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According to "people with knowledge of his thinking," Bloomberg is reporting that, should Stephen Elop become Microsoft's next CEO, he would consider shutting down or selling parts of the company to "sharpen its focus." The two divisions mentioned specifically are Xbox and Bing. The "kill Bing" and "kill Xbox" memes have become popular among certain kinds of analysts. Though obfuscated by Microsoft's new reporting structure, both Bing and Xbox share one feature: they're not great money makers. It's important to be a little wary of this kind of anonymous, unsourced commentary. It may not be accurate, and it may be agenda-driven. This kind of "thinking" appeals grea…

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 and x64 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, 7, 8), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD. Download: Virtual…

SUPERAntiSpyware is an anti-spyware program that is known for taking care of a majority of malware that most other scanners miss. Besides protecting the browser's home page, it can repair more than 20 other settings that malware change to reduce a system's security. These include restoring the security settings for the Internet Explorer Internet Zone, restoring the normal Windows Explorer Shell, and restoring access to the Windows Task Manager. Download: SUPERAntiSpyware 5.6 Free | Portable SUPERAntiSpyware Free Screenshots: SUPERAntiSpyware Album Homepage: SUPERAntiSpyware | Release Notes View the full article

Today Twitter makes its debut on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In typical Twitter style, the company announced its share price via tweet, ending weeks of speculation about the price point that would be decided upon. Rather than the anticipated $15 to $20, the IPO (Initial Public Offering) of 70 million shares are up for grabs priced at $26 each -- effectively valuing the company at $18.2 billion. View the full article

Open-source password manager KeePass 2.24 has been released for Windows. The tool, which allows users to manage a variety of online and offline passwords via a secure, encrypted container, boasts a number of minor new features to go with an impressive list of changes and improvements for such an incremental release. First, KeePass 2.24 adds support for importing passwords from Norton Identity Safe 2013 CSV files. It also now supports tags when using either the generic CSV importer or Mozilla Bookmarks import options. Another new feature is that the URL override field in the entry editing dialog is now an editable combo box, with drop-down suggestions for browser over…

Today at Pubcon Matt Cutts of Google once again promoted the use of autocomplete-type, a new property for web forms that works in Chrome (and possibly other browsers, I haven’t checked). Google first introduced it back in January 2012 in this post. I wanted to do this quick post to tell you to turn off autocomplete in your browser. This test URL will show you why quicker than I can explain it in words. Please try it and come back. If you’re using autocomplete to, for instance, sign up for an email newsletter, you might have just provided that website with your full address and/or (even worse) your credit card details too. It’s as simple as adding the fields to t…

Java now requires explicit permission to run in the latest version of Firefox, thanks to a patch that rolled out late last week. Developers at Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind Firefox, are hoping that it will help protect end users from the notoriously unsafe browser plugin – but many have complained that the move has disrupted their businesses (and even the entire nation of Denmark). Since January, the browser has already blocked out-of-date (and vulnerable) versions of Java. However, in the wake of a particularly nasty SSL-decrypting exploit, Firefox devs made the decision to prevent any version of Java from auto-running. View the full article

A new study confirms what you might have expected: US customers are getting hosed when it comes to broadband speeds and prices. The annoying trend holds true in both wired and wireless service. In the Cost of Connectivity 2013 report being released today by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, researchers note that "in larger US cities, we continue to observe higher prices for slower speeds… In the US for example, the best deal for a 150Mbps home broadband connection from cable and phone companies is $130/month, offered by Verizon FiOS in limited parts of New York City. By contrast, the international cities we surveyed offer comparable speeds for …

So Windows 8.1 is finally here and although it is a massive improvement over its predecessor (I recently had to install Windows 8 on a laptop and couldn’t believe how bad it is in comparison), Microsoft’s new Start button really isn’t what a lot of people were hoping for. If you want to enjoy the benefits of the new operating system without being bothered by the Modern UI there are lots of alternative third-party options available. And when I say lots, I mean it. Some cost money, others are free. I’ll list my favorite three and then suggest some others to try if those don’t appeal. View the full article

Microsoft Sysinternals has released Sigcheck 2.0, the latest edition of its digital signature verification tool. Okay, it’s true, a command line utility which scans for signed executables doesn’t exactly sound interesting. At all. But wait: this version’s new VirusTotal support means it could be a very useful addition to your malware-hunting toolkit. View the full article

CAPTCHA are a thorn in the side of web users. Those almost indecipherable string of letters and numbers that are meant to help websites determine that you are a human rather than a spambot often cause more frustration for users than anything else, and they have now been cracked. Vicarious, a California-based AI team, reveals that it has been able to develop algorithms that can successfully solve CAPTCHAs from the likes of Google, Yahoo and PayPal. The cracking of CAPTCHAs by machine is nothing all that new, but Vicarious is reporting an extremely high success rate -- the algorithm is successful in up to 90 percent of cases. The company goes as far as saying that "…

Malwarebytes products have been protecting PCs since 2008, but the company has now decided to broaden its horizons with the release of an Android app. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Mobile still has plenty in common with its PC cousin, of course. The app is effective, free, and very easy to use: just launch it, click Scan and watch as your apps are checked for malicious code (we found this generally takes less than two minutes). You also get a Privacy option which scans your apps, checking on their privileges, and grouping these by category. It told us that we had six apps which could "access text messages", 8 which were able to "monitor calls", and 6 that could cost u…

The jury is out on stylus input on mobile devices, though many people likely are happy if the option is there, even if it goes unused. Drawing or writing on a screen may not be for everyone, but it has its place in the market, and today Google adds support for your handwriting to both Gmail and Google Docs. "Whether you’re a student trying to include a foreign phrase in your paper or an international consultant hoping to begin your message with a friendly local greeting, now you’ll be able to use your own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad", states Google Product Manage Xiangye Xiao. You will need to enab…

Avast is a full-featured antivirus package designed exclusively for home users and non-commercial use. The latest version of avast! antivirus kernel features outstanding detection abilities, together with high performance. You can expect 100% detection of In-the-Wild viruses (viruses already spreading between users) and excellent detection of Trojan horses. The kernel is certified by ICSA; and frequently takes part in the tests of Virus Bulletin magazine, often yielding the VB100 award. The avast! engine also features outstanding unpacking support. It can scan inside the following archives: ARJ, ZIP, MIME (+ all associated formats), MAPI (Outlook pst files), DBX (Outl…

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD. Download: VirtualBox 4.3.0 V…

Bill Gates had a chat with David Rubenstein, Harvard Campaign co-chair for a Harvard fundraising campaign. In that Gates revealed that it was a mistake to force users to use hold down “Ctrl+Alt+Del†to log into their computers and he also blamed IBM for doing so. “You want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signaling to a very low level of the software — actually hard-coded in the hardware — that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect, instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like a log-in screen, and then it listens to your password and then it’s able to do that,†Gates said. View the …

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment. This project, based on the Scintilla edit component, written in C++ with pure win32 api and STL that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program. Notepad++ supports the following languages: C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP, javascript, RC resource file, makefile, ASCII art file, doxygen, ini file, batch file, ASP, VB/VBS source files, SQL, Objective-C, CSS, Pascal, Perl, Python and Lua. Download: Notepad++ 6.5.0 Homepage: Notepad++ View the full article

There have been several updates to Lunarsoft recently. These updates cover every part of Lunarsoft from the Wiki to the Frontpage and the Forums as well. Several minor issues were identified recently and resolved. The updates and issues identified are as follows: Frontpage: Several of the extensions used for the Frontpage website have been updated. >Security update has been applied. >Automated news posting to Facebook has been fixed. >Feedburner has been removed from the Frontpage but is still available. Downloads have been reviewed. If you find an error please report it on the forums. Optimizations have been applied that allow the frontpage/website to load fast…

BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy. Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean a thousand applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari,and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source. Download: BleachBit on Source…

CCleaner - also known as Crap Cleaner - is a disk cleanup utility that goes beyond the scope of the built in Windows Disk Cleanup tool. Featuring the ability to clean up temporary files, browser history and cache, the Recycle Bin, along with Windows applications that you install. There is also a registry cleaner, uninstall helper, startup manager, System Restore manager and disk wiper. You can choose to have your data cleaned with a single pass or range up to the Gutmann 35 pass data cleaning sequence. There's even a cookie manager and free space wiper. One of the great things about CCleaner is that it automates all of these cleanings so you don't have to hunt down these …

VLC (VideoLAN) is a multi-platform multimedia player that is driven by open-source development. It can read DVDs, VCDs, MPEG, and DivX files and from a satellite card. It can also read a stream from a network sent by the VideoLAN Server or another source. The stream can be MPEG 2 TS in UDP or HTTP packets unicasted or multicasted on an IPv4 or IPv6 network. Download: VLC Media Player 2.1.0 | Other Versions Changes: Changes Homepage: VideoLAN View the full article

A new way to play your entire Steam library from the sofa. Join the Steam hardware beta and help us shape a new generation of gaming. A different kind of gamepad We set out with a singular goal: bring the Steam experience, in its entirety, into the living-room. We knew how to build the user interface, we knew how to build a machine, and even an operating system. But that still left input — our biggest missing link. We realized early on that our goals required a new kind of input technology — one that could bridge the gap from the desk to the living room without compromises. So we spent a year experimenting with new approaches to input and we now believe we’ve arr…

Microsoft has admitted Windows users should install antivirus above and beyond its own Security Essentials, describing its protection as merely a "baseline" that will "always be on the bottom" of antivirus software rankings. Microsoft launched Security Essentials in 2009, raising complaints from antivirus rivals that such software shouldn't be bundled with Windows for competition reasons. However, the most frequent complaint about Security Essentials is that it's not good enough: it flunked a pair of tests earlier this year - including one from Dennis Technology Labs. Now, Microsoft has said it sees Security Essentials as merely the first layer of protection, adv…

A powerful new category of living-room hardware is on the horizon. Join the hardware beta now. Choose the model right for you in 2014. Finally, a multiple choice answer! Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world. We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS. View the full article

Thousands of games, millions of users. Everything you love about Steam. Available soon as a free operating system designed for the TV and the living room. Steam is coming to a new operating system As we've been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines. View the full article