Facebook has planned to "launch something awesome" this week.

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has told reporters that his company has planned to "launch something awesome" this week.
Speculation on the announcement has included; a Facebook app for the iPad, a new photo sharing feature and even the rumour of a new tablet or smartphone.
However, a Facebook spokesman has refused to comment further on the details.
Facebook is the world's largest internet social networking site with over 500 million users.

Indestructible botnet infects 4.5 million PC's.

Researcher Sergey Golovanov has warned that a botnet named TDL-4, but also known as TDSS and Alureon, is "the most sophisticated threat today".

A botnet is a network of home computers that have been infected by a virus that allows a hi-tech criminal to use them remotely. Often botnet controllers steal data from victims' PCs or use the machines to send out spam or carry out other attacks.

TDL-4 is thought to have infected 4.5 million PC's, 5% of which are in the UK.

On the Kaspersky site, Golonav wrote; "The owners of TDL are essentially trying to create an ‘indestructible’ botnet that is protected against attacks, competitors, and antivirus companies."

One reason the botnet is so difficult to take down is the communications between the infected computers and the command and control centre are encrypted, and can also be controlled via P2P in case the control servers are knocked offline.

Story Source: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/368377/indestructible-botnet-wipes-out-other-malware

Nokia unveil N9 smartphone.

Nokia has unveiled its new N9 smartphone from the Nokia Connection press release in Singapore.The MeeGo device features a 3.9inch AMOLED Gorilla Glass screen, 8MP wide angle camera with dual LED flash and either 16GB or 64GB storage.

“With the Nokia N9, we wanted to design a better way to use a phone. To do this we innovated in the design of the hardware and software together. We reinvented the home key with a simple gesture: a swipe from the edge of the screen. The experience sets a new bar for how natural technology can feel,” said Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s head of Design in the press release. “And this is just the beginning. The details that make the Nokia N9 unique – the industrial design, the all-screen user experience, and the expressive Qt framework for developers – will evolve in future Nokia products.”

Check the N9 out at http://swipe.nokia.com/

Microsoft to retire Office XP, Vista SP1.

Microsoft will retire 2001's Office XP and the first service pack for Windows Vista next week, according to the company's published schedule.

Both Office XP and Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) will exit all support July 12, this month's Patch Tuesday. That date will be the last time Microsoft issues security updates for the aging suite and Vista SP1.

Microsoft supports its business products for 10 years, the first five in what it calls "mainstream support," and the second five in "extended support." The biggest difference between the two phases is that in the latter, non-security fixes are provided only to companies that have paid for special support contracts.

Microsoft generally patches security vulnerabilities in its products throughout the entire 10-year stretch.

Although Office XP's support expires next week, Vista users can continue to receive security updates by upgrading to SP2, the service pack Microsoft launched in May 2009.

Users can install Vista SP2 through Windows Update, or by manually downloading the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the service pack.

The consumer editions of Vista SP2 -- Vista Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate -- exit support in April 2012, while the corporate versions of Vista Business and Vista Enterprise will be supported with security patches through mid-April 2017.

Microsoft supports Windows' consumer versions for only five years, but maintains the enterprise editions for 10 years.

Users can continue to run out-of-support software: There is no "kill switch" that gets thrown to disable or cripple the programs. Without security fixes, however, such software will be increasingly vulnerable to attacks.

Office 2003, the follow-up to Office XP, will receive security updates until April 2014. Office 2007 and Office 2010 will get patches until April 2017 and October 2020, respectively.

Office XP and Vista SP1 were last patched three weeks ago when Microsoft issued 16 security updates that fixed 34 flaws.

Install OS X Snow Leopard in VMware Windows OS.

The following step by step guide will help you in installing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as a guest virtual machine in Windows 7. You’ll need to have a system with an Intel processor which supports hardware virtualization, original OS X Snow Leopard retail disk, VMwareWorkstation 7 and Windows 7, Vista or XP installed as host operating system. If you meet all these requirements, you can then install OS X Snow Leopard as a VM under Windows and can enjoy the best of both worlds.

Note: We don’t in anyway encourage downloading Apple software via file-sharing / torrent sites and run it in an virtualized environment under Windows. This guide is for informational purposes only. If you like OS X Snow Leopard, Get a Mac.

Step 1: Download and install VMware Workstation 7.

Step 2: Download pre-made modified version of Snow Leopard.vmdk and darwin_snow.iso files required to get this thing to work.

Step 3: Start VMware Workstation and open up “Mac OS X Server 10.6 (experimental).vmx” file which you downloaded in Step 2.

Step 4: Click on”Edit virtual machine settings”, select CD/DVD (IDE) option from left hand side and then and select “Use ISO image file” option. Point it to “darwin_snow.iso” which you downloaded in Step 2.

Step 5: Now power on the virtual machine and hit “F8” key. You should now have a screen similar to the one shown below.

Step 6: Now you’ll have to point your virtual machine to OS X Snow Leopard retail DVD instead of “darwin_snow.iso”. To do this, right click on CD/DVD option found in lower right most corner of your VMware window and select settings.

Insert OS X Snow Leopard retail DVD in your DVD drive and select the “Use physical drive” option.

Step 7: Now go back and select “c” option (Boot DVD) from the prompt which you got in Step 5 to boot from the OS X retail DVD. OS X boot screen with Apple logo should now appear. If the boot screen doesn’t appear for you, try booting it in verbose mode by pressing “F8” key after selecting “c” option, and then enter “-v” (without quotes). This will enable the system to boot OS X DVD using verbose mode.

Step 8: Wait for a couple of minutes for the Installation Setup screen to show up. From here on, simply follow the onscreen setup instructions to install OS X Snow Leopard. Make sure you format your virtual hard drive in “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” format using Disk Utility. Customize your installation with minimum set of printer drivers and language options for a lightweight trouble free installation experience.

Step 9: Once the installation is completed. System will automatically reboot. At this point, close your guest virtual machine and change your CD/DVD option again like you did in Step 2 to point it to “darwin_snow.iso”.

Step 10: Start the virtual machine again. Press “F8” key and select “h” option to “Boot first hard disk”. Voila! Snow Leopard should now be running live under Windows 7! [via vipititps]

Feel free to ask me any question should you run into any problem in getting Snow Leopard VM to work under Windows 7.

If you liked this, then you may also like to check out:
How to Install Chrome OS in Windows 7

Free Facebook Mobile Access with 0.facebook.com on Reliance GSM.

Facebook, the largest social networking portal has rolled out a new mobile site “0.facebook.com” along with around 50 mobile operators in 45 countries and territories with zero data charges.

This new offering has been optimized to deliver a speedier user interface for people who access Facebook via their mobile on the go across the globe. Facebook’s 0.facebook.com is simply a faster and lighter version of Facebook’s mobile site m.facebook.com. The 0.facebook.com has been composed of all of the key features of Facebook, with no graphics or photos in order to make it faster.

To bring this new service for the Indian users, Facebook has tied up with one of the leading mobile service providers in India, Reliance Communications (RCOM). With this status updates and photo uploads on Facebook are only one click away from 0.facebook.com for Reliance users.

The service is being made available as a zero data charges in order to relieve the users from the hassles of cost of data plans. Yet, standard data charges will apply when a person leaves 0.facebook.com to view photos.

“Facebook is a great social utility connecting people with their close network of friends and others. Indians have already embraced Facebook in a big way to keep up with friends, share photos and links and videos. We’re extremely delighted to announce that thanks to our collaboration with Facebook, millions of our subscribers will now be able to access Facebook for free through 0.facebook.com. We are happy to announce this offer to all of our GSM/RTL subscribers,” said Mr. Anil Pande, Head – VAS, Reliance Communications.

Besides RCOM, Videocon is the other mobile operator in the country which would be providing the service of 0.facebook.com (according to the data on Facebook’s official page).

Do note that though browsing 0.facebook.com from any Reliance Mobile service enabled handsets is free, you will be charged with data charges if you leave that link. For instance, if you happen to be on 0.facebook.com and click on the photos recently posted by your friend, then you'll be charged standard data charges for viewing those photos outside the 0.facebook.com link.

The mobile only version – 0.facebook.com – will be currently available for two operators in India, Reliance & Videocon and Tata Docomo will soon join the ranks as well.

The Google+ Project Real-life sharing, rethought for the web.

Users have discovered a loophole in Google+, Google’s newest endeavor in the social networking space. This new loophole involving the network’s "reshare" feature might lead some private posts to accidentally end in the public domain.

Those who’ve tried Google+, or read out write-up, should be aware of the +Circles feature, which allows friends to be organized into different groups and have different information, such as status updates, assigned to each group. While that feature works surprisingly well, there’s a rather interesting loophole. Using the "reshare" option on posts, similar to "retweet" on Twitter, users can broadcast other people’s private posts, intentionally or otherwise, to all their friends. This could can cause private posts to end up in the public domain without the poster’s consent. Even worse, this loophole doesn’t only apply to status updates but to any content shared by users, including photos and videos, and since there’s no way to disable posts from being reshared, users can’t really control whether their content falls on the wrong hands.

Google has acknowledged this problem and insisted that Google+ is still in an early testing phase, with a very limited number of users. Going forward, it would be a sensible move to implement tighter privacy controls, similar to Facebook’s privacy settings, in order to prevent these accidents from happen. Google+’s simplicity, one of the products main selling points, doesn’t need to be hindered by more granular privacy controls if they’re implemented correctly.

Until then, just make sure you follow the most basic online privacy rule: if you don’t want most people to know what you’re posting, you should think twice about getting it out there. The Internet might not be the best place to share private data after all.

Google+ is Google’s new attempt to be successful in the social networking space, after the failure of Buzz and Wave before it. Although not everything about the product is innovative, Google+ does a great job at taking many features from different social networks and making them work better. The product is marketed as a friendly social network that simulates real-life social interactions, with features such as +Hangouts: dynamic multi-person video conversations any authorized user can join at any time, just to have someone else to talk to.