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Google Inc. has opened an online photo gallery that will feature millions of images from Life magazine’s archives that have never been seen by the public before. The new service, available at images.google.com/hosted/life, debuted Tuesday with about 2 million photos. Eventually, Google plans to scan all 10 million photos from Life’s library so they can be viewed on any computer with an Internet connection. About 97 percent of Life’s archives have not been publicly seen, according to Life.

The photos can be printed out for free as long as they aren’t being used as part of an attempt to make money. Time Warner Inc., Life’s parent company, hopes to make money by selling high-resolution, framed prints. The orders will be processed through Qoop.com. Life’s archives include photos from the Civil War as well as some of the most memorable moments from the 20th century, including the Zapruder film capturing John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Go check it.

Source: AP

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Microsoft Corp. said it will offer free software to protect PCs from viruses, in a move that could pose new challenges for independent makers of security software. The Redmond, Wash., company said it plans to introduce its security software, code-named Morro, during the second half of next year in an effort to persuade more users to secure their PCs against spyware, viruses and other forms of “malware.” Use of antimalware software is far from universal, especially in emerging markets.

There are two primary reasons consumers supply for not protecting their PCs, including a concern that the anti-malware software will bog down their PCs, said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the online services and Windows division at Microsoft. The other reason is the cost of security software, which can run $75 for the programs plus two years of updates. Morro will replace another security software program Windows Live OneCare, a broader suite of software and services. Microsoft will discontinue retail sales of that software, which costs consumers $49.95 a year, on June 30 of next year. The shift to a free security offering from Microsoft could be a problem for Symantec Corp., McAfee Inc. and other independent security companies that charge consumers for their products.

Source: WSJ

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A new CPU from Intel is big news around the PC enthusiast realm. Intel has introduced its latest Core i7 CPU that promises to deliver vastly superior performance compared to the previous generation of Intel processors. According to Intel, the Core i7 parts deliver 40% more performance in processing intensive applications compared to the previous generation of processors. The CPU features Turbo Boost Technology that accelerates performance to match a computer user’s needs and the workload of the system at the time.

The on-die power control unit uses power gate transistors to automatically adjust the clock speed of one or more of the cores inside the CPU depending on the needs of the system. The technology also allows sleep states that are normally common only on notebook systems. Available processors include the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition runs at 3.20 GHz at $999 and the i7-940 running 2.93 GHz for $562 and the i7-920 at 2.66 GHz for $284.

Source: SlipperyBrick

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Flash is around the corner for Google’s G1 and Nokia’s Symbian smart phones; Flash on Blackberries likely coming as well; Apple continues its apathy towards Adobe. The best selling phone in America, Apple’s iPhone, could be the last of the smartphones to get Flash.  At a slew of press events over the last few days, Adobe unveiled a new version of mobile version of Flash — a leaner, faster, smart phone-aimed version of Flash 10.  The new version is optimized for ARM processors like the one used in the iPhone. Any smartphone with a 200 MHz or better processor and 16 MB of RAM should be able to run the new version of Flash, opening many phones up to the software.  A “completely capable [Web] browser” is also required, implying support of typical standards.

Google’s G1 and future Android smartphones will likely soon be getting the update, either over the air or in Google’s store, although no official release date has been announced.  Flash was demoed fully working on a T-Mobile G1 phone, though. It seems like Flash and the iPhone would be a logical fit, but Apple doesn’t think so.  Adobe has tried to woo Apple first with ARM-support upgrades and now with even more ARM-processor optimization.  The iPhone’s processor clearly can support Flash, and can support it well, but Apple remains obstinate in its refusal to adopt the technology.

Source: DailyTech

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Revenue for the video-game industry in October, the first month of the critical fourth quarter that includes the holiday shopping season, grew by 18%, despite a significant decline in sales of portable players, a market research firm said. Sales increased to $2.2 billion for the month, keeping the industry on track to top $22 billion for the year, the NPD Group said. The 18% rise over October 2007, however, was less than the year-to-year increase of 26% in September. Despite the October growth, NPD said sales were “mixed” in the month.

“The console portion of the market made significant gains at 26% across hardware, software, and accessories, while the portable side of the market stalled, declining 14%,” NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in a statement released late Thursday. “Year-to-date the portable segment of the market is still up 7%.” On the hardware side, the greater supply of Nintendo Wii paid off with the console recording its best sales month since last November and December. Price reductions on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 resulted in a 7% increase in unit sales over September.

Source: InfoWeek

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Microsoft is expanding its Windows Live online services over the next several weeks, including adding social networking features that will make the portal for consumers more Facebook-like, such as new photo-sharing capabilities and links to other Web sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.The move may bring Windows Live into closer competition with Facebook — ironic, given that Microsoft invested $240 million in the popular online service last year. Microsoft said Windows Live has more than 460 million users. With the enhanced Windows Live, users will be able to add third-party sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, Photobucket and Twitter to their profiles through a new “What’s New” feed.

Microsoft is also upgrading the messaging and e-mail services in Windows Live. Windows Live Messenger will offer more personalization capabilities, drag-and-drop photo sharing, a favorites list for the most important contacts, group IM for chatting with up to 20 people simultaneously, and updates from contacts through the What’s New feed. Windows Live Hotmail, which has 375 million active customers, will be faster and offer spam filtering that is 80 percent more effective, according to Microsoft. The system will allow users to bring multiple e-mail accounts together and put multiple e-mail addresses onto one device. The amount of online data storage provided by the service is being increased from 5 gigabytes to 25 gigabytes.

Source: CRN

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Google is finally catching up to competitors Microsoft and Yahoo for once. It is rolling out a new application for the iPhone that allows users to conduct searches with their voice rather than typing. Nice of Google to catch on to the voice-activated search craze. Microsoft and Yahoo have offered voice-enable search for some time. Microsoft through its TellMe service and Yahoo through its oneSearch service. Both work pretty well at converting speech into text and delivering relevant results. This is a feature that Google’s services have lacked for too long.

First to get Google’s version of voice search is the iPhone. The New York Times reports that the application will be available through the iPhone Apps Store as early as today, though that is not confirmed by Google or Apple. The Times notes that, “The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.” The application will be free for iPhone users.

Source: InfoWeek

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The closure of a web hosting firm that is believed to have had spam gangs as clients has led to a drastic reduction in junk mail. Two US internet service providers have pulled the plug on the firm McColo following an investigation by the Washington Post newspaper. Anti-spam firm Ironport has seen junk mail levels drop by 70% since McColo was taken offline on 11 November. But, it warned, it will be a temporary respite from the menace of spam.

“It is an unprecedented drop but will be a temporary outage as the networks move from North America to places where there is less scrutiny,” said Jason Steer, a spokesman for Ironport. The Washington Post has been gathering data on McColo for the past four months and passed the information to its internet service providers, Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric. Both decided to pull the plug on the firm on Tuesday. It is believed that it hosted gangs running botnets - networks of computers that have been taken over by criminals to send malicious software and spam. According to MessageLabs, botnets are responsible for over 90% of spam.

Source: BBC

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With the launch of its latest quad-core Opteron processor, code-named Shanghai, on Thursday, Advanced Micro Devices is looking to rebuild confidence among customers after problems with its Barcelona chip earlier this year. Running at 75 watts, the Shanghai processors range in speed from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz. The chip also includes improved hyperthreading for faster application performance. Manufactured using the 45-nanometer process, Shanghai chips are more power-efficient than Barcelona, which were manufactured using the 65-nanometer process. New CPU designs allow Shanghai to turn off unused functions or shift processing duties to save power. It also provides more power savings when servers are idle compared to earlier processors.

Shanghai is being aggressively priced for vendors to quickly adopt the chip, Patla said. The chips are 20 percent faster than Barcelona and can be easily plugged into the same socket that support Barcelona chips now. Shanghai-based systems are expected to be immediately available, Patla said. Vendors including Sun, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and Verari Systems are expected to launch servers with the quad-core chip. Pricing for the Opteron 2000 series chips start at $377 for the 2.3GHz Opteron 2376, running to $989 for the 2.7GHz Opteron 2384. Prices for the Opteron 8000 series begin at $1,165 for 2.3GHz Opteron 8378, up to $2,149 for Opteron 8384, which runs at 2.7GHz. Shanghai chips running at 55 watts and 105 watts will be launched in the first quarter of 2009.

Source: PC World

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Fresh off several hot smartphone releases, device maker HTC on Tuesday unveiled the HTC Fuze, a touch-screen handheld that takes cues from the T-Mobile G1, without the Google Android guts.The Fuze, an AT&T exclusive in the U.S., takes what made the G1, also made by HTC, a swift seller and ups the ante with a host of new features and functions. Like the G1, the Fuze features a fill slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Where it differs is the touchscreen, which ties in HTC’s own TouchFLO 3D user interface for one-touch access. The smartphone, which runs on AT&T’s 3G BroadbandConnect network, is designed specifically for one-hand operation, using gesture-based navigation, meaning users can touch, hold and slide along the screen tabs. The 3-D touchscreen interface extends to the Opera Web browser, where users can zoom in or out to ease navigation.

Another striking difference between the Fuze and the G1 is the Fuze’s operating system — Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, which offers integration with Microsoft Outlook e-mail, contacts, calendar and to-do lists. It wraps in a unique business card application that lets users capture and save contact information using the built-in 3.2 megapixel camera. The device hosts a 262,000-color, 2.8-inch, 480-by-640 VGA touchscreen for touch-sensitive navigation control, with three-dimensional animated transitions. On the connectivity side, the HTC Fuze can connect to voice and data via AT&T’s 3G network, and also features built-in GPS, Wi-Fi access and Bluetooth 2.0. It also has a push-to-talk feature for instant communication. The HTC Fuze is available now starting at $299.99 with a contract at AT&T stores. Voice plans start at $39.99 per month with monthly enterprise data plans starting at $45 and personal data plans starting at $30.

Source: Cnet, CRN

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Today, the Gmail team at Google has expanded GMail capabilities by including video and voice chat. On the Gmail blog Justin Uberti, software engineer for Google, writes, “[T]oday we’re launching voice and video chat — right inside Gmail. We’ve tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video — all for free.” In order to access Gmail Video and Voice Chat, users have to install the voice and video plug-in, and, as the Uberti states it, Google “takes care of the rest.” Gmail Voice and Video Chat was designed using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP and H.264, making the Google program able to interact with separate, third-party applications, assuming those separate voice and video applications decide to allow Gmail’s offering to interact with them.

Installation is easy and only takes a few seconds to download the plug-in. Once the browser is restarted, a “Video and more” menu will appear at the bottom of the Gmail page. Go to the menu and select “start video chat.” It will take a few moments for the video call to connect with your friend of co-worker. Once the video and voice session is initiated, users can pop the window out of the Gmail interface, just like an Gchat instant message window. Users are then given the option to go full screen with the chat, for an up close and personal experience with your chat partner. In order for Gmail Voice and Video to function on your machine a Web cam is required. The Gmail team guarantees that the functionality for MAC will be available to everyone in the next couple of days.

Source: CRN

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Hollywood is warming up to the Internet’s top video site. On Monday, YouTube will announce an ad-revenue sharing deal with MGM - home of James Bond, the Pink Panther and Rocky - that will let the site show full-length movies for the first time from a major Hollywood studio. Jordan Hoffner, YouTube’s head of content partnerships, called the agreement a “watershed moment’ for the company: “We are really happy about MGM. They have an incredible library.” It’s easy to understand why YouTube is excited. Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen want the site to be more than just a destination for clips of skateboarding dogs, experiments involving Mentos and Diet Coke and the occasional Simpson episode that needs to be taken down immediately because of copyright infringement.

After all, there are only so many ads YouTube can put into a short clip like “Tiger vs. Bear.” A feature-length film like “Rocky IV” has room from many more marketing messages. The site is already showing full-length independent movies like “Harold Buttelman, Daredevil Stuntman.” Now YouTube can boast that it has the kind of big budget movies that people can watch on Hulu.com. There’s only one catch. MGM - owned by an investor group led by Providence Equity Partners, Sony and Comcast - will only be posting only a few of its 4,000 movies on YouTube at first.

Source: CNN Money

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Apple, Inc.’s popular iPhone 3G has become “the leading handset purchased by adult consumers in the U.S.,” according to the NPD Group. The Apple iPhone 3G dethroned Motorola’s RAZR, long the market leader, in the third quarter. NPD said the “watershed shift” to Apple’s iPhone 3G represents a move toward “fashionable functionality.” Apple’s iPhone 3G can add another trophy to its crowded shelf. On Monday, The NPD Group reported that the popular smartphone surpassed the Motorola RAZR in the third quarter as “the leading handset purchased by adult consumers in the U.S.”

The RAZR had reigned as the top-selling consumer handset for the past 12 quarters. The report by the market researcher is based on more than 150,000 online consumer surveys each month, projected to represent all U.S. consumers 18 years and older. Mobile phones are also seeing some features becoming more common. For instance, 30 percent of handsets sold in the third quarter had a QWERTY keyboard, resulting in the greatest year-over-year increase yet in sales for devices with that feature. A year ago, only 11 percent had QWERTY keyboards. Similarly, 83 percent of handsets purchased this year have Bluetooth, versus 72 percent last year, and 68 percent were music-enabled, compared to 49 percent last year.

Source: NewsFactor

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Headphones used with MP3 digital music players like the iPod may interfere with heart pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, U.S. researchers said on Sunday. The MP3 players themselves posed no threat to pacemakers and defibrillators, used to normalize heart rhythm. But strong little magnets inside the headphones can foul up the devices if placed within 1.2 inches of them, the researchers told an American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans. Dr. William Maisel of the Medical Device Safety Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston led a team that tested eight models of MP3 player headphones, including clip-on and earbud types, in 60 defibrillator and pacemaker patients.

They placed the headphones on the patients’ chests, directly over the devices. The headphones interfered with the heart devices in about a quarter of the patients — 14 of the 60 — and interference was twice as likely in those with a defibrillator than with a pacemaker. So that means people with pacemakers or defibrillators should not place the headphones in a shirt pocket or coat pocket near the chest when they are not being used, drape them over their chest or have others who are wearing headphones rest their head on the patient’s chest, Maisel said. Most of the headphones had magnetic field strengths more than 20 times higher than the threshold for interfering with pacemakers or defibrillators, he said.

Source: Reuters

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I received few emails from our readers that Rapidshare changed their Users policy and it’s quite a significant change so I will write few sentences about it. Rapidshare continues to be one of the most popular filesharing services offering terabytes of data. You can find pretty much everything uploaded there, often just a few minutes after the pre time.

Anyway, the new policy affects mostly holders of Rapidshare Premium account: the main change is the download traffic limit to 80 GB per month, which is something as 2.66 gigabytes per day. Before the update, it used to be 10 gigabytes per day, so this is a pretty major limitation. Still, 80 gigabytes should be more than enough for you, unless you download all new video games and HD rips.

This change is valid only for new Premium accounts on Rapidshare, the holders of old accounts shouldn’t be affected unless they extend their account(s) after the policy change. The other important and actually very annoying change is that public, anonymous uploads will last only 10 downloads and then the data will be deleted. If you want to keep your files longer, you have to register a Collector’s account, which is free, but it’s still an extra hassle. Well, although these bad news may prevent few people from paying for Premium account at Rapidshare, I’m pretty sure the service will remain very popular nevertheless.