News

rockpapershotgun.com: This just came in from Valve: “The PC version of the product will be powered with Steamworks for both the digital and tangible versions of the game and, as with all Steamworks titles, offline play will also be supported along with Auto-Updating, Achievements, and more. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will also support dedicated servers on day 1.” Better, I suppose. The game is out November 8th. ...

Blogger Buzz: As you may have heard, things are starting to look a little different across many Google products—and today, Blogger is the next product to get a makeover. It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time. ...

Gmail Blog: The great thing about web apps is that you can access all of your information on the go, and we’ve introduced ways to use Google Apps on a variety of devices like mobile phones and tablets. But it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally find yourself in situations when you don’t have an Internet connection, like planes, trains and carpools. When we announced Chromebooks at Google I/O 2011, we talked about bringing offline access to our web apps, and now we’re taking our first steps in that direction. Gmail offline will be available today, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today. ...

Windows 8 News Blog: The recently created Building Windows 8 blog seems to be up in full swing, with new articles about the upcoming operating system being released regularly. Steven Sinofsky revealed in “Improving our file management basics: copy, move, rename, and delete” that Microsoft intents to improve file management processes under Windows 8. According to Steven, Microsoft had three goals to improve the copy experience: One place to manage all copy jobs: Create one unified experience for managing and monitoring ongoing copy operations. Clear and concise: Remove distractions and give people the key information they need. User in control: Put people in control of their copy operations. Consolidating the copy experience is a great idea. This means that you won’t have to deal with multiple copying windows when you run multiple copy or move operations in the operating system. All copy jobs are now consolidated in one screen. ...

gHacks: One “by-product” of the rapid release cycle of the Firefox web browser is the version number increase that goes along with every new release of the web browser. Firefox this year jumped from Firefox 3 all the way to the latest version Firefox 8, and we are not even at the end of the year. Mozilla interestingly enough plans to hide the version number in the Firefox web browser. Asa Dotzler added an entry to Bugzilla to remove the version of the browser from the about Window dialog in the browser. ...

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that Google post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights” and subscribe to the series. This week we have news from the Gmail and Google Docs teams, which both made interface changes to streamline how you use those applications. We also introduced some new keyboard shortcuts and made improvements to spreadsheet charts and functions. New preview pane in Gmail Labs The Gmail team has heard requests from many of you for an inbox preview pane, and last Thursday we introduced this option as a Gmail Lab. Now you can quickly scroll through a list of messages and see their contents, marking mail as “read” as you go. Once you enable this feature from the Labs area in Settings, you can choose between a vertical or horizontal split in your Gmail window. ...

Microsoft announced the release of a Camera Codec pack for Windows that offers support for the RAW file format from within Windows Explorer as well as Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011. The Codec Pack has support for more than 120 RAW file formats from brands such as Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, Leica, Minolta, Panasonic, and Espon. The Codec Pack will allow you to generate thumbnail images from RAW files, once it is installed. ...

Anonymous claims to have stolen around a gigabyte of classified NATO data The H-Online Security wrote: In a post on Twitter, the Anonymous hacker group said that it has managed to steal a number of secret documents from one of NATO‘s servers. As proof, Anonymous published two PDF documents from 2007 and 2008 that are allegedly from NATO. The classification “NATO Restricted” suggests that the documents are intended only for circulation within the organisation – if they are genuine. The hacktivists say they copied a gigabyte of data in total, but added that it would be “irresponsible” to publish most of the material. ...

ghacks.net: Microsoft has just released a beta of a system recovery software. Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper has been designed to aid users in starting an infected PC and performing offline malware scans to remove viruses, trojans, rootkits and other forms of malware effectively. It is also used if malware is hindering the user to install or start an antivirus software on the infected system, or if the applications used to detect malware are not able to find the malware on the PC. ...

Facebook Security: Facebook is committed to bringing you a safe experience on the Internet, and today we are announcing several new features to help protect you while online. Partnership with Web of Trust First, we’re happy to announce a partnership with Web of Trust . Web of Trust is a free safe surfing tool that tells you which websites you can trust based on the ratings supplied by other Web of Trust community members. Facebook already has a system that automatically scans links to determine whether the websites associated with those links are spammy or contain malware. ...