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A Texas-based researcher claimed he had discovered that about 40 different Windows apps, including the Windows shell, suffer from a critical vulnerability that could open up users to attacks by hackers. The flaw was originally discovered in iTunes for Windows, and was patched by Apple four months ago with iTunes 9.1. Rapid7 chief security officer HD Moore detailed his findings to Computerworld in an interview on Wednesday. He said a wide range of applications are affected, and it was found while looking into another flaw involving Windows shortcuts, which Microsoft patched in an emergency update. The flaw exists in how the programs handle malformed DLLs. Whi…

foobar2000 is a comprehensive, easy to use audio player for Windows. Featuring full Unicode support, advanced tagging capabilities, customizable hotkeys, ReplayGain to help correct your audio and many more useful utilities to assist your media library. There are multiple ways to configure and customize your user interface. foobar's developer also includes an open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player. foobar2000 allows you to easily use multiple playlists and utilize features to remove both duplicates and dead items. foobar handles multiple popular audio formats, including: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis,…

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops. We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how user…

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 3.2.8 …

The latest operating system market-share figures are in, and the news is good for fans of Windows 7, and ho-hum for Mac OS X aficionados. Since its release last October, Windows 7's star has been steadily rising — and this July it passed the lamentable Windows Vista to become the world's number-two OS, according to stats from the market watchers at Net Applications. View the full article

Thunderbird is a fast, flexible e-mail client. You can quickly search through your e-mails, worry less about spam thanks to the spam filters, and even customize how you view Thunderbird. Thunderbird works with most Firefox add-ons as well, adding more content to your e-mail client. Thunderbird makes the e-mail experience fun again. Download: Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.2 | Other Systems and Languages Changes: Release Notes Homepage: Mozilla Thunderbird View the full article

Today is earnings day and Windows continues to have a strong showing. We announced a new milestone in Windows 7 sales - 175 million copies. This continues our record breaking pace of more than 7 copies sold per second. And as of today – Windows 7 is now running on more than 16% of all PCs worldwide. It's exciting to see this kind of response from customers who have helped make Windows 7 the fastest selling operating system in history. We are also seeing some strong momentum with businesses for Windows 7. The PC “refresh cycle” for businesses has accelerated and we recorded the second straight quarter of double digital business license growth. And with Internet Explorer, I…

Google is one of the smartest, most innovative companies in the world, but in its core business -- online search -- it's being routinely shown up by Microsoft's third-place search engine, Bing. Bing is a surprisingly fast-moving, innovative product -- and it's forcing Google to play catch-up time and time again. Years ago, for example, Google set itself apart from other search engines by focusing on making its homepage load faster than everyone else's, including a very simple design with a white background. View the full article

Version 10.7 of the AMD ATI graphic drivers have been released. This unified driver has been further enhanced to provide the highest level of power, performance, and reliability. The ATI CATALYST software suite is the ultimate in performance and stability. Display and WDM Drivers included in this bundle. Download: ATI Catalyst 10.7 Notes: Release Notes Homepage: AMD ATI View the full article

This is the first stable release of the new Unicode version of mIRC. The project to convert mIRC to Unicode has taken almost two years of development and testing and has required tens of thousands of changes to 150,000+ lines of source code. This has been the most complex and time-consuming update to mIRC since it was created in 1995, when it started out as a non-Unicode, 16-bit, Windows 3.1 application. Many areas of mIRC have had to be updated or re-written, from file handling to text processing, from display to memory allocation, from server communications to file transfers. mIRC should now be faster, more stable, and more compatible with the latest version…

VLC (VideoLAN) is a multi-platform multimedia player. 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 1.1.2 | Other Versions Changes: Changes Homepage: VideoLAN View the full article

SanDisk on Wednesday announced a Secure Digital card that can store data for 100 years, but can be written on only once. The WORM (write once, read many) card is "tamper proof" and data cannot be altered or deleted, SanDisk said in a statement. The card is designed for long-time preservation of crucial data like legal documents, medical files and forensic evidence, SanDisk said. The media comes with capacity of only 1GB. SanDisk determined the media's 100-year data-retention lifespan based on internal tests conducted at normal room temperatures. To draw comparisons, the card is like DVD-write only media, but much smaller and with a much longer life span. …

Apple has displaced Oracle as the company with the most security vulnerabilities in its software, according to security company Secunia. Over the first half of 2010, Apple had more reported flaws than any other vendor. Microsoft retains its third-place spot. Secunia has tracked security vulnerabilities and issues advisories since 2002, producing periodic reports on the state of software. Together, the top ten vendors account for some 38% of all flaws reported. Though this does not necessarily mean that Apple's software is the most insecure in practice—the report takes no consideration of the severity of the flaws—it points at a growing trend in the world of security f…

SSDs are now hitting sizes that are beginning to make them viable replacements for the magnetic counterparts. Samsung has introduced a new SSD offering in a 512GB configuration – boasting both capacity and speed, utilizing high-performance "toggle-mode" DDR NAND. "The highly advanced features and characteristics of our new SSD were obtained as a direct result of an aggressive push for further development of our NAND flash technology, our SSD controller and our supportive SSD firmware," said Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Electronics. "Early introduction of this state-of-the-art toggle DDR solution will enable Samsung to play a majo…

It looks like Microsoft may have revealed something big at its annual MGX (Microsoft Global Exchange) event, namely... new logos for its main brands and a fresh brand motto. "Be What's Next" touts a teaser which has been posted on YouTube, along with a fast moving sequence of morphing logos, shuffling from Windows, to Windows Phone, Xbox, Bing, and finally the familiar Office logo that's been kicking around for a little longer. It's unclear if these are just treatments used for a promo at the event, or if this is a signal that Redmond is dumping its familiar (and frankly dated) iconography for something a little looser, leaner, and hipper, but we can't say it would…

Autoruns has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor It shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP. Download: Autoruns 10.02 Homepage: Autoruns View the full article

Firefox (referred to as Fx) is a web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox is a highly customizable browser that allows you to enhance it using Add-ons. Some examples of Add-ons that you can use to customize Firefox are AdBlock Plus, CuteMenus - Crystal SVG, DownThemAll!, TabMixPlus and many more. Tabbed browsing is one of the many features that helps to make Firefox an enjoyable browser. Firefox does not use ActiveX which helps make it a more secure browser. Firefox does make use of many plugins to enhance your web experience. From Shockwave, Flash, Quicktime and more; your browsing experience reaches new levels…

VLC (VideoLAN) is a multi-platform multimedia player. 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 1.1.1 | Other Versions Changes: Changes Homepage: VideoLAN View the full article

Google's image search service will be getting a revamp this week, aimed at making the search function easier to use, and to provide more relevant results. The redesign is essentially the service's first major makeover since Google Images went live in 2001. At that time, only 250 million images had been catalogued by the Mountain View, Calif. search company. Now over 10 billion images are indexed. With such an increase in volume, obviously the search functionality will need to improve, as does the way the site displays ever larger results. "We hope [the changes] not only make it easier to search for images, but also contribute to a better aesthetic experi…

Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr networks. Gaim users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time. Pidgin supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer, away messages, and typing notification. It also goes beyond that and provides many u…

Today we are announcing the beta for the next version of Microsoft Security Essentials. Microsoft Security Essentials was first released in September 2009 and is our award-winning no-cost light weight anti-malware service. It’s designed to help address the ongoing security needs of PCs running genuine Windows – helping keep people protected from viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. View the full article

Firefox (referred to as Fx) is a web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox is a highly customizable browser that allows you to enhance it using Add-ons. Some examples of Add-ons that you can use to customize Firefox are AdBlock Plus, CuteMenus - Crystal SVG, DownThemAll!, TabMixPlus and many more. Tabbed browsing is one of the many features that helps to make Firefox an enjoyable browser. Firefox does not use ActiveX which helps make it a more secure browser. Firefox does make use of many plugins to enhance your web experience. From Shockwave, Flash, Quicktime and more; your browsing experience reaches new levels…

Thunderbird is a fast, flexible e-mail client. You can quickly search through your e-mails, worry less about spam thanks to the spam filters, and even customize how you view Thunderbird. Thunderbird works with most Firefox add-ons as well, adding more content to your e-mail client. Thunderbird makes the e-mail experience fun again. Download: Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.1 | Other Systems and Languages Changes: Release Notes Homepage: Mozilla Thunderbird View the full article

Microsoft Corp. said the 12th alleged member of a Russian spy ring operating in the U.S. was an employee at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters. The man, a Russian citizen in his early 20s named Alexey Karetnikov, worked for Microsoft as a software tester for about nine months, a spokeswoman for Microsoft in Moscow, who declined to be identified in line with company rules, said by e-mail today. Russia’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the news when contacted by Bloomberg. Ten members of the spy ring pleaded guilty to conspiring to serve as unregistered foreign agents on June 8 in a U.S. federal court in Manhattan. They admitted to carrying mon…

The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters. Of course, we continue to get comments from many of you who are eager to get access to the new Hotmail, and we’re just as eager to get the new version out to everyone. I’d like to give a bit more detail about why it takes time to do the rollout. In the last post, I explained that we go slowly at first in order to give our engineers an opportunity to study the operational characteristics of the new software in all the different environments. That’s true of every release. But there is another reas…