| Path is Officially Super-Sorry, No Hard Feelings? Posted: 08 Feb 2012 03:16 PM PST  Okay everyone, Path is really sorry that they did something really creepy and didn't think tot ell anyone first. The mobile start up is attempting to talk its way out of the outrage stepping from a discovery recently that user address books were being uploaded to the Path servers without any notification. CEO Dave Morin has posted a lengthy apology on the Path blog explaining what the company has done to smooth things over.
According to Morin, Path was using the address books to help improve the functionality of the "Add Friends" feature. Path would also use the stored data to notify users when a contact in their address book joined Path. The company feels these are useful features, but recognizes that users should have more control. Path has pushed out an Android and iOS update that gives users the option of uploading their contacts. All previously saved contacts ahve been deleted from the servers. For those unaware, Path is a mobile sharing service that plugs into existing social services like FourSquare and Facebook. Path usage has been skyrocketing as of late, and this hiccup is unlikely to slow its growth. |
| Anonymous Exposes Syrian Government Emails Posted: 08 Feb 2012 02:56 PM PST  Hacker collective Anonymous has a reputation for targeting authoritarian regimes, and the government crackdown in Syria has led the group to begin hammering away. Anonymous has just released a cache of emails from the mail servers used by Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs. The correspondence contain plenty of dirty little secrets, but Anonymous also happily exposed dozens of terrible passwords.
The emails contain everything from the routine back and forth, to a strategy for comparing the Syrian crackdown to police actions against US-based Occupy protesters. The goal apparently being to spin the situation and manipulate the foreign news reporting. Some of the emails are presented as talking points for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in preparation for his December 2011 interview with Barbara Walters. On the lighter side, Anonymous found the passwords used by Syrian authorities to be laughably bad. Of the 78 accounts exposed, 31 were using "12345" as the password. Other popular choices were "iloveyou" and "testing." |
| Amazon Deal Brings Viacom TV Shows to Prime Streaming Posted: 08 Feb 2012 02:42 PM PST  Amazon announced a deal with Viacom today that brings it one step closer to truly competing with Netflix as a streaming video service. Amazon Prime Video will soon be streaming TV shows from MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central to Prime subscribers. The 2,000 new titles will push Amazon's Prime offerings to roughly 15,000.
Both Netflix and Hulu can boast more content than Amazon, but the retail giant sweetens the pot with the Prime shipping service. Anyone that drops $79 for a yearly subscription to Prime gets free 2-day shipping on most items from Amazon, and free streaming video. As Amazon continues to push into tablets, and possibly phones, video content will become increasingly important. Amazon is really pushing the acquisition with a banner on the Amazon homepage today. Amazon thinks it has a winner with Prime Video, but until it can match Netflix and stream to more devices, Prime will have an uphill climb. Do you have a Prime subscription? Was the shipping the main draw, or was it the video? |
| Avast Introduces Streaming Updates with New Antivirus Software Posted: 08 Feb 2012 01:00 PM PST  Streaming works well for music and movies, so why not push out software updates that way as well? That's the question Avast Software asked itself when building Avast 7, the next major release of its antivirus software set to hit the streets sometime later this year. Avast 7 will give users streaming updates on new malware threats in addition to regular virus database updates, Avast Software says.
"Instead of our clients having to 'pull' in the updates, we can 'push' it to them," said Ondrej Vlcek, CTO of Avast Software. "Once we have decided to publish an update, we can push it out to all of our users in minutes." Avast isn't breaking new ground with what some refer to as pulse updates, which are essentially a series of minor updates pushed out to client software throughout the day and night as new threats emerge. But new ground or not, it should make Avast more secure. "This lets users get fresh information more frequently while still retaining a very up-to-date Plan B," added Mr. Vlcek. "We believe this is a better design than a cloud-only system where the malware information is not stored and users have to be connected to remain protected." If all the features in the beta version of Avast 7 stick, the updated software will include a UI facelift, improvements to its sandbox, browser protection tweaks, a remote assistance feature for users to help their family and friends, import/export settings, and more. Image Credit: Avast |
| Microsoft Employees Raised Over $100 Million for Charities in 2011 Posted: 08 Feb 2012 12:46 PM PST  With Bill Gates out of the picture, Microsoft and its employees didn't skip a beat in 2011 with its philanthropic efforts, raising over $100 million for more than 18,000 U.S.-based community organizations. It's the most Microsoft has ever raised as part of its employee giving campaign, in which worker donations are matched by Microsoft dollar for dollar.
"Last year, Microsoft U.S. employees broke their annual giving record, raising more than $100 million for community organizations," said Brad Smith, executive vice president, Legal and Corporate Affairs, Microsoft Corp. "The money and time donated by our employees is one way we aim to play our part in creating opportunities for people in the U.S. and around the world. This new fundraising record is a great start to the 30th year of our Employee Giving Program." The giving program dates back to 1983 and has raised more than $946 million since then. At the current pace, they will undoubtedly break the billion dollar mark well before 2012 comes to a close. The way it works is every full-time employee at Microsoft in the U.S. receives a $12,000 corporate matching gift that matches volunteer time at $17 per hour or dollar for dollar charitable contributions to eligible nonprofit organizations, Microsoft said. In 2011, Microsoft employees spent 426,671 hours doing volunteer work, which is 73,000 more hours than was volunteered in 2010. Image Credit: Flickr (Robert Scoble) |
| ARM Has the Upper Hand in Price Against AMD and Intel Posted: 08 Feb 2012 12:14 PM PST  Intel and AMD know a thing or three about processors, and between the two, there's barely any room left over in the desktop market for competing players. In the mobile handset and tablet sectors, however, both chip giants play second fiddle to ARM, which rules the mobile roost with low power processors. The reason for this is simple: ARM processors are cheaper.
Notebook makers in Taiwan tell DigiTimes that Intel and AMD can't compete in price with ARM for processing solutions for tablets and smartphones, and that's all there is to it. That could change, as both x86 chip makers are turning their attention to the mobile market. Intel's looking to make a move with its Medfield line and will also launch Atom processors with power consumption rated below 10W later this year. AMD, meanwhile, will eventually unveil Hondo, an accelerated processing unit (APU) with a power consumption of less than 5W. If both chip makers can come out swinging with comparable prices, things could get very interesting in the mobile space. |
| AMD Launches 2 New Athlon II X4 CPUs Posted: 08 Feb 2012 11:34 AM PST  With all the focus on mobile chips and as-yet-unreleased Ivy Bridge and Trinity processors, sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the fact that, you know, there are already a ton of processors out there for you to choose from. That number recently increased by two, as AMD quietly rolled out a pair of new Athlon II X4 CPUs, otherwise known as "Llano chips without integrated graphics."
The two new chips on AMD's pricelist sport an identical $81 official price tag, along with 4 cores and 4MB L2 cache. Both should fit quite nicely in an FM1 socket. What's different between the new chips? TDP and clock speed. The 2.8 GHz AMD Athlon II X4 641 is rated for 100W, while the 2.7GHz AMD Athlon II X4 638 has a 65W TDP. These low-end CPUs won't break the bank, but remember that they don't include a GPU, so you'll need to tag-team it with a discrete graphics card. CPU-World (which broke the story) reports that the 641 is already available online, but the 638 has yet to hit the streets. |
| Nvidia, Rambus Settle Patent Dispute, Ink Five Year License Agreement Posted: 08 Feb 2012 11:26 AM PST  Rambus, a memory technology licensing company, announced today it has signed a patent license agreement with GPU maker Nvidia that will be valid for the next years. As part of the five-year deal, the two sides agreed to settle all outstanding claims against each other, ending what had become a bitter and stretched out legal dispute over various patent innovations.
"This is an important license agreement as it settles our differences and allows us to move forward with Nvidia, the leader in visual and parallel computing," said Harold Hughes, president and chief executive officer at Rambus. "Looking forward, we have the opportunity to focus on developing innovative solutions in concert with our licensees to help bring compelling, innovative products to market." Other terms of the deal were not disclosed, though Nvidia spokesman Hector Marinez told The Wall Street Journal his company was "pleased to settle the matter on terms that are fair and logical" to Nvidia. Rambus and Nvidia have been battling each other for over three years. Count this as purely speculation, but Nvidia likely got the better end of the deal on this one. The settlement comes just a few months after Rambus lost a $4 billion antitrust lawsuit against Micron and Hynix, which promptly sent the company's share price free-falling by more than 60 percent. With the legal tides seemingly turning against it, it's possible Rambus figured that any settlement was better than no settlement. |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview Coming On February 29 Posted: 08 Feb 2012 11:03 AM PST  So, what do you think about that new Metro interface in Windows 8? If you ask ten geeks that question, you'll end up with ten different answers -- and a lot of them won't be positive. Up until this point, however, we could only base our opinions on blog updates from the Windows team and a far from fully functional Developer Preview build. Prepare to become much better informed soon, though: Microsoft just announced that it will roll out the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on February 29th at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Microsoft will hold an event at the show between 3 P.M. and 5 P.M. local time to celebrate the kick off. If you're a one-size-Windows-fits-all naysayer, the fact that Microsoft decided to roll out the new build at a cellphone conference will probably only increase your heart palpitations. On the plus side, The Verge managed to get ahold of a list of Metro-style apps that will likely be included in the Consumer Preview: - Camera
- Messaging
- Mail
- Calendar
- SkyDrive
- People
- Photos
- Video
- Music
The "Microsoft Store" -- similar to Apple's App Store or the Android Market -- will also be included, and yesterday The Verge reported that several games will likely be available for purchase at launch. (Pinball and Solitaire are also rumored to come pre-included with the Preview.) They are: - Hydro Thunder
- Toy Soldiers
- Reckless Racing
- Angry Birds
- Ilomilo
- Rocket Riot
- Full House Poker
- Tentacles
- Crash Course
- Ms Splosion Man
- Wordament
A Release Candidate is also planned for launch prior to the full-scale release of Windows 8.Any thoughts on the rumored release lineup or the timing of the launch? Will you be taking the Windows 8 Consumer Preview for a test drive? |
| Multi-Monitor Usage On The Rise Posted: 08 Feb 2012 10:26 AM PST  Whether you're into widescreen gaming, day trading, multitasking, or just stretching windows until they're really, really big, a multiple monitor setup is the only way to fly. Us geeks have been keen to the secret for a while now (Eyefinity, anyone?) but sales numbers from 2011 seem to indicate that dual-screen madness may be starting to take the world by storm -- and that most buyers think bigger is better.
The average computer monitor sold these days measures in at 21 inches, a three-inch increase over the 18-inch average way back in 2007. According to numbers that IHS iSuppli, well, iSupplied to the New York Times, 179 million monitors were sold in 2011, compared to just 130 million desktops. Rhoda Alexander, iSuppli's monitor-watcher, told the newspaper that difference means "more screens per desk." 
Don't necessarily chalk that increase up to a rise in multi-monitor gaming, though (such as the sweet Eyefinity Assassin's Creed goodness being showed off by Maximum PC weekend contributor Justin Kerr in the pic above). The Times says that business use likely contributed to the spike. "NEC Display, a major supplier of monitors, said 30 to 40 percent of the employees of its corporate customers now used more than one monitor, up from 1 percent four years ago," the article reports. One thing's almost certain: as multitasking increases and monitors continue to get wider, thinner and cheaper, multi-screen usage should continue to rise. Do you rock a dual (or more!) screen setup, or are you a one-screen kinda guy/gal? |
