President Obama signs iPad

Sylvester Caan dropped us a note to tell us (and show us!) his iPad being signed by US President Barak Obama. Take it away, Sylvester: At a rally in Seattle, WA at the University of Washington, the President used the touchscreen on my iPad to give me his autograph. He looked slightly surprised, but proceeded to use his finger to scribble on the iPad using the Adobe Ideas app....

October 24, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 111 words

Are You Smarter Than John?

How not to manage your passwords… John, and his unique approach to security is part of an F-Secure Internet Security 2011 campaign. You can find more at besmarterthanjohn.com.

October 21, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 28 words

Thief Steals Laptop, Returns Data on USB Stick

A university professor in Sweden has “hope for humanity” after the thief who stole his laptop backed up all his data and mailed it to him on a USB stick. Having your laptop stolen sucks, but what really hurts is the loss of everything on it. Whether it’s family vacation photos or the sum total of your life’s work, that’s stuff that you just can’t get back unless you’re seriously conscientious about making backups....

October 19, 2010 Â· 2 min Â· 340 words

Implantable LEDs Can Really Get Under Your Skin

Maybe your main problem with tattoos is probably the fact that you’ve never been able to play Pong on them. But those problems seem to be over now that an international team of researchers, led by John Rogers at the University of Illinois, has developed a new flexible array of LEDs that can be implanted under the skin. The researchers managed to make the LED matrix implantable by encasing the electronics in a thin layer of silicon rubber that makes the whole thing functional even when exposed to biofluids....

October 19, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 192 words

Avira know better what to put and where

Sometimes we encounter childish messages from the authors in the body of malware. A variant of the TDSS family we got recently is even going a step further by offering a convenient location for a malware signature. The samples include the message “Put your signature here”, which is shown when run inside a debugger. While in many cases signatures could be still useful for detection, Avira prefer to use other technologies which are more generic and proactive....

October 18, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 113 words

Google's First Personalized Doodle

Google found a nice way to wish you Happy Birthday. If you visit Google’s homepage when you are signed in and it’s your birthday, you’ll see a special doodle that links to your Google profile. When you go to your profile, you’ll find colorful confetti and a Happy Birthday message, but that’s not new. “Because doodles are such a fun part of the search experience, we thought we’d share a fun little way Google will help celebrate your birthday....

October 17, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 152 words

Messages from Malware authors in Malware

During our analysis of the different malware families we sometimes stumble upon some messages inside the viruses placed there by their authors. For example, the TDSS Trojan family is known to contain random strings from “Hamlet” and from the Bible. Also there is the Koobface family which contains random sentences – mostly taken from Wikipedia articles, like in the last variant we discovered, about the Tower of London. TDSS: Koobface:...

October 2, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 189 words

Alyssa Milano Teaches Jimmy Kimmel How to Use Twitter

On Jimmy Kimmel Live 2 nights ago, Jimmy asked guest Alyssa Milano to explain Twitter and hashtags to him. In the video below, Alyssa explains that she tweets 12 to 22 times per day, that she likes to imagine Jimmy Kimmel naked when she’s nervous and that she uses a lot of hashtags — a big plus in my book. A closer look at the actress’s Twitter stream reveals that she uses TweetDeck, an app she likes so much that she asks Twitter “not to kill TweetDeck....

April 17, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 118 words

The goats are baaaahk!

Taken from Google Official Blog: Last year, in our quest to minimize our carbon footprint (and keep people on their toes), we turned to an unlikely solution for mowing an overgrown field: goats. More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing....

April 16, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 127 words

RIP Windows Vista RTM

Avid readers of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Blog (and really, how can you not be?) know that yesterday, April 13th, marked the end of support for Windows Vista RTM, also known as Windows Vista SP0. We’d like to say that we’ll miss Vista RTM. We’d like to say that… but, well… Ctrl+Alt+Del On a related note, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will reach its end of support this summer on July 13th....

April 14, 2010 Â· 1 min Â· 154 words