, the automatic updater will be activated with the patches so in future updates get installed silent.

Palm, the smartphone pioneer, is on the block. The company, which in recent years has been eclipsed by the iPhone (and to some extent by Google’s Android OS), failed to make much of a comeback with its most recent Pre and Pixi phones. Now Bloomberg reports the inevitable: Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners have been tasked with finding a buyer for the ailing company, and bids may be sought as early as this week. ...

Brian Krebs, in his “Krebs on Security” blog is reporting that a large number of WordPress blog pages have been hacked to redirected visitors to networkads.net that downloads rogue security applications onto their machines. Also, the owners of the blogs are locked out of access. “It’s not clear yet whether the point of compromise is a WordPress vulnerability (users of the latest, patched version appear to be most affected), a malicious WordPress plugin, or if a common service provider may be the culprit. However, nearly every site owner affected so far reports that Network Solutions is their current Web hosting provider,” Krebs wrote. ...

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has confirmed that his company is developing a tablet device based on the Android operating system, according to friends that spoke to the executive at a recent event in Los Angeles. The New York Times reports that Google has “been working with several hardware manufacturers,” and “hopes to make its own apps marketplace available for new slate-like devices.” Although Google is yet to publicly announce such a device, many signs point to its likely launch. For starters, Google has been rumored to be developing a slate device with HTC – the same company it brought Nexus One to market with – since January. Moreover, the company has already announced plans for an e-book store expected to launch within the next few months. ...

Barnes & Noble confirmed that its Nook e-reader is coming to Best Buy retail stores beginning April 18. Last week we reported on rumors that both the Nook and Amazon’s Kindle would be hitting retail stores, but it looks like the Barnes & Noble device has secured a presence at the large electronics retailer first. Released last December, the Nook has already been available for purchase in Barnes & Noble retail and online stores. The move to a major consumer electronics retailer like Best Buy, however, potentially opens the device up to a whole new market. ...

In an e-mail to a German customer, Steve Jobs confirmed what most of us surmised last week: There will be no iPhone OS 4.0 support for original 2G iPhone owners. At last week’s iPhone OS 4.0 announcement, Apple let iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod touch owners know that those devices will not support multitasking, although they will support other new features. For owners of the nearly three-year-old original iPhone, it looks like iPhone OS 3.1.x will be the end of the line in terms of official OS updates. Jobs didn’t explain why Apple is no longer going to offer software updates for the original iPhone, though we suspect it’s part of a plan to phase out the product line. ...

Twitter has just announced that it has acquired Atebits, the company behind the popular Tweetie iPhone app and Mac desktop application. Tweetie’s creator, Loren Brichter, will be joining the Twitter team as well. The app will be renamed “Twitter for iPhone” and be made free in the next few weeks. Twitter CEO Evan Williams explained the move in a blog post: “We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world.” ...

…and some of it masquerades as “marketing” and “newsletter” emails. In March 2010, spam continued to account for a high percentage of all email traffic, peaking at 93.6% of all messages. The majority of this spam email was sent using certain tactics that were deployed to hijack unsecured computers and hide the senders’ identity. Recently, however, there has been an uptick in spam “marketing” and “newsletter” emails. These spam marketing and newsletter emails share one significant commonality with “regular” spam emails, which is that they are unwanted email messages sent to individuals who have no formal relationship with the message sender. ...

Aiming for one billion Twitterers by 2013? Twitter’s International Team Lead Engineer Matt Sanford has blogged on the company’s site that Twitter is seeing growth of over 60 percent in registrations outside the U.S. After setting up a Spanish language capability in November, the microblogging service saw a huge surge in registrations in Latin America, Sanford said. Sign-ups in India also spiked early in the year after several politicians and Bollywood movie stars began Tweeting. ...

European telecommunication giants are preparing to fight Google over the data traffic and bandwidth that is consumed due to YouTube videos, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Their goal: to have Google pay them for the bandwidth YouTube and its other websites consume. Telefónica, S.A., France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom are all cited in the report as being part of a new coalition looking to change the current state of affairs, where users are charged for Internet access, rather than websites that provide the content they consume. These telecoms believe that Google should share its online ad revenue with network operators for carrying its content. YouTube is their biggest complaint: by far, it is the most data-intensive service that the search giant offers. ...

Apple has been challenging Google on many fronts this week — first with its mobile platform, then with its advertising platform. Earlier today, its developers launched the first volley in the battle’s third front, releasing the first public code for the next WebKit rendering and processing kernel that will likely drive the Safari 5 browser. With Google Chrome using a reworked form of WebKit, the Apple team did something that perhaps any other free and open source developer would be publicly stoned for doing, but which Apple might just have the savvy to get away with: It openly one-upped another developer’s open contribution. ...

One week ago, we heard that popular BitTorrent search engine Isohunt had been ordered by a U.S. judge to remove copyright-infringing content from their website. Following the court decision, Isohunt owner Gary Fung announced his resolution to replace Isohunt with a lite version that would turn the site into a very simple search engine, intentionally similar to Google, but specializing in torrents. This is now the case for visitors from the US, who are redirected to the new, lite version of the site. Fung explains the move to the site’s visitors: ...