Week 1 Christmas Giveaway!

By DustinPosted on

It’s Christmas Giveaway time! This week, we will have 2 lucky winners, each getting a license for TuneUp Utilities 2011, which is good for 3 installs each. This is a great utility to tune your PC and keep it running as fast as possible.

Entering is easy. Like our page on Facebook (the link is to the right) , and leave a comment to this post (No Registration is Required!). Simple, right?

Winners will be chosen Friday, December 10th 2010 at 7:00PM PST. Good luck to all! Make sure to come back next week to see what else we have in store!

EDIT: The Winners have been chosen using Random.Org. Congratulations to Brittany E & AllTheWiser! You each won a license for TuneUp Utilities 2011! Check your Facebook inbox for the key and to download your software! Enjoy! Thank you to all that entered.

We will be posting another contest on Monday morning for Week 2!

Black Tango Down For Windows – 99 Cents

By DustinPosted on

Today is Day 4 of the Games For Windows Daily Deal. For 99 pennies today, you can grab the newer game Black Tango Down. I’m DLing it right now, and from the videos I’ve seen, it looks to be a nice game!

Participate in the “NetWar”: a hyper-realistic battlefield letting you fight tomorrow’s conflicts with or against your friends in the gritty Blacklight universe. Experience the bleeding edge of advanced warfare today for only 99 cents!

Internet Explorer “Protected Mode” Can Be Bypassed

By DustinPosted on

The Protected Mode in the later versions of Internet Explorer has been proven to be not so “Protected” as previously thought. While it is a security hole, it can also be avoided as much as possible by limiting the trusted Intranet Zone.

Researchers from Verizon Business have now described a way of bypassing Protected Mode in IE 7 and 8 in order to gain access to user accounts. The technique requires a vulnerability that allows the execution of malicious code in the browser or in a browser extension. Although the malware will initially only run in the browser’s Low Integrity Mode, it can start a web server on the computer that will respond to requests on any port of the loopback interface. By calling the IELaunchURL() function, an attacker can instruct IE to load a URL from this web server, for instance “http://localhost/exploit.html”. Localhost is generally part of IE’s Local Intranet Zone and, by default, Protected Mode is disabled for content from this zone.

Microsoft Begins Pushing Cut/Paste Update

By DustinPosted on

Developers have started to get the new update from Microsoft for the Windows Phone 7 which includes the Cut & Paste functionality. This was promised from the beginning, and it is starting to get into the cycle of updates. How long did it take the iPod Touch/iPhone? I know that was a lot of the animosity from the Apple crowd about the Windows Phone 7. It’s turning out to be a real nice platform.

“A user can tap a word in mail, IE, Word, etc and that word is then highlighted with arrows on both sides. One can then drag to the left or right to include more words. An icon appears above the highlighted word(s) (looks very similar to the copy icon in Office 2010) to copy. Open a new document, once the cursor is set/blinking and the soft keyboard appears, a paste icon (again, looks the same as the paste icon in Office 2010) is shown just above the top row of letters. In “Messaging”, a user can long press a specific IM which open up the hidden menu that now includes copy. Paste where you wish…”

MS Office 2010 Celebrates 6 Months

By DustinPosted on

6 Months ago, Microsoft unleashed Office 2010 onto the public. It looks like it has been a great success so far, with excellent growth and market penetration. There are many reasons to upgrade to the newest version of Office, but for many, Office 2007 is still “good enough”. Those that need basic features for school or home could get by with Office 2007. Anything more than that, and you will find a lot of potential with Office 2010.

First, customers are buying Office 2010 at a record pace. Office has seen double-digit growth in its first full quarter on the market, a 50 percent increase in business non-annuity sales, and a 5 percent increase in multi-year licenses in Q1. Needless to say, we’re delighted by the rate of adoption and interest from consumer and business customers. While the numbers are amazing, what pleases us even more are the many ways customers have become more efficient and productive as a result of implementing Office 2010.

IE6 Usage Down, IE9 Usage Up

By DustinPosted on

Finally, people are weening themselves off the ancient internet browser, Internet Explorer 6. The beta of Internet Explorer 9 has shown a lot of interest,with over 15 million downloads so far. While the IE9 beta won’t replace the browser in businesses quite yet, until the final is released, it is nice to see a beta making such an impact. It is also very good that people are moving away from the insecure and vulnerable Internet Explorer 6.

Moreover, Microsoft said enterprises are adopting modern browsers even more quickly, as evidenced by only 10.3 percent of enterprises running IE6. And IE8 and IE9 continue to grow—current usage share for each browser version has increased this month to 32.75 percent and 0.38 percent, respectively. As of Dec. 1, Microsoft’s IE team said they have seen more than 15 million downloads of the IE9 beta.

AVG Update Kills Windows 7 64-Bit

By DustinPosted on

AVG released an update yesterday that rendered 64-Bit versions of Windows 7 useless. The update caused an endless reboot loop with the error “STOP: c0000135 The program can’t start because %hs is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.”. AVG has since fixed the update and it is now safe to do updates now. There are instructions on how to fix the damage of the first update here.

We are sorry to report that we have identified a potential conflict between one of our recent updates (3292) and a significant number of systems running on the Windows 7 64-bit platform that has caused systems to go into an infinite crash loop.

We regret any inconvenience this is causing our customers and we are working  quickly to resolve this issue.

It appears that the problems are most prevalent in Windows 7 64-bit systems. This is because a wrong update file is being served into the product. We removed the update immediately after the problem was identified and will release a program to ensure that the fix is completed automatically as soon as possible.

In the interim, we encourage our Windows 7 64-bit customers to do the following: Watch this video or follow the instructions below this video to help you solve this problem.


Google Chome Adds Sandbox For Flash Apps

By DustinPosted on

Google’s alternative, and fast, browser now includes a sandbox feature for Adobe Flash applications. Chrome has always been a nice browser, and less vulnerable to attacks, and this adds one more layer of protection. You can download Chrome here.

Since this past March, we’ve been working closely with Adobe to allow Flash Player to take advantage of new sandboxing technology in Chrome, extending the work we’ve already done with sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution. This week, we’re excited to roll out the initial Flash Player sandbox for our dev channel users on Windows XP, Vista and 7.

This initial Flash Player sandbox is an important milestone in making Chrome even safer. In particular, users of Windows XP will see a major security benefit, as Chrome is currently the only browser on the XP platform that runs Flash Player in a sandbox. This first iteration of Chrome’s Flash Player sandbox for all Windows platforms uses a modified version of Chrome’s existing sandbox technology that protects certain sensitive resources from being accessed by malicious code, while allowing applications to use less sensitive ones. This implementation is a significant first step in further reducing the potential attack surface of the browser and protecting users against common malware.

While we’ve laid a tremendous amount of groundwork in this initial sandbox, there’s still more work to be done. We’re working to improve protection against additional attack vectors, and will be using this initial effort to provide fully sandboxed implementations of the Flash Player on all platforms.

We’ll be posting updates as we continue working with Adobe to add new security improvements to the Flash Player sandbox. For those of you on the dev channel for Windows, you’ll be automatically updated soon, and we look forward to your feedback as you test it out. If you prefer to disable this initial sandbox in your Chrome dev experience, add –disable-flash-sandbox to the command line.

Microsoft Announces Silverlight 5

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft has announced Silverlight 5 to developers at an online event. Unless Adobe can get Flash to work correctly (stable 64-bit, use less than 100% CPU), I see Silverlight replacing it soon. Not to mention it is on the WP7 and XBox 360 now.

Introducing Silverlight 5, Guthrie said the next version is a “major new release” that brings new enhancements for media. Silverlight 5 introduces the following support:

  • Hardware media decoding – can stream 1080p video on Netbooks
  • Trickplay – variable playback of video and audio including pitch correction
  • Power management – less battery used during playback and richer power management
  • Remote control – 10ft experience against a PC and can take advantage of remote controls for playback
  • 64-bit version of Silverlight
  • Databinding enhancements