Windows 7 Life Theme
Windows 7 users that have been keeping an eye on Softpedia already know that Microsoft has been releasing a steady flow of personalization content. The latest Windows 7 theme made available by the Redmond company is titled Life, and comes courtesy of the Discovery channel and BBC.
The theme pack in question is available for download, as many others, free of charge via the Windows Personalization Gallery, the company’s central hub for offering themes designed to allow customers to customize their Windows 7 desktops.
“Bizarre, beautiful nature from Discovery Channel,†the short description of the Life theme, which will leave users with a feeling that the images should have been accompanied by more information, reads. Of course, the same is not the case with many themes on the Windows Personalization Gallery, but this specific example feels like it needs the added touch of the Bing wallpaper hotspots.
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Apple Keyboard Hack Proved Possible
Slashdot reports that Apple keyboards are vulnerable to hackers’ attacks due to the complexity of their inner workings, which include RAM and flash memory. According to the report, the hack can potentially place keyloggers and malware directly into the device’s firmware.
To make matters even worse, the author of this “proof of concept†has also published the presentation and code in a PDF that’s free to download for anyone on the planet. The vuln is undoubtedly enticing to hackers, some of which are likely to create one or more exploits for the flaw in question. To better understand how this discovery has turned into a potential security issue, we offer you a few excerpts from the published document.
For ethical reasons, the ï¬rmware modiï¬cation we describe is benign. The ï¬rmware is modiï¬ed so that the LED under the CAP S LOC K key of the keyboard will flash momentarily when the keyboard is ï¬rst plugged into a system. However, malicious payloads can be developed by individuals with mal-intent. Read more
12 Euphemisms Used to Mislead You
Here is a list of the 12 most misleading sets of words that we could find in use, most of them in the United States, which seems to have a real appetite for calling things by names they have nothing to do with. These are just a few examples.
Binocular Deprivation means no more no less than to sew an animal’s eyes shut during an experiment, for various purposes. The technique is widely used in research labs worldwide, and is meticulously described in each paper featuring the procedure.
Biosolids is just another word for sewage sludge, and is employed in official documents instead of other terms. This word, like many others from the list, is only meant to make a bad thing sound good, and has nothing to do with being politically correct. It’s all about PR and image. Read more
MS Firefox discovered!
Once the most preferred browser is Internet Explorer, Firefox, especially with the support of its plug-and users, and software developers are happy. Many independent programmers and users for Firefox, is developing its own plug-ins offer. In this way, and has made their introductions, and facilitate business users. The new Firefox add-ons that enhance the company’s very difficult for independent programmers, because these firms with IT giant Microsoft.
“Heavy on demand, we have to integrate Live Search to Firefox” and speaking of Live Search software manager Ray Debapriya own blog, Microsoft’s add-in was announced by the official. Read more
Live Search Gets Wallpapers
Microsoft is constantly evolving the products and services under the Windows Live brand umbrella, and one of the main focuses of the company is, of course, Live Search. Chris Rayner, Senior Product Manager, and Zach Gutt, Senior Program Manager Live Search User Experience team, revealed that the redesigned Live Search homepage would from now on feature background images. The Redmond company will ensure that the Live Search “wallpapers” will alternate frequently, but this process won’t be random, and it won’t happen on every refresh. Additionally, the Live Search backgrounds will have hotspots implemented, offering users a search item in accordance with elements contained in the image. Read more
Opera 9.50 Fixes Fiesta
On its official website, Opera describes the latest version of its browser as “beautifully engineered”. However, it looks like Opera 9.50 was made available to end users before the cooking process was ready. After the release of the gold version of Opera 9.50 on June 12, 2008, the feedback starting pouring in, and it was not a pretty sight. As a direct consequence of the user input, Opera is now scrambling to make available version 9.51, designed to resolve all the issues introduced with Opera 9.50.
“Discover the new standard in Web browsing. Download Opera today to get the fastest and most powerful Web browser available and make the most of your time online,” is a message on the official Opera welcoming page. And while the evolution of version 9.5 over its predecessor is indisputable, the fact is that so are the many problems plaguing the browser. June 25, 2008 saw the offering of Opera 9.51 Build 10074 Release Candidate 1, and as of June 30 users can also grab Opera 9.51 RC2 Build 10080. Read more
Introducing Zune 2.5
Microsoft continues to hammer away at its Zune digital media player and the services built around the device, but the evolution is largely a case of going where Apple has already taken the iPod and iTunes. On May 5, 2008, Microsoft introduced the latest update to Zune, not only adding new features and enhancements to the device itself but also evolving the Zune software, Zune Social and the Zune Marketplace. The focus of the update is to build on top of what the company started with “Zune Social” in November 2007, namely to extend the social networking community created around the device.
“Zune owners are pretty passionate, and they had a lot of great ideas for making the community more valuable to music fans. And I definitely fall into that category myself – the main reason we’re all here is we love the music,” stated Brian Seitz, a Group Marketing Manager for Zune. Zune Social offers users the possibility to interact in terms of music discovery, comments, playlist browsing, with the update bringing to the table additional capabilities including the ability to send messages to friends, explore their music collections and even drag-and-drop Zune Cards. Read more
Hollywood discovers movie fingerprinting star
Hollywood has picked a winner in its competition to develop an effective but unobtrusive system for fingerprinting digital movies.
The contest, organised by Movie Labs, the R&D arm of the MPAA, asked each fingerprinting system to identify 1,000 movie files by their “fingerprints”, patterns of data unique to each movie.
The files varied in quality, from HD through internet downloads to bootlegs recorded on camcorders. Three of the 12 systems managed to identify more than 90% of the files with no false positives. Read more
