Anti-virus update can freeze your computer

Computers running the 64-bit version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system could be rendered unusable if users install the latest anti-virus software update from AVG. The company has now withdrawn the product.
The problem affects the most recent free update for AVG 2011, which was made available to users Dec 1.
AVG has acknowledged that the patch can send some 64-bit Windows 7 machines into a crash cycle, forcing a reboot of the computer from which it never restarts. The anti-virus company has withdrawn the update, reports the Telegraph.
The problem is caused by one particular virus database update, which automatically forces the computer to reboot in order to let the update take affect. Upon restarting, the computer will register an error and will not complete the boot cycle.
The software update is no longer available to users, but AVG has released a guide for those customers who have already installed the update and are experiencing problems.
The step-by-step instructions tell how the update can be disabled, by running an AVG 'rescue CD'.
AVG apologised to users for the software glitch. The company has also recommended an alternative recovery method for those users who no longer have, or cannot create, a 'rescue CD'.

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WiFi Camera: Can This Model Beat an iPhone?

I can't remember the last time I used my point-and-shoot. I take most of my photos with my iPhone because it makes it so easy to share photos by email or on Facebook.

Now, some camera companies are trying to make it easier to share high-quality photos with WiFi-enabled digital cameras. I tested Samsung's ST80, a 14.2 megapixel point-and-shoot camera that lets you send photos straight from the device over WiFi.

The ST80 came out last month and costs $249.99. It's a tiny camera, measuring approximately 3.6 by 2.2 inches and weighing about 4 ounces. I actually found it difficult to get a good grip on the camera. The 3-inch touchscreen was responsive and easy to use, and the camera can also record 720p video.

Shots came out best in bright daylight. At first glance, photos I took of the gold statue and ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center looked true to life. But people and scenery in the background looked murky, and the photos lacked crispness.

I also noticed a slight capture delay after pressing the shutter button, which wasn't a problem until I tried to take a photo of an ice skater mid-jump. Even when I pressed the button slightly before she jumped, I was never able to capture the skater mid-air.

I also had trouble taking photos at night or in low light. Even in Times Square, which stays fairly well-lit at night, most photos weren't sharp. When I turned on the flash to take a photo of my plate at a restaurant, it ended up washed out.

A Samsung spokesperson suggested focusing on the subject of the photo while in "program" mode by using options like "one touch shooting," which allows you to select a specific area of focus using the touchscreen. I experimented with this option in my apartment at night, and the objects I photographed looked like they were in broad daylight.

The ST80 can connect to free WiFi, your home network or Boingo, a network with nearly 30,000 hotspots in the U.S. (ST80 users get a 3-month free trial when they purchase the camera; thereafter, Boingo costs $7.95 a month.) The camera only attempts to connect to WiFi once you select "web" on the "wireless networking" menu.

I tested out the ST80's photo-sharing capabilities in Times Square, one of the few places where I found a free WiFi connection. After a couple of tries, I got a connection through the Boingo network. To upload photos to an existing Facebook album, I had to sign into Facebook and select an existing photo album on my profile. Then, I dragged the photos into the album.

The entire process took about two minutes, which was noticeably longer than it takes me to send photos to Facebook using my iPhone on the 3G network.

But I was able to upload more than one photo at a time to Facebook with the ST80, which was very convenient. Of course, it takes longer to upload multiple photos.

I also e-mailed photos and uploaded them to Picasa. The ST80 supports sharing photos on Photobucket and Samsung's imaging site and 30-second video clips on YouTube. Unfortunately, posting photos to Twitter isn't among the options.

And finding a free WiFi network to connect to sometimes felt like searching for a needle in a haystack. I often couldn't get the camera to pick up a signal when I was out on the street in New York, even in the middle of Rockefeller Center and Greenwich Village.

I was concerned that the WiFi connectivity would drain the battery quickly. But since the ST80 only searches for WiFi when you try to share photos, this didn't add extra strain to the battery life.

One useful feature is that the camera has more than two dozen built-in editing options including cropping and face retouching. I liked being able to fix photos before sharing them with the world, and editing on the camera using the touchscreen was surprisingly easy and fun.

So is the ST80 worth it? $250 can buy a lot of digital camera these days, and I wasn't wowed by the photos I captured, particularly action shots. The WiFi connectivity is a great feature in theory, but didn't perform well in practice. We'll have to keep waiting for a camera that perfectly pairs high-quality photos with easy sharing.

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Rivals Say Google Plays Favorites

Google Inc. increasingly is promoting some of its own content over that of rival websites when users perform an online search, prompting competing sites to cry foul.
The Internet giant is displaying links to its own services—such as local-business information or its Google Health service—above the links to other, non-Google content found by its search engine.
Google, which is developing more content or specialized-search sites in hopes of boosting ad revenue, says that prominently displaying links to them is more useful to Web searchers than just displaying links to sites that rank highly in its search system. But the moves mean Google increasingly is at odds with websites that rely on the search engine for visitors.
Those companies say their links are being pushed lower on the results page to make room for the Google sites. Critics include executives at travel site TripAdvisor.com, health site WebMD.com and local-business reviews sites Yelp.com and Citysearch.com, among others.
"There is no denying that today Google is competing [with many websites] for the same Web traffic and the same advertising dollars," said Jay Herratti, chief executive of CityGrid Media, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp. that owns Citysearch and sister sites Urbanspoon.com and InsiderPages.com.
Mr. Herratti said he believes Google's moves are hurting the growth of his sites, though adds it is hard to measure the impact.
TripAdvisor LLC Chief Executive Stephen Kaufer said the traffic his site gets from Google's search engine dropped by more than 10%, on a seasonally adjusted basis, since mid-October—just before Google announced the latest change to the way its search engine shows information about local businesses. TripAdvisor.com, whose top source of traffic is Google, reviews hotels and other businesses frequented by travelers.
"Google does seem to be chasing us and I don't like it one bit," said Mr. Kaufer, adding that he has been negotiating with Google for about two months to try to improve his situation.
"We built Google for users, not websites, and our goal is to give users answers," a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. "Sometimes the most useful answer isn't '10 blue links,' but a map for an address query, or a series of images for a query like 'pictures of Egyptian pyramids.' We often provide these results in the form of 'quick answers' at the top of the page, because our users want a quick answer."
She declined to comment on any specific criticisms or any discussions with other websites.
The complaints underscore how crucial Google searches are to virtually every business online, and the increasingly close scrutiny of how Google operates. In November, the European Union's top antitrust authority said it began a formal inquiry into whether Google manipulates its search results to disadvantage competing Web services, or give preferential placement to Google's own services.
The EU received a complaint from a shopping-search site that claimed it and other similar sites saw their traffic drop after Google began promoting its own Product Search service above conventional search results.
Google said it has never intentionally hurt competing services. It has also said the complaints to the EU were made by companies with ties to rival Microsoft Corp.

The latest complaints by Web competitors don't focus on Google's underlying search algorithms—which show links that are supposed to be most relevant to a particular query—but the way it displays links to its own services. The company insists it is simply helping users.
The issue isn't entirely new. The company for several years has used prominent links to services such as Google Finance and Google Maps to boost their popularity, with varying results.
But Google's recent moves seem to be prompting more complaints from competitors. Since last fall, Google has pointed users to business listings, called "Place pages," when they search for things as "New York spa." Such searches often bring up results that list specific businesses but also include large red pin symbols for each of them. Clicking on those pins often takes users to the local business's website or a Google Place page that shows details about the business.

Links to some non-Google local-business review websites appear lower on the results page.
Links to Place pages have become more prominent in recent months, and Google has introduced new ad initiatives associated with the changes.
Over the past year or so Google has also directed people who search for mortgages or credit cards to Google's own marketplace for such offers, an effort that competes with websites like Bankrate.com. A spokesman for Bankrate Inc. declined to comment.
And last year, Google began showing links to Google Health pages when people type ailments such as "cancer" or "emphysema." The Google Health pages organize information such as causes, symptoms and news. Links to those pages appear above regular search results.
"It's contrary to the notion of a natural search," said Adam Grossberg senior vice president of corporate communications at WebMD Health Corp. He said his company hadn't seen negative repercussions but is watching closely.

Google plans to use similar methods to steer search-engine traffic to two services begun last month, company representatives said.
The first, Hotpot, lets people rate businesses, museums or public places and share those ratings with friends, similar to Yelp and other such sites. The second service, Boutiques.com, is aimed at online shoppers of apparel and accessories.
Google's promotion of its own content over others' has been one of many issues raised during the federal antitrust review of the company's acquisition of ITA Software Inc., people involved in the discussions have said. ITA is the underlying search engine for travel sites like Kayak.com, and Google said it intends to use ITA technology to develop its own travel-search site. Analysts expect Google to show links to the new site on top of results for travel-related searches.
Google executives have said the government will conclude that online travel will remain competitive after the acquisition closes, and that the deal shouldn't raise antitrust concerns because Google doesn't compete with ITA.
The vast majority of Google's revenue comes from ads placed next to search results. But growth in that core business has slowed from several years ago, leading the company to add websites that go deeper into categories like comparison shopping.
Bing, Microsoft Corp.'s search engine, also points users in some cases to its local-business pages, finance or airfare services. But Bing's influence is smaller—it handles less than 30% of U.S. Web searches, including those on Yahoo Inc. sites, compared to Google's 66%, according to comScore figures for October.
At least one site, MayoClinic.com, a Web publisher of health information, said Google's changes led to a small uptick in traffic. Brian Laing, a MayoClinic.com executive, attributes that to Google showing a link to MayoClinic.com next to the Google Health link for certain health queries, even if MayoClinic.com links don't show up on the first page of regular results—which are determined by a special ranking algorithm.
Google's expansion into local information has been a particular source of friction. This fall, Google made its links to its millions of Place pages even more prominent on the first search results page, pushing sites such as TripAdvisor.com farther down the page for searches on "Berlin hotels," for instance. Place pages for businesses give basic information such as location and hours as well as a summary of user-generated reviews from sites like Citysearch and Yelp.
Carter Maslan, a Google product management director, acknowledged "a little bit" of tension between Google and local-information sites. But he said the changes are meant to improve users' experience by getting them more information about businesses faster, and to provide links to review sites.
Yelp Inc. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has complained about Google's use of Yelp content for Google Place pages and is negotiating with Google over the issue. He said Google "is trying to leverage its distribution power"—the search engine—"to take an inferior product and put it in front of the user."
Mr. Maslan said the company's data show that users have been happy with Google's changes to local-business searches.

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Web Attacks Test Firms'(PayPal's) Internet Defenses

The computer attacks against Visa Inc., PayPal and other companies that cut off ties with WikiLeaks are testing businesses' digital preparedness for what has become a high-stakes cyber war.
Moments after a manifesto saying "PayPal is the enemy" surfaced Sunday on blogs, PayPal's chief information security officer, Michael Barrett, moved his team "into red alert status," including at the company's operations nerve center in San Jose, Calif.
What ensued was a week-long chess game between hackers and PayPal engineers in some nine locations around the world. The attackers tried to flood PayPal.com and other sites with a surge of Internet traffic meant to overwhelm their server systems and make their websites inaccessible.
"A good chess player will typically go several half-moves ahead," Mr. Barrett said in an interview Friday. "We have counter-measures and counter-counter-measures," he said, such as shifting server resources from one part of the site to another. Amid the assault, PayPal's site has occasionally slowed down, but hasn't crashed.
By contrast, MasterCard Inc. and Visa both suffered website outages on Wednesday. The companies don't conduct business on those sites, which act as electronic brochures. Both firms said sensitive customer information and transaction processing networks were unaffected.
The attacks by a loose-knit collective known as "Anonymous" weren't a good measure of what the world's hackers can mete out on corporate sites. The attacks appear to be classic distributed denial of service (DDOS) assaults of a type that have plagued sites since almost the first days of the Web. The attacks were relatively unsophisticated.
Yet the fact that financial companies like MasterCard and Visa have left part of their operations vulnerable raises questions of whether businesses are using every tool available to them to gird for attacks from a more-sophisticated cyber army.
The cyber attacks were ongoing Friday. A prosecutors office in the Netherlands said its website had been disrupted by a denial-of-service attack, Reuters reported, a day after a teenager suspected of involvement in the attacks was arrested in the country.
On Friday, some "Anonymous" members put out an announcement saying they were shifting their strategies from attacking websites to flooding news sites and forums with interesting bits from the exposed WikiLeaks documents.
"We do not want to steal your personal information or credit card numbers. We also do not seek to attack critical infrastructure of companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon," they wrote in a statement posted online. "Our current goal is to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by the above companies to impair WikiLeaks' ability to function."
U.S. authorities say there are multiple probes into various aspects of the WikiLeaks case, including people responsible for leaking the documents and the recent Internet-based attacks, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Justice Department has used a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., which has jurisdiction over criminal cases involving the Pentagon, to conduct aspects of the investigations, according to people familiar with matter. It couldn't be learned what aspects of the investigation have been presented to the grand jury or whether prosecutors are moving close to making arrests.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has investigators embedded in several police agencies around the world that are probing the cyber attacks, officials said. The FBI's role generally consists of providing Internet service provider information and other data from companies attacked. FBI investigators provided assistance in Wednesday's arrest of the Dutch teenager, the officials said.
"It is a scary reality of putting your business online that it is relatively cheap and relatively easy to mount a major attack from around the world," said Shawn White, the senior director of external operations at mobile and Internet performance monitoring firm Keynote Systems Inc.
The Web industry offers an arsenal of weapons against denial-of-service attacks, often selling them as services to corporations that can't afford to set up those technologies in-house.
Such services are often used to market the "cloud computing" industry, which urges corporations to move many of their computing tasks online to services that distribute the load across many servers, often in multiple locations.
Denial-of-service attacks are "the kind of thing that will never go away," says Rich Mogull, an analyst at research and consulting firm Securosis. But the more bandwidth a business has the less likely an attack is to succeed. Bringing down a large website like Amazon.com or PayPal isn't easy because such sites are used to dealing with large volumes of traffic.
But any slowdown has the risk to hurt PayPal's business. On Wednesday the graphic design website 99designs.com experienced a 15 to 20 minute outage in PayPal's payment service and had difficulty accepting payments via PayPal for several more hours, says its chief technology officer, Lachlan Donald.
While 99designs also accepts credit card payments, the company plans to add an additional payment option in order to buffer itself against possible future PayPal outages.
In PayPal's network operation center, charts showing total payments processed per minute and total traffic to the site, along with other data, are projected on a large, curved wall in front of around 20 workstations, each holding three to five computer monitors.
After the attacks began Monday, the line graph showing payments processed each minute dipped slightly as PayPal came under siege—signaling the website was slowing—while the neon green bar graph showing traffic to the website spiked, said Mr. Barrett.
PayPal, which is owned by and shares resources with e-commerce giant eBay Inc., was prepared. "We have made more changes in the last week than I can remember ever, simply to ensure the site is as robust as possible," said Mr. Barrett, the chief information security officer. Those include "hotwiring" the defensive layers that might get stressed. For example, the company repurposed server resources that might normally be used to redirect people who type in the company's Web address without the needed "www" at the beginning.
PayPal's information security teams work on a global basis, handing off tasks between places as far apart as Tokyo and Dublin. "We made some changes last night that didn't work as we wanted," said Mr. Barrett. "The team in Chennai was able to fix them," while teams in the U.S. focused on other issues, he said.
On Friday morning, even as the attacks continued, the key charts had returned to their typical levels, signaling that PayPal's defensive layers were successfully deflecting unwanted traffic, said Mr. Barrett, who has been working 18 to 20 hours a day this week.
Both Visa and MasterCard were skittish about saying why the attacks hobbled their sites more than PayPal and Amazon, or what they are doing now to prevent such a disruption from occurring again.
"We're not commenting on technology questions," said a MasterCard spokesman. Visa declined to comment.
Raj Chaudhary, who leads the security and privacy practice at consulting firm Crowe Horwath LLP, said the unknown question about Visa and Mastercard is whether they had plans in place to thwart an attack. Most companies, he added, still have not constructed adequate defenses even after a decade of intermittent disruptions to Internet commerce.
The events of the last week have prompted new requests from clients to put together a new defense. Mr. Chaudhary said, companies want to know, "How can I assure I don't become Visa."

Disclaimer: All information on this news has been compiled from their respective official websites or through public domain sites and leading newspapers. Although, we have taken reasonable efforts to provide you with accurate information, but we assumes no responsibility for the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the Information and would advise you to verify it from the official product provider. We cannot guarantee that the information on this page is 100% correct. If you would like to advertise on our site please contact us