Announcement on Omid Farhang

Google Overhauls Gmail to Take On E-Mail Overload

Thu, 30 May 2013 15:04:25 +0000

NYTimes posted: On Wednesday, Google introduced a new in-box design for its e-mail service, Gmail.

In a blog post announcing the new design, the company said it wanted to help people quickly sort through their messages to determine which ones were important and which ones could wait until later.

The revamped Gmail automatically sorts incoming messages into categories, which appear as three tabs — primary, social and promotions — that users can toggle between in their in-box. The primary tab contains the e-mails that the service thinks are most important. Social contains message updates from various social networks, like LinkedIn, Tumblr and Yelp. Promotions contains newsletters, party invites and concert announcements. Users can also select to add additional tabs to help manage electronic bills, banking statements and messages from forum boards.

Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail is out, What's new?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:39:43 +0000

Canonical has released Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, most likely the last release of Ubuntu that will primarily cater for laptop and desktop users. For Ubuntu 13.04, Canonical focused on tightening up the core of the OS and polishing the Unity interface in preparation for Ubuntu’s smartphone and tablet debut, which is slated to occur in October with the release of version 13.10. There’s also the usual slew of package updates, a new Linux kernel, and a couple of new features, too.

Apple adds two-step verification option for Apple IDs

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:13:00 +0000

A new security option gives Apple’s customers a way to secure their Apple ID password using their phone.

Cross-posted from Cnet:

Apple today added an extra layer of security to its Apple ID system that can harden the password people use to log in to various Apple services.

Users with an Apple ID can now sign up for two-step verification of their password, a system that sends a four-digit passcode by text message to a user’s phone, and must be used on top of a regular password. In practice, this could keep an account from being compromised by an attacker, unless that person had access to the mobile device too.

Dropbox Makes PDF Viewing Less Painful, Adds Push Notifications For Shared Folders

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:11:00 +0000

Just a few days after adding a new set of features to Dropbox for Teams, the cloud storage company rolled out a new version of its iOS application which introduces a few useful additions as well. For starters, it has added an improved PDF viewer, which lets you navigate to any page in the document by tapping on the thumbnail. It’s rather awesome, in fact. The update also introduces push notifications for folders shared with you – a feature that’s now available on Android, too.

Dropbox tests two-factor authentication

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 19:33:00 +0000

h-online: Cloud backup provider Dropbox says it has begun a public test of two-factor authentication for its service. Dropbox had announced it would start offering the security measure after the service experienced a data leak at the beginning of the month.

Users who activate two factor authentication will have to enter a security code after logging in with their username and password. The security code can only be used once and is sent to the user’s mobile phone in a text message. To generate security codes, users can also use a variety of smartphone applications such as Google Authenticator. Details of the process are given on the two-step verification help page.

Firefox 17 to make add-ons more secure

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 12:38:00 +0000

h-Online: As suggested by some of its developers back in 2010, the Firefox browser will introduce enhanced separation between add-ons and the rest of the browser. With the change, which is planned to take effect with the release of Firefox 17, scripts on web pages will only be able to access the data belonging to add-ons if they are included in a whitelist.

The beta version of Firefox 15 already logs warning messages in the browser’s Error Console when a page that is not on the whitelist tries to access data from add-ons. This behavior has been included to make add-on developers aware of the new policy and to give them time to fix their add-on’s behavior before the release of Firefox 17.

Microsoft unleashes Windows attack tool

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 08:48:00 +0000

TheRegister.co.uk wrote:

Attack Surface Analyzer explains what apps do to your beautiful Windows installation

Developers, developers …. *&^%%!!# developers who break Windows!

That may well be a refrain that motivated Redmond to release a new software tool, Surface Analyzer 1.0, which explains how new apps impact Windows’ ability to repel the various varieties of naughtyware.

Microsoft explains the tool’s powers thusly:

Attack Surface Analyzer looks for classes of security weaknesses Microsoft has seen when applications are installed on the Windows operating system, and it highlights these as issues. The tool also gives an overview of changes to the system that Microsoft considers important to the security of the platform, and it highlights these changes in the attack surface report. Some of the checks performed by the tool include analysis of changed or newly added files, registry keys, services, Microsoft ActiveX controls, listening ports and other parameters that affect a computer’s attack surface.

VirusTotal online scanner adds behavior analysis

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 14:16:00 +0000

h-Online: The developers of the VirusTotal online virus scanner service are currently testing a new sandbox feature to provide users with more meaningful scan results. In a post on the company’s blog, software architect and developer Emiliano Martinez says that, for this purpose, samples uploaded to the service are executed in a controlled sandbox environment where their actions can be “recorded in order to give the analyst a high level overview of what the sample is doing”.

Third edition of vulnerability spotter Secunia PSI

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Version 3 of Personal Software Inspector (PSI), Secunia‘s free program updater, has been released with a much simplified user interface, enabling less technically astute users to keep their Windows applications up to date as well.

According to Secunia, the automatic updater has also been enhanced. PSI is now able to keep programs from more than 3,000 companies up to date, though, as before, PSI only cares about updates which fix security vulnerabilities. Version 3 also includes additional translations, including German. The software checks the user’s computer for outdated program versions known to contain vulnerabilities and either installs updates or provides links to download them.

Google bringing new smarts to Search with Knowledge Graph

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:15:00 +0000

Google’s Knowledge Graph will display summaries of topics when your query is related to one of the 500 million items in Google’s new database of things.

Google has long sought to index the world’s information — and it’s now taking things a step farther with an effort to create “a database of everything in the world.” And it’s bringing this effort to your search results pages.

The new Knowledge Graph project, rolling out to English-language Google Search users over the next few days, provides more data snippets alongside its query results than the search engine currently provides. The results are based on Google’s new database of 500 million people, places, and things, says Jack Manzel, Product Management Director of Search at Google. Manzel says there are 3.5 billion attributes and connections between these things in the database.

Windows Live is dead, long live Windows Live

Thu, 03 May 2012 20:17:00 +0000

Cross-posted from BetaNews: In a blog post on Wednesday, President of Microsoft’s Windows division Steven Sinofsky announced the seven-year old Windows Live brand is being retired.

Do not be mistaken, there are more than 500 million users of the various Microsoft services that fall under the general classification of Windows Live. They are alive and well.

The brand and the concept of Windows Live as a whole, however, is antiquated in this mobile-driven era, and Microsoft is finally halting the differentiation.

OONI maps internet censorship on a global scale

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:23:00 +0000

The H-Online: Tor developers Arturo Filasto and Jacob Appelbaum have been working on a new tool they call the OONI-probe. OONI stands for Open Observatory of Network Interference and is designed to help map internet censorship across the global network. The open source tool gives users the ability to check their internet connection for censorship, selective bandwidth throttling, surveillance and other interferences. This data can then be shared freely with other users, creating a global overview of the state of censorship of the network.

Get ready for exciting changes coming to Firefox 13, 14 and 15

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:12:00 +0000

Cross-posted from BetaNews: Following on from the release of Firefox 12 FINAL, Mozilla has updated its developmental branches to versions 13 (Beta), 14 (Aurora) and 15 (Nightly/UX), respectively. Those looking for major changes in version 12 will may be disappointed, but future builds promise a number of radical new features, including redesigned Home and New Tab pages, plus panel downloads manager and inline preferences screen.

Get a head’s up on what’s coming and discover which build is best for your personal needs with our essential guide to what’s coming up in the near future for Mozilla’s open-source, cross-platform browser.

Microsoft Security Essentials 4.0 ready for download

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:25:00 +0000

Cnet: Microsoft today made available for download a new release of its free anti-virus/anti-malware program for Windows PCs, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE).

The MSE 4.0 release is available via the Microsoft Download Center and the MSE Web site. (I learned of its availability from a post on Neowin today.) The latest version runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

The 4.0 version has been in beta since late 2011. As ZDNet sister site TechRepublic reported back in December 2011, Microsoft officials said the 4.0 release would include a streamlined interface; a renamed version of the SpyNet service (now slated to be known as Microsoft Active Protection Services); new automatic remediation functionality; and overall improved performance and detection capabilities.

Introducing Google Drive… yes, really

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:33:00 +0000

Cross-Posted from Official Google Blog: Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist.

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

Google updates OAuth 2.0 Playground

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 20:51:00 +0000

The H-Security: Google has added new features to its OAuth 2.0 Playground, which it launched last November. Developers can now switch to using client-side flow, and the system has added support for APIs that use OAuth 2.0 drafts 10 to 25. Google has also added a feature that makes it easy to see all available API operations supported by the user’s current access token. To make it easier to use the Playground for an extended amount of time, developers now have the ability to refresh their access tokens automatically, and clicking HTTP response links will now populate the request URI field.

Instagram Sign-Up Page Now Beckons Android Users

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:25:00 +0000

Mashable: The day when Android users will first lay hands on the red hot photo-sharing app Instagram just got even closer. Late Saturday, a sign-up page appeared on Instagram’s website, inviting all those of the Android persuasion to sign up to be notified when the app is first available for that OS.

The company still isn’t saying when the long-awaited Android Instagram app will actually become available. But now, at least those eager to try out the free app can take some sort of action that brings them closer to Instagram.

Firefox switching to encrypted Google search

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:01:00 +0000

The H-Online: An inconspicuous “s” added to various lines of code in its latest nightly builds means that future versions of Firefox will send all search queries to Google in encrypted form. This means that instead of HTTP, the open source browser will use the HTTPS protocol, which encrypts traffic between the web site and browser using SSL. The nightly builds will feed through, over the next few months, until the feature is, most probably, in Firefox 14.

Apple previews OS X 10.8 with Gatekeeper

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:45:00 +0000

The H-Online: A developer preview of Mac OS X 10.8 is now available to registered Mac developers after Apple announced the new version, named Mountain Lion, and previewed a number of its features. Among those features is Gatekeeper which Apple says “helps prevent you from unknowingly downloading and installing malicious software”.

The Gatekeeper feature has three levels of security for running applications downloaded from the Internet; “Mac App Store”, “Mac App Store and identified developers” and “Anywhere”. The first setting only runs applications downloaded from the Mac App Store, in a style similar to the iPhone only running apps from the App Store. Unlike the iPhone though, Gatekeeper lets users allow applications from other sources. The “Mac App Store and Identified Developers” option only allows applications from the store and from developers who have signed their program with an Apple-issued Developer ID, while “Anywhere” allows any program to be downloaded and run. It is unclear how Gatekeeper interacts with software loaded from other media, such as a USB memory stick or CD/DVD.

No further updates for Debian 5.0 Lenny

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:54:00 +0000

The H-Online: The Debian developers have pointed out, in an announcement on the debian-announce mailing list, that – three years after it was released –Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny) has reached its “End of Life”. Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 was originally released in February 2009 and on 6 February 2012, the developers stopped providing security updates for that version of the distribution.

Users have now had a year to update their systems to Lenny’s successor, Squeeze, which was released on 6 February 2011. The Debian developers recommend that any installations that are still using Debian 5.0 should be updated to version 6 of the distribution immediately. The Debian community recently released version 6.0.4 of Debian Squeeze which includes all the updates that have been released for Squeeze since its release.