TechBlog

V3.co.uk: Microsoft is a whisker away from an $8bn deal to buy VoIP firm Skype in its biggest ever foray into the acquisition market, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The deal, which would total around $8.5bn when including Skype’s long-term debt, could be signed as early as Tuesday, people familiar with the matter told the paper. Microsoft’s biggest acquisition to date is the $6bn paid in 2007 to buy online advertising firm aQuantive. ...

Gizmodo: OS X Lion is coming to the Mac App Store, ushering in a new era of digital distribution for their desktop operating system. And rumors are flying that iOS devices will soon receive over-the-air updates. If we had to smash these two pieces of information together and speculate about the future a little bit, we’d say Apple is heading down a path to automatic background updates for all of their operating systems. Hardcore nerds would hate this to be sure, but for the average user, it’s a good thing. ...

The Google Chrome team is happy to announce the arrival of Chrome 11.0.696.57 to the Stable Channel for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome Frame. Chrome 11 contains some really great improvements including speech input through HTML. Read More at Google Chrome Release Blog.

Avira TechBlog: Great news – our Avira Premium Security Suite received the next AV-Test.org certificate, this time for the first quarter of 2011! So far the suite thus achieved all available AV-Test.org certificates since the beginning of the certification process. The certificate approves the tested products a good quality in detection, repair and usability. This means that users of the Avira Premium Security Suite can be assured to be well protected from the threats they face when using their computers on the Internet!

TUAW: According to the results of a massive survey by Hunch.com, Mac people are frequently young, vegetarian city-dwellers who like modern art, liberal politics, and independent films. Meanwhile, Windows supporters tend to be older, more conservative, and more likely to compare talking about computers to “struggling with a foreign language.” Whether you’re collecting evidence for the Mac vs. Windows debate you have planned for the weekend or preparing for an appearance on Family Feud, Hunch’s results offer some fun and fascinating insights into the tastes and habits of Mac and PC users, from what TV shows they watch to what snacks will best satisfy their afternoon munchies. ...

Since 2003, the number of exploitable vulnerabilities has fallen considerably in Microsoft’s Office suite. H-Online: Independently of each other, security specialists Dan Kaminsky and Will Dormann from Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT have found that, in the past few years, the number of flaws and exploitable vulnerabilities in individual versions of Microsoft Office has fallen dramatically, achieving results that are even below those ofOpenOffice. However, their findings should be treated with caution, as they are based on automatic evaluations and say little about the actual threat potential. ...

Avira TechBlog: The series continues – Avira AntiVir Personal and Avira AntiVir Professional received the April 2011 VB100 award! The tests were executed in a Windows XP SP3 environment by the Virus Bulletin test engineers. The Avira anti malware solutions performed very well: All WildList samples were detected, all of the polymorphic viruses too. Also, more than 99 percent of the Worms and Bots were blocked. The heuristics test also looks very good: With 96 percent of the yet unknown malware samples filtered out Avira ranks among the best solutions!

Adobe Flash Player 10.2.159.1 is now available! Download it from here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

On its recent patch day, Microsoft released security updates to fix vulnerabilities in multiple versions of its Office products. The patch for PowerPoint 2003 can, however, have negative consequences – after installation existing presentations may be unable to be opened or may cause an error message stating that the file is corrupted and cannot be fully displayed. In the latter case, the content of the presentation can only be partially read and any non-displayed elements, in particular background images, are lost for good after saving. ...

Avira TechBlog: Today some updates need attention – they fix critical security issues and should be installed immediately! The update reign starts off with Apple. Critical security vulnerabilities are closed within the Safari web browser 5.0.5 – they allowed cyber criminals to smuggle in malware. For Mac users, additionally a security update is available for the Snow Leopard operating system. It fixes an issue with stolen certificates which arose a three weeks ago at Comodo and is amazingly tiny for an Apple security update, only 4 MByte. And then for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users the update to iOS 4.3.2 is available which basically closes the same security holes for the mobile devices as well. ...