News

As expected, Microsoft has pushed out a mandatory update to the Xbox 360 today, which adds support for USB storage devices, expanding the memory capacity of the five-year old video game console. The update will ostensibly allow any FAT32-formatted USB storage device between 1GB-16GB in size to be used to save profiles, game saves, and downloadable content. There are, however, a number of caveats, which mean users can’t just plug anything in and have it work. ...

The iPad already has an app for credit card transactions thanks to Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s Square project. Originally planned for the iPhone, the app works with a peripheral credit card scanner that attaches to the headphone jack. Once the scanner is in place, you can use your iPad as a mobile cash register. Customers will be impressed by the multi-touch interface, and they will be able to sign for their purchases on the screen. The app then verifies the credit card transactions through Square’s servers for a flat fee plus a small percentage of the sale. ...

The FBI has said it will be checking to see if any federal wiretapping or computer-related laws were broken by a Pennsylvania school district in connection with an incident in which someone turned on the webcam in a school-issued computer and spied on a student in his own home. The incident occurred in Lower Merion School District, located in Montgomery County near Philadelphia. The county district attorney also is investigating. ...

A very dodgy looking PDF file appeared on Nintendo’s Japanese investor relations site with the title “Launch of New Portable Game Machine” (PDF available here). In the document, Nintendo quietly announced that it will be launching “Nintendo 3Ds” during the fiscal year ending in March 2011. The new handheld gaming console will support 3D effects without the need for special viewing glasses, and Nintendo will talk more about it at the E3 conference in June. ...

A spokesperson for Adobe told us that on the morning of April 12 at 11:00 a.m. EDT, the company will hold a global online launch event for all of the components of its Creative Suite 5. Among the most anticipated new components — or as Adobe tends to present them in its periodic table, “elements” — is a vastly improved HD video rendering engine called Mercury. Unlike other manufacturers, Adobe tends to retain the cool names for its products and platforms even after public release. Mercury will utilize the graphics processing power of video cards to expedite the decoding and playback of HD-encoded formats, especially for the Premiere Pro editor. ...

Although Apple rivals the Fortress of Solitude when it comes to unreleased products — remember all of the speculation around the iPad? — the Cupertino-based company does leave clues about what is to come. A look into the iPad OS’s file system suggests that we can expect not one, but two iPhones in the near future, along with the next-generation iPod touch and the next-generation iPad. In the configuration, you can see a list of devices based on the iPhone OS model. However, there have been some new additions to this list following the iPad’s launch: iPhone3,2; iPhone3,3; iPod4,1 and iProd2,1. For reference, the current model of the iPhone is 3,1, the current iPod Touch is 3,1 and the current iPad is iPad 1,1. You may recall that Apple used the iProd 0,1 tag as a placeholder for the iPad before it was released. Our guess is that iProd 2,1 refers to the second generation iPad. ...

The Inquirer security news site were reporting that the 25-year-old arrested by French police for hacking a Twitter data base and accessing U.S. President Barak Obama’s account guessed the admin’s password. The unemployed man, who went by the handle “Hacker Croll.” is not a genius, the news site concluded. “Apparently it was a doddle to do. He simply guessed people’s passwords by working them out from information on their blogs or online pages they had created about themselves,” it said. ...

Lots of little newsworthy updates recently . . . they’ve been well-covered elsewhere, but we wanted to make sure our readers saw them as well. Russia: Safe Haven no more? One of the constant complaints that we hear is “the criminal is probably in Russia”, as an excuse for why a case is not worth investigating. Back on November 11, 2009, we posted a story The $9 Million World-wide Bank Robbery, where VIKTOR PLESHCHUK, 28, of St. Petersburg, Russia; SERGEI TŠURIKOV, 25, of Tallinn, Estonia; and OLEG COVELIN, 28, of Chişinău, Moldova were charged with leading the robbery, which actually occurred in 2008. This week the Financial Times has revealed that Viktor Pleshchuk was arrested by the FSB. Their story leads with: ...

New Scientist is reporting that a massive database culled from the public profiles of 210 million Facebook users has been destroyed before its anticipated — and controversial — release to researchers. Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer, reluctantly deleted the data after Facebook threatened legal action, saying he could not afford to fight a lawsuit. He said Facebook was not aware that such information was available and that the flaw is being patched. ...

Tom Gallagher, senior security test lead with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, was extensively quoted in news stories today as he described how his group found 1,800 software flaws in Office 2010 by running millions of “fuzzing” tests. According to ComputerWorld, “Microsoft was able to find such a large number of bugs in Office 2010 by using not only machines in the company’s labs, but also under-utilitized or idle PCs throughout the company. The concept isn’t new: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home) project may have been the first to popularize the practice, and remains the largest, but it’s also been used to crunch numbers in medical research and to find the world’s largest prime number. ...

Google today announced its strategy for delivering services on the iPad, and unveiled a new mobile Gmail interface optimized for bigger touchscreens. Since the iPad lies somewhere between a notebook and a smartphone, the Mountain View search company is taking a hybrid approach, offering some services in their desktop format, some in their mobile format, and some as standalone apps. “We’re particularly excited by how tablet computers create the opportunity for new kinds of user interaction,” Punit Soni, Product Manager for Google Mobile wrote in the official Google blog. “Here on the mobile team, we often talk about how mobile devices are sensor-rich: they can sense touch through their screens, see with a camera, hear through a microphone, and they know where they are with GPS. The same holds true for tablet computers, and we’re just starting to work through how our products can become even better on devices like the iPad.” ...

Mozilla.org has made public a report that says its Firefox browser has 30 percent market share worldwide. Assuming it’s true, that is a six percent increase since a news story last November. The Mozilla Metrics report 1Q2010 says the browser has 39.2 percent penetration in Europe (152.7 million users) and 29 percent in the U.S. (100 million users.) Mozilla claims 350 million users worldwide. Adoption is quickest in Russia (20 percent increase in the first quarter) the report said. ...

Google has revealed that users can now transfer files via chat in iGoogle and Orkut. This is good news for web users with a preference for software-free chatting, but the better news is that Google promises to bring the same functionality to Gmail, which already supports voice, video and group chat. The iGoogle and Orkut file transfers will work for photos, documents and presumably small video files. In addition, web users can exchange files with users of Google Talk — the more robust desktop version of Google’s chat client — without any hiccups. ...

With Google owning YouTube, the Internet’s principal delivery system for Flash-based video, it was perhaps inevitable that the company would bundle the Flash plug-in with its Chrome browser. The announcement came today from both Google and the team developing the open source Chromium component on which Chrome is based. The move now officially places Google in contention with proponents of HTML 5, who had held out a glimmer of hope for a non-proprietary, non-plug-in video format for the standard’s new [VIDEO] element. In its blog post today, the Chromium team indirectly blamed the standards process for not having solved what it perceives as the problem of specifying how plug-ins should operate, and credits Mozilla — which makes Firefox — with helping to rectify that issue. ...

There seems to be an established procedure used by government officials who want to censor Internet traffic: begin requiring Google and ISPs to filter pornography then sneak in filtering of the politically sensitive material of your choice. Maybe we should give this a name: how about “porn filter law bait and switch?” In China’s Green Dam fiasco last summer, the web filter that was required on new machines (before the whole idea broke down) was supposed to protect good Chinese Internet users from sex and violence. When various researchers took apart the Green Dam files, however, they found that 1.) it ripped off a lot of code from a U.S. company and 2) two thirds of the strings it was set up to filter were politically sensitive words and not sex and violence issues at all. ...