Unfortunately, not all websites have users' best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to "buy PageRank™" in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.
Yet another mobile Linux alliance has been formed, this time with a focus on devices with larger displays.
The new organisation is spearheaded by the British processor manufacturer ARM, and its formation adds to a list of similar associations, including the LiPS Forum, the LiMo Foundation and the Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI). Members working with ARM include Marvell, MontaVista, Movial, Mozilla, Samsung and Texas Instruments.
There is a lot of crossover between the various groups. ARM is already a member of both LiPS and LiMo, MontaVista is a member of the MLI and LiPS, and Movial and Texas Instruments are both members of LiPS.
The push towards mobile Linux has in the past been criticised for being too fragmented, although many of the major players are adamant that the current arrangements will bear fruit in the near future.
ARM's organisation, which is as yet unnamed, is aiming to develop an open-source platform based on Linux, Gnome Mobile and Mozilla Firefox. It said the platform will enable mobile devices to run on ARM's partners' system-on-a-chip designs (SoCs).
"Today's consumers are very knowledgeable about technology, want to be connected to the Internet and access multimedia content and applications anywhere, at any time, yet they do not want to be restricted by short battery life and inadequate features that will limit their experiences," said Mike Inglis, ARM's executive vice president of sales and marketing.
"By stepping up the collaboration among key stakeholders in the mobile market, we will be able to jointly deliver the devices and applications with the cutting-edge innovation consumers have come to expect."
According to Jim McGregor, research director of enabling technologies at In-Stat, the market for ultramobile devices will be fuelled by new communications standards, content-rich data and new usage and business models.
"A critical component of success in this market will be building on industry standards that promote innovation in silicon, systems, and, most importantly, software solutions," he said. "Through open standards and growing industry support, Linux naturally promotes such innovation."
The platform resulting from the ARM collaboration is expected to appear in early 2008, with devices using the platform scheduled for release a year later. The platform will be "subject to open-source licensing terms", according to ARM.
In the beginning, antivirus software fought viruses and worms, and antispyware software fought spyware and adware. That clean distinction has largely disappeared. The decline of the macro virus and the e-mail worm sent antivirus companies looking for something else to fight, and the complexity of spyware makes it a formidable foe. (See "The Italian Job," for an example of how sneaky spyware can get.)
As we discussed in our recent antivirus roundup, "Virus Stoppers," several antivirus products are effective at fighting Trojan horses and backdoor programs--typically classified as spyware--as well as adware. So the question arises: Are specialized antispyware tools particularly effective at fighting today's threats?
The Contenders
To find out, we looked at six well-known programs. We tested five--Grisoft's AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5, Microsoft's Windows Defender 1.1, PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0, Safer Networking's Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4, and Webroot's Spy Sweeper 5.5--on Windows Vista systems.
The sixth program, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware 2007 Plus, wasn't available in a Vista version during our testing period, so we evaluated its performance on a Windows XP SP2 PC; for this reason, its results are not directly comparable with those for the other apps.
German research company AV-Test.org conducted the malware portion of our tests, bombarding the applications with samples of current adware and spyware. AV-Test.org gauged the products' ability to recognize about 110,000 inactive adware, spyware, and rootkit samples. An inactive sample is like an application you've downloaded and haven't yet installed. You'll want your antispyware product to recognize it--based on a match to a signature database of known threats--before the sample unpacks itself and activates in various areas of your PC.
To learn how the tools would react in such a case, AV-Test also measured each product's ability to recognize the behavior of and subsequently clean up 20 active pieces of adware and spyware. Since each threat can break down into more than 100 components, disinfection can be a tough job. We looked for the programs to clean up major file and Registry changes.
We also looked at the programs' behavior-based capabilities for detecting and blocking changes to key areas of an infected system without having to recognize anything about a specific invader. Spyware writers are continually releasing new threats, and security companies typically take some time to release signatures to catch those threats. An antispyware product's behavior-based detection protects the user during this critical window. We also tested for false positives and for speed; and we evaluated each software's design, price, and ease of use.
The Results
PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0 outperformed its Vista competitors. Grisoft's AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5 and Webroot's Spy Sweeper 5.5 finished some distance behind. Neither Spybot Search & Destroy nor Windows Defender adequately protects against today's threats. And on Windows XP, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, in several performance areas, did not impress us.
For comparative results of the five Vista programs, see our chart, "Best Vista Antispyware." And for further discussion of the results we obtained, see our video, also titled "Die, Spyware, Die!"
A Search Engine Friendly Website Is Important To Your Success On The Internet :
Getting your website listed in the search engines is very important, and this is far from an easy task. There are a lot of things that play factor into high ranking, and the more competitive the market is the harder it is.
No matter what a successful search engine campaign begins with the creation of your website, you must build a search engine friendly website. Just getting the search engines to crawl your site is one thing, but you want them to crawl it and then list it.
There are many companies that have very good success rates of getting companies listed in the search engine for some very competitive keywords. The thing that you need to do is a bit of research to find a company that is going to work hard for you. The design of your website for you small business is important for two main reasons, one is you want your site to be visible appealing to your visitors. First impressions are very important, and you only have a few seconds to capture their attention before they click off of your site. And the second reason is search engine optimization. This is one of the things that the search engine spider is looking at. They have certain requirements and if you don’t follow them then they will not put your website in their search engine, and they definitely will not give you a very high ranking. And without this it’s going to be very difficult for you to be successful on the internet. Unless of course you have a huge advertising budget, but not many small businesses have the type of budget that you will need.
SQL Maestro Group recently announced the release of SQL Maestro for MySQL 7.8, a Windows GUI solution for MySQL administration and database development.
New features include:
1. SQL Maestro for MySQL is optimized to work with MySQL servers with a small timeout.
2. Includes the ability to reorder columns for existing tables. It is also possible to reorder parameters for a stored procedure/function and reorder partitions (only for newly created tables).
3. It is now possible to cancel a long running query execution (MySQL 5) and data fetching (all MySQL versions).
4. The SQL Formatter for DML statements (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE) is implemented. It can be invoked through the Format SQL link on the SQL Editor's navigation bar (Ctrl+Alt+D shortcut). Also it is now used for view body formatting (MySQL stores such bodies as a single line)
5. Data grid: the editor for ENUM fields displays a lookup list with enumeration values.
Spears loses custody of sons L.A. Superior Court Judge Scott M. Gordon ruled that Britney Spears must surrender custody of her two children to their father, ex-husband Kevin Federline. Federline will take custody of Sean Preston, 2, and Jayden James, 1, on Wednesday (Oct. 3) ''until further order of the court.'' Gordon did not give a reason for his ruling, which follows an unspecified oral motion made by Federline's attorneys that was handled in a closed-door hearing. Another hearing is scheduled for Wednesday. Spears has recently been charged with hit-and-run and driving without a valid California license, and faces claims made by her ex-bodyguard that she used drugs and is a danger to her children. Gordon has already declared that Spears is a ''habitual, frequent, and continuous'' user of alcohol and controlled substances, and ordered her to submit to random twice-weekly testing.
Download videos from YouTube and Google directly. Unlike VideoDownloader it does not use a proxy page, and unoike unplug it does not create a layer over the current page. It simply try to get the absolute video path and prompt for download it.
YouTube, now owned by Google, may still be the 800-pound gorilla of video sharing sites, but an impressive number of rivals--some merely clones, others offering unique twists--are nipping at its heels.
We whittled down an initial list of 50 contending services to 17 topflight sites we tested to determine the single best place to share your videos online. Blip.tv's video quality and functionality made it our overall Best Bet, but each free service has strengths in areas that others may not.
Video quality and embedded player design remain the major points of comparison, so we put together a special evaluation page on our PC World.com Web site so that you can judge the video from each service for yourself, side-by-side. (Caution:Our comparison page features ten embedded videos and may tax your system's resources. In addition, you may be prompted to download certain video players if you don't already have them.)
For our rankings, we also took into account policies on shared advertising revenue, potential audience size, the entire upload experience, and the design of each embedded player, including the intrusiveness of any advertising, watermarks, and other nonvideo elements. In addition, we considered social-networking options, the ability to make videos private, and other attributes.
How We Tested
Each site that we tested--those in our top 10, plus AOL Uncut Video Beta, Crackle (previously Grouper), Dailymotion, Facebook, Google Video, Metacafe, and Yahoo Video--will let you upload a variety of video types, but the only format supported across the board is QuickTime. Most sites don't limit video length or the number of videos you can upload, but many restrict file sizes to 100MB. Consequently, we used the same 1-minute-long, 95.5MB QuickTime (MPEG-4) test file with Apple Lossless stereo audio to test each site.
To gauge video quality and audio, we incorporated shots from past PC World Videos and Test Center footage from the Panasonic PV-GS500, our current MiniDV Camcorder Best Buy, in our 720-by-480-resolution video.
The pace of everyday living may be hectic, but the pace of innovation is downright frenetic. Technologies barely imagined a few years ago are now poised to change the face of computing, as digital devices continue to burrow into every aspect of daily life.
The world of science fiction is rapidly becoming fact, from tabletops that charge your laptop wirelessly to wall-mounted PCs that recognize your face and gestures. Thanks to breakthroughs in miniaturization, you'll be able to tuck products into your pocket that wouldn't have fit into your briefcase a few years ago, such as projectors and photo printers. The next generation of Internet technology will change everything from TV to Coke machines. And standard computer building blocks are growing ever more powerful, as processor makers squeeze more cores onto each chip and drive makers pack more bits into each platter--guaranteeing that even ordinary PCs of the future will be anything but ordinary.
In the pages that follow, we spotlight a dozen major innovations, from ones right around the corner to a few that won't show up until at least 2012. On multiple fronts, the future you've been waiting for has almost arrived. Here's what you need to know to prepare for it.
Accounts on Google Inc.'s Gmail can be easily hacked, allowing any past -- and future e-mail messages -- to be forwarded to the attacker's own in-box, a vulnerability researcher said Tuesday.
According to Petkov, who declined to release details about the vulnerability, attackers can use Gmail's filtering feature to exploit the bug. An attack, he said, would start with a victim visiting a malicious Web site while also still logged into his Gmail account. The malicious site would then perform what Petkov called a "multipart/form-date POST" -- an HTML command that can be used to upload files -- to one of the Gmail application programming interfaces, then inject a rogue filter into the user's filter list.
Internet Explorer 7 is designed to make browsing safer. Here's a quick rundown of some of the new security features, including Active X opt-in, the Phishing Filter, cross-domain security, enhanced privacy protection, and an international character alert.
Some sensationalistic reports of a security flaw immediately followed Internet Explorer 7's final release, but the vulnerability turned out to be in Outlook Express rather than IE. In fact, Microsoft has put a great deal of effort into making IE7 more secure. Here are some of the new IE7 security features and what they can do for you.
1. Default protection from potentially dangerous Active X controls
Active X controls that haven't been checked out and verified as safe no longer run automatically by default; instead they're automatically disabled by the Active X opt-in feature.
2. Per-zone control of Active X opt-in
You can disable Active X opt-in on a per-zone basis. It's enabled by default on the Internet and restricted sites zones for better security and disabled on the intranet and trusted sites zones.
3. Site and zone locking for Active X controls
Developers can now make their Active X controls more secure by restricting a control to run only on a particular site (site locking) or only in a specific security zone (zone locking).
4. Protection against phishing
IE7 introduces the Phishing Filter, which helps protect users from being fooled into entering personal information or passwords that can be collected and used for identity theft. The Phishing Filter automatically checks the Web sites you visit against a list of known phishing sites and issues a warning if the site has been identified as a phishing site. If you prefer not to have sites checked automatically, you can check specific sites when you suspect they might be phishing sites.
5. Cross-domain security
A tactic called cross-domain scripting is prevented by new IE7 security mechanisms that force scripts to run in their original security context even if they're redirected to a different security domain.
6. Locked down security zones
Security zones in IE7 are locked down tighter than before, with higher default security settings, disabling of the intranet zone on non-domain computers, and an interface that makes it harder to select low or medium low security.
7. Better SSL/TLS notification and digital certificate info
Users of IE7 can more easily determine whether a Web site is secured by SSL/TLS and get information on the digital certificates issued to the site. Sites with high assurance certificates cause the address bar to turn green.
8. Privacy protection features
Three new registry keys, called feature control keys, prevent HTML from getting a user's personal information. In addition, you can easily clear out information you've entered in Web pages, as well as the browser cache (temporary internet files), history, cookies and other personal info, with a single click.
9. Address bars
All browser windows in IE7 contain address bars, so it's harder for a malicious site to conceal its identity by hiding the URL of the site.
10. International character alert
IE7 supports international characters, but to prevent spoofing that exploits the similarity of characters in different languages, the browser warns you that the characters are in another language when international character sets are used.
I'm sure it's a little scary being James Blunt. After all, his trajectory from ubiquitous chart topper to universally loathed singer-boy seemed to happen in a matter of weeks, and as Billboard points out in its review of his brand-new single "1973" (which is streaming now at AOL Music) he's already at serious risk of being dubbed a one-hit wonder (there in the U.S. anyway). The question is, does he deserve to be slapped with the dreaded label?
Based on "1973," I'm gonna have to say, "Most definitely." Granted, there's a strong chance I'm still suffering from a case of post-"You're Beautiful" Stress Disorder (PYBSD), but hearing Blunt's slippery mewl on this mid-tempo track makes me want to snap my ears off. Maybe it's the way he rhymes the name Simona with older ("old-ah"), sober ("sob-ah"), and over ("ov-ah"). Or is he actually saying "Simona" at all? Maybe he's actually singing to a woman named "Simone," but adding an "ah" sound to the end of her name in a bit of whimsical songwriting license. Or maybe her name is simply Mona, but he's adding the "ssaa" sound to the beginning of her name as an homage to Michael Jackson's "sha-mon" from "Bad"? I don't know. I'm just trying really hard to avoid focusing on the way Blunt keeps turning "seventy" into a two-syllable word ("Sev'n-ty). Also: This guy was wearing diapers in 1973. So how is it he and Mona/Simona/Simone will always be in a club in that very year? The more I think about it, the angrier I get. How 'bout you?
Firefox: 1.5 – 2.0.0.* 
