9th July 2008, 08:23 am
It’s a little bit late, since the WWI took place last month, but I didn’t want to miss this. Blizzard announced the latest addition to its Diablo series. Diablo 3 is a work in progress, and they didn’t give any hint regarding the official release date. You can see on the Diablo 3 official website a game-play movie featuring the Barbarian and the new class character, Witch doctor. I just have to say the in game graphics look amazing and sound is breath taking. My only fear is that I will have to upgrade my PC in order to be able to play this one. Anyway, it will be pretty difficult to decide between Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3. 
12th June 2008, 06:22 am
Security vendor ScanSafe said that web-based malware on legitimate sites has increased with 400% in the last year. In a security report on this issue, ScanSafe found 68% of malware hosted on legitimate sites. The most used techniques used were Iframes and SQL injections, ScanSafe said.
The fastest-growing category of threats hosted on sites was backdoor and password-stealing malware, which increased with 855% from May 2007 to May 2008.
Source: silicon.com
20th May 2008, 03:47 am
According to online forums, the recently launched Win XP SP3 causes problems to users of Windows Home Server who want to use the remote desktop access feature. This feature asks users to add their home server’s web site address, even if they already did it.
Users say that the problem appears because XP SP3 by default disables Terminal Services ActiveX control, as part of its security model. A use has posted a fix, that outlines how to enable Terminal Services ActiveX control in Internet Explorer.
After SP3’s release on May 6th, users reported that it puts some AMD-based PCs in endless reboots. Microsoft posted information on fixing it on the Web.
12th May 2008, 04:54 am
Microsoft announced that it will offer important discounts to cheap laptop manufacturers. This comes because Microsoft realized the threat from Linux on the low-budget laptop market.
The giant will charge PC manufacturers just $26 to have Windows XP Home Edition preloaded on low-cost machines sold in emerging markets, and $32 for those sold in the developed markets. The manufacturers can get $10 off those prices, if they qualify for Microsoft’s market development scheme.
The discount is limited to machines with display no larger than 10.2 in (excluding touchscreens), and with hard disks no larger than 80GB.
5th May 2008, 02:22 am
Microsoft announced that it was ready to increase the offer for Yahoo, from $31 to $33 per share, adding $5 billion to the value of the takeover. Yahoo was seeking for further $5 billion to complete the deal, but Microsoft decided this increase would not be reflected by Yahoo’s values, so they decided to withdraw the proposal for Yahoo.
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said he is happy to see the back of Microsoft, and looks forward to the continuation of Yahoo’s plans of development.
Source: pcpro.co.uk
22nd April 2008, 07:58 am
Paypal announced that it will not block Safari, after earlier this months they announced new security measures, including blocking access using insecure browsers. Many thought that Safari will be among the blocked browsers, but Paypal denied that, and said it will block just old browser/OS combinations, for example IE4 running on Win98.
Source: pcpro.co.uk
15th April 2008, 08:28 am
Shumeet Baluja, research scientist at Google, announced that he and some other Google employees developed software for detecting exploited children, in videos. They did it because they wanted to help the Nationa Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). An interesting fact is that the team leaded by Baluja created this software in the 20% worktime in which the Google employees are allowed to focus on their own projects and ideas. So, thumbs up for both Google, and its employees.
More about this, on the official Google blog.
11th April 2008, 03:02 am
In the latest edition of its bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report , Symantec revealed that the number of computer viruses is now bigger than one million. In the 2nd half of 2007, there were found 499,811 malicious threats, which is 136% increase compared to the first 6 months of 2007.
The end of 2007 found Symantec detecting 1,122,311 threats. Symantec says that this big increase of the new viruses is caused by the fact that high-tech crime groups now employ very good programmers to help them create dangerous viruses. Many of the threats are Trojans, which once installed on a computer, install other malicious programs, send confidential data to the Trojan creator, by logging user names, passwords and so on.
Source: BBC News.
7th April 2008, 04:23 am
Microsoft informed Yahoo! that they should decide if they sell to MS, within 3 weeks. If this does not happen, Microsoft will try to buy directly from the share holders, at a lower price. This kind of offer is very likely to cause massive resignations at Yahoo, and of course Microsoft would not want to lose high qualified employees that gave Yahoo so much value.
The current offer that Yahoo should accept / reject within 3 weeks is $44.6 billion.
4th April 2008, 04:12 am
Yahoo! has released a new application, which enables the user to search the web using voice commands. The web giant says that voice searches should take no more than 5 seconds, or 10-20 seconds on slower networks.
Yahoo! claims that oneSearch will allow general queries, not just simple ones, based on a basic vocabulary. This is very good news, because people will easily find restaurants, movies, concerts, flights, and so on. Yahoo has already finished deals with mobile operators that sum 600 million users that access the web using a phone, they hope to reach 750 million users.
Source: pcpro.co.uk
