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It’s Alive: Xmarks Back From the Brink

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 6, 2010
  • Reading Time: 4 min
  • Word Count: 757 words

Mashable: It looks like cross-browser, bookmark syncing service Xmarks won’t be going out of business after all. Just over a month after announcing that the service would be closing its doors and shutting down operations come January 2011, the company has announced that it is in the final stages of selling Xmarks to a new owner who is focused on keeping the tool running smoothly. Xmarks announced the news on its official blog, noting that exact details can’t be revealed just yet, but that the service is alive and “things are on track for a ‘new and improved’ Xmarks.” The Xmarks blog says that the Xmarks service will evolve into offering free and premium components. Details about what will be included in the premium offering are promised to come at a later date. ...

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AV scam: is it a rogue or is it AVG’s free edition for sale?

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 6, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 350 words

Tom Kelchner, Sunbelt blog: Alert reader Laurie (my boss actually) forwarded a copy an email she received from a friend. It said the sender was “
pleased to announce the newest version of Antivirus 2010 for Windows.” There was a link to click, of course. Something called “Antivirus 2010” for sale in November is very odd for three reasons: It’s nearly 2011 and legitimate AV companies are putting out their 2011 versions. There was a rogue security product last year called “Antivirus 2010.” (VIPRE detection: FraudTool.Win32.Antivirus2010 (v)) Although a lot of companies make a product named Anti-Virus 2010, they usually put their name in front of it, such as “Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010” or “Norton AntiVirus 2010.” The Antivirus 2010 rogue graphic interface from 2009: ...

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Google Chrome's Version Number Is Meaningless

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 6, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 185 words

Google Operation System blog: Google Chrome is the first browser that has a meaningless version number. Since Chrome is automatically updated, most people use the latest version of the software a few days after it’s released. Google’s help articles aren’t the only ones that ignore Chrome’s version number. Yahoo has recently released a report that recommends developers to assume that Chrome users are running the latest version. “Chrome has been progressing rapidly through versions, and Google has communicated its intent to continue rapid development and short release cycles. As a result, we’ve modified our strategy for Chrome to advise testing on the latest [generally available] release of Chrome as soon as it is issued, with prior versions moving to X-grade as soon as they are superseded.” ...

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Microsoft Smart Screen False Positives

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 4, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 129 words

SANS.edu: We received a couple of reports about Microsoft’s “Smart Screen” flagging harmless sites as malicious. Initially, we considered the possibility of an infected ad service. But it may be a bug in Smartfilter as well. Some reports on twitter show that the problem has been resolved. Please let us know if you have sample URLs that are still affected. To disable smart screen: Select “Internet Options” from the “Tools” menu. Select the “Advanced” tab and find the “Enable SmartScreen Filter” setting (about the 10th item from the bottom. Scroll all the way down). Needless to say: This will also remove the smart screen protection from real-evil sites, not just from appear-to-be-evil-to-smartscreen-today sites. The setting should only be changed if you can’t wait for the problem to be fixed. ...

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Webcam cyber-sextortionist preyed on over 200 women

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 4, 2010
  • Reading Time: 3 min
  • Word Count: 584 words

A perverted hacker who spied upon more than 200 women via their webcams and microphones, after infecting their computers with malware, was arrested earlier this year by the FBI after a two year investigation. The 31-year-old man broke into victims’ personal computers, and stole personal information. Threatening to share the private information with their parents and email contacts, the man pressured the young women (some of them still young teenagers) into providing him with risquĂ© pictures and videos. ...

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Android Overtakes iPhone

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 4, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 316 words

Wall Street Journal: It looks like Steve Jobs may have something to be nervous about after all. Google Inc.’s Android platform has taken the lead in the U.S. smartphone market, according to several new reports by technology research firms. In the third quarter, devices with the Android operating system were installed in 44% of smartphones, while Apple Inc.’s iPhone came in second place with 23%, according to market research firm, NPD Group. RIM’s BlackBerry trailed behind in third place with 22%. One big caveat: NPD tracks consumer activity, but doesn’t measure corporate cellphone purchases. ...

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Goo.gl is the Fastest and Most Reliable URL Shortening Service

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 4, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 76 words

There are a lot of URL shortening services out there, but Pingdom has worked out which is the fastest. Reliability and performance is key for URL shortening services and Goo.gl is on top! As you can see from the above chart Goo.gl has the fastest service in all locations. Additionally, it was reported that they have a 100% uptime. So if you have already checked out the Goo.gl service then make sure you take a look. ...

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Facebook's smaller font size straining eyes

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 4, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 200 words

(CNN) — Facebook is the biggest name in social networking. But overnight, it got smaller. The font size on much of the site appears to have shrunk — a tweak that has folks complaining about their poor, News Feed-browsing eyes. By Wednesday morning, users had taken to Twitter to sound off on the change, mostly for the negative. “Eye doctors everywhere must love the smaller default font on Facebook this morning. Eyes squinting everywhere!” wrote Twitter user esilverstein. ...

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 TDP is 244W, includes 128 TMU, Benchmarks Leaked

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 373 words

Chinese website eNet has filled in some missing information – notably TDP and TMU count. The TDP of GeForce GTX 580 is at 244W, slightly lower than the GeForce GTX 480. The texture fillrate had been viewed by many as one of the bottlenecks for GF100, and eNet reports that GF110 effectively doubles the TMU count to 128 TMUs. Apart from this substantial improvement in TMU, the GF110 is a “full revision” and fixed version of GF100. ...

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Facebook is fastest social network; Twitter, MySpace slowest

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 178 words

On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users. Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter’s performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent. ...

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