17, October, 2010 - Software News

Welcome to the social: Bing uses Facebook friends to power search

During a live event at Microsoft's headquarters today, Bing and Facebook announced that Facebook's social data is being added to Bing. In an optional Facebook module, Bing now shows what has been "Liked" by your friends and offers Facebook-powered people search results on Bing's search results page. These new social search features, available only when an individual is logged into Facebook while searching on Bing, will begin rolling out to users today, with full availability in the coming months. Read More ...

Microsoft buying Adobe would fix both companies' Apple problem

The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has recently been at a secret meeting with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen to discuss topics including the two companies' mutual competitor, Apple.
The Times says that the companies were investigating ways to partner in order to do battle with Apple. One option was for Microsoft to acquire Adobe, a claim that has seen Adobe's stock price surge by more than 10 percent. Read More ...

October 2010 Patch Tuesday will come with most bulletins ever

According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue 16 Security Bulletins addressing 49 vulnerabilities on Tuesday, October 12. It will also host a webcast to address customer questions the following day.
Four of the vulnerabilities are rated "Critical," 10 are marked "Important," and the last two are classified as "Moderate." All of the Critical vulnerabilities earned their rating through a remote code execution impact, meaning a hacker could potentially gain control of an infected machine. At least eight of the 16 patches will require a restart. Read More ...

Microsoft sues Motorola, citing Android patent infringement

Microsoft has announced a lawsuit against Motorola, alleging that several of the mobile company's Android devices infringe on nine of its patents. The software giant is suing in US District Court in Washington, and is also bringing a complaint before the International Trade Commission (ITC). The patents are all related to key smartphone experiences that include syncing e-mails, calendars, and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications about changes in signal strength and battery power. Microsoft specifically names two Motorola devices, the Droid 2 and the Charm, but says these are just examples and not a comprehensive list.
The suit comes just as Microsoft readies the release of its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, the successor to Windows Mobile. Motorola was once a big backer of Windows Mobile, but in recent years it has shifted to Google's Android. Although manufacturers can use Android for free, Microsoft argues that phone makers should consider the potential patent infringement issues and the related costs of the mobile OS.

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IE9 beta not enough to keep IE market share over 60% mark

2010 will be remembered as the year when Chrome took off despite Microsoft's attempts to hold on to its shrinking browser market share. It looks like Internet Explorer's two months of market share gains were an aberration. Other trends are continuing as before: Firefox is steady between 20 and 25 percent share, Chrome is steadily moving forward, and Safari trudges onward. Opera, meanwhile, is still hanging on to the leftover scraps. Everyone but Microsoft saw at least a modest market share gain in September. Read More ...

Crackdown on Zeus Trojan crime ring in progress, 60 charged

Law enforcement agencies say that over 60 people have been charged with trying to siphon millions of dollars out of banks by using the Zeus Trojan program. Police made about 11 of the arrests in New York City, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York City police department.
It also appears that these busts are related to a crackdown in London yesterday in which 19 people were accused of being part of a cybercrime ring that stole about £6 million from UK banks.
The Zeus Trojan is a sneaky little sucker. It's designed to trick users into downloading the program via various phishing scams. Then Zeus goes into keystroke logging mode, tracking your bank and credit account data as you type away on your computer.
The application can also be designed to make individual installations vary, so that it's harder for antivirus software to track down. Plus kos, or "kill operating system" code can be written into the Zeus program. This extra feature doesn't wipe out user data, but it does make it difficult to reboot the system.
The Department of Justice and Manhattan District Attorney say they'll disclose more details about the case today. The UK banks involved include the Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC holdings.


Unity 3 brings very expensive dev tools at a very low price

Indie game development tool Unity got a big update today with version 3. Unity is well known for its use in mobile Web and 3D mobile game development, but this new release brings some desktop and console graphics features usually only seen in more expensive high-end development packages like UDK.
Unity 3 brings deferred rendering (allowing for many real-time lights with little added rendering overhead), a built-in tree editor, native font rendering, automatic UV mapping, audio filters, occlusion culling for desktop OSes and, most notably, integration of Illuminate Labs' Beast Lightmap tool. Beast has been used extensively in games like Mirror's Edge and Killzone 2 to create efficient, high-quality 32-bit floating point shadow maps.

Unity 3 also adds Android support, although it's still undergoing polishing. Unity remains free for commercial use for Web and desktop game development and Unity Pro remains $1,500 per seat.
It has been a good month for the people at Unity. Apple recently loosened restrictions on the use of cross-compilers for iOS development, which was aimed at Flash, but also caught a lot of fish like mono-based Unity in the net. Then Unity won The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Award for software. The year looks good for Unity users as well—the company plans a free upgrade to version 3 that integrates Allegorithmic's Substance, a powerful procedural texture generation tool. If you're an existing Unity user, it's hard to find a reason not to upgrade.

Home WiFi Network Security Failings Exposed

"The shocking state of home wireless (Wi-Fi) network security in the UK has been revealed by a life assistance company study. CPP used an 'ethical hacker,' Jason Hart, to test thousands of Wi-Fi networks across six UK cities, including London. He found that many didn't even have a password and roughly half of home UK Wi-Fi networks could be hacked in less than 5 seconds."

Erasing Objects From Video In Real Time 

Smoothly interpolating away objects in still pictures is impressive enough, but reader geoffbrecker writes with a stunning demonstration from Germany's Technical University of Ilmenau of on-the-fly erasure of selected objects in video. Quoting: "The effect is achieved by an image synthesizer that reduces the image quality, removes the object, and then increases the image quality back up. This all happens within 40 milliseconds, fast enough that the viewer doesn't notice any delay."