Android Music Store coming soon!

All gloves are off between Google and Apple, after the search giant unveiled a host of products to compete with the Cupertino company. Following Google TV and Flash on Android, Google will also take on Apple’s iTunes through the acquisition of music streaming service Simplify Media, and a music store in the Android Market.

Google’s engineering Vice President Vic Gundotra announced at the Google I/O conference on Thursday that it will begin offering a desktop app based on technology acquired from Simplify Media about two months ago. Simplify’s software lets users stream music from their iTunes libraries from their home computers to other mobile devices, through the Internet.

Google said it will use this software to allow Android users to stream their desktops at home to their phones, via a dedicated service. Simplify Media’s software runs on Windows and Mac computers, and works not only with iTunes (non-DRM songs), but also with WinAmp and Windows Media Player.

Despite multiple operating systems supported for desktops, it seems Simplify’s mobile software will be exclusive to Android, as the company retracted its iPhone and iPod touch apps from the Apple App Store when Google acquired it.

Gundotra also briefly showed off what it would become the Android Market music store, as TechChrunch’s MG Siegler points out. Basically, Google would let users search for songs in the Android Market Music section, and download them on to their phones.

This so-called Music section in the Android Market is practically like the iTunes Store on the iPhone, but built into the App Store app. Of course, due to different naming conventions between Apple and Google’s mobile OSs, Google is able to integrate music straight into its app store, without having to promote a different app to users. However, there are no other details on partners or prices for songs sold through the Android Market so far.

Since Google Chrome’s release in September of 2008, Mac and Linux users have been playing catchup with Windows users for features and stable releases. As of Today, all three versions of Chrome are now officially stable as the Mac and Linux versions have shed their beta labels for a faster version of Chrome with new features. According to the official Google Chrome blog, the new universally stable release also includes a handful of new HTML5 and syncing features.

Previously only bookmarks could be synced across various machines, but with this latest release, users will now be able to port their preferences – including zoom defaults, themes and homepage settings – to the various computers they browse from. By associating browser settings with a Google account, users can quickly sync the settings on their various installations of Chrome.

Additionally, this newest version of Chrome now supports some fancy new HTML5 features, including geolocation APIs, and drag-and-drop functionality. Beta release testers of Chrome may have already spotted the ability to use Google Maps’ location functions, as well as drag-and-drop of attachments from within Gmail.

Chrome Benchmark Results

According to Google, today’s release of Chrome is the fastest ever, improving “by 213 percent and 305 percent in Javascript performance by the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks” since its initial beta release. Google is also working with Adobe to fully integrate Flash into the browser with new plug-in APIs, but this will not be available until the next full release of Flash Player in the near future.

Google TV Annoucement at Google I/O

Today at Google I/O, the company made the announcement that everyone was waiting for — Google TV. While some glitches in the demo (with the Bluetooth keyboard) prevented it from being a “wow” moment, the implications are pretty clear what Google is going for. That is, the 4 billion TV users worldwide. Or rather, advertising to the 4 billion TV users worldwide.

Google noted that while computer usage is huge with 1 billion users, and mobile is even bigger with 2 billion users, TV is the real massive medium with 4 billion users around the world. Further, Google notes that people spend 5 hours a day on average in the U.S. watching TV — and that’s more than ever before. Then the real stat came out. 70 billion dollars. that’s the annual ad spend on television in U.S. alone.

Video should be consumed on the biggest, best, and brightest screen in your house, Google says. And while they’re not the first to attempt this, Google thinks they can get it right. There are four things they’re focusing on:

• With Google TV, you’ll spend less time finding, more time watching
• We’ll also show you more ways to personalize content
• We’ll make existing TV much more interesting
• This is much more than a TV

“TV meets web. Web meets TV” is the slogan Google is going with for this new endeavor. It will work as a new box — you’ll just hook up your existing cable or satellite box to it. All the hardware will include a keyboard and a mouse — but it will work with Android phones too. And you can use multiple Android devices to control the same TV — no more fighting over the remote.

You can also use the Android devices to speak to your TV — voice search on the TV.

Google TV is built on Android (2.1 right now, but they’ll upgrade it later). It runs Google Chrome for the browser. And yes, it has Flash (10.1).

Also cool, since Google TV is Android-powered, Android apps will work on the TV. With the device, there will be two app frameworks: web apps and Android apps. A new SDK for the Google TV is coming as well. And YouTube has a new product they’re launching for Google TV: YouTube Leanback — this is an optimized way to use YouTube on a big screen.

Google is working together with Sony and Logitech to bring Google TV to televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes, and you should expect to see it in Best Buy stores by next fall.

You can also Click HERE for the official announcement via the Google blog!

Removable drives are one of the most common infection vectors for malware today. Worms propagate via these vectors to proliferate their payload and ultimately, infect more users. Users need to perform some countermeasures to secure their systems. One way of doing this is to protect removable drives against worms using the Autorun feature.

One popular way of protecting removable drives is by creating a folder or file and renaming it as AUTORUN.INF. It could enable the malware to automatically run on the system even without the users executing it. By creating this file beforehand, ideally, worms would not be able to run in this way.

However, this method is not perfect. Worms can delete the existing AUTORUN.INF file or folder, and then replace it with a malicious version. This would negate any protection placed by the user on the said file. However, by using file permissions to restrict changes, the AUTORUN.INF file can be protected more effectively.

Note: Make sure that your external drive is formatted using NTFS, as this procedure uses a specific feature of NTFS. If your removable drive is formatted using either FAT or FAT32, back up any data on the said drive first and reformat using NTFS. This may require Windows Vista or Windows 7.

• Create a new folder in the root directory of the removable disk and rename it as “AUTORUN.INF.”
• Create four more folders in the same location and named it as “recycle,” “recycler,” “recycled,” and “setup” respectively.
• Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and go to the root directory of your removable drive.
• Set the folder attributes using the following DOS command: attrib autorun.inf /s /d –a +s +r

• Set the privilege level of the folder using the following DOS command: cacls autorun.inf /c /d administrators

• Select ‘Y’ and press enter when the message, “Are you sure (Y/N)?” is prompted.
  
• To test it, try to delete, modify, rename, copy, or open the created folder. If you cannot perform any of these functions, then the procedure is successful.

In addition to the above procedure, users may also choose to use hardware means of protection. Certain removable drives have an external switch that prevents the device from being written to. This would prevent malware from making any modifications to the drive, including the AUTORUN.INF file. However, as this may prove to be somewhat inconvenient, it is still a good idea to use the procedure shown above.

So this morning I woke up not really able to sleep and was looking around on the internet for something to do. I just so happened to stumble across a little 2D Flash game which was in a way DOOM! Being a oldschool DOOM fan I thought the best thing to do would be to test it out and see what its made of and if it is worthy of having the DOOM name attached to it.

I was pretty impressed that it was able to load up the entire game in about 15 seconds and was able to start playing. It even let me pick my difficulty and had a large portion of the music from the game (everything from the sounds to the level music playing).

The game itself looked and felt a lot better than I was expecting when I entered the first level. While I was only able to go to the left or right (and jump of course), the details and he models of the guns, bad guys, and myself were so crisp it felt like they had been taken right out of the original game and stuck into what I was playing.

I would also like to mention that while the little levels didn’t look like they were similar to the original game (I don’t really see how they could be in 2D)… I was very pleased at how your objective was the almost the exact same. You simply need to get to the exit button killing anything that gets in your way and if you are lucky stumbling across a secret or two in the process.

Even though this post won’t be as long as they usually are, being a big DOOM fan I just couldn’t resist taking some time out of my morning to talk about this nifty little game I just so happen to find. I am sure some of you are wondering where you can try out this as well so fear not… I do have the link for you to go play it! If you wanna try it out for yourself, just make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed and CLICK HERE to go enjoy this little game.

A new attack that peppers Google search results with malicious links is spreading quickly, the U.S. Computer Emergence Response Team warned on Monday. The attack, which has intensified in recent days, can be found on several thousand legitimate Web sites, according to security experts. It targets known flaws in Adobe’s software and uses them to install a malicious program on victims’ machines, according to CERT.

The program then steals FTP login credentials from victims and uses that information to spread further. It also hijacks the victim’s browser, replacing Google search results with links chosen by the attackers. Security experts started tracking the attack in March, when it had infected several hundred Web sites, but in recent weeks the number of infected sites has jumped dramatically. The attack has been called Gumblar because at one point it used the Gumblar.cn domain, though on Monday it had switched to a different one.

Security vendor ScanSafe has counted more than 3,000 infected Web sites, up from around 800 just over a week ago. That kind of continued growth is unusual, according to senior security researchers with ScanSafe. Attackers have launched many widespread Web attacks over the past few years, but after a few months the total number of infected sites usually drops as Webmasters clean up their servers.

With Gumblar, more and more sites are now being infected. It is believed that it’s because Gumblar’s creators have been good at obfuscating their attack code and making it harder to spot on infected sites. And because they’ve been stealing FTP login credentials, they’ve been able to use a few new tricks to get their software onto the sites. They’re doing things like changing folder permissions … and leaving behind multiple ways that they can get back into the server which can make it difficult to clean up.

Still, Web attacks have become so widespread that Gumblar remains a relatively small-scale phenomenon, according to Symantec Security Response Product Manager John Harrison. Last year, Symantec counted 18 million online attacks against its customers. With Gumblar, it has counted 10,000. “It’s really just another day with drive-by downloads,” he said. “There really are so many of these.” Security experts say that if you’re using a fully-patched system with up-to-date security software, you should be protected from these attacks. To date, they’ve worked by hitting the victim with malicious PDF or Flash files.

For the icing on the cake today at work while I was working on cleaning up a pretty severe malware infection, I came across this infection on the system (which was easy caught and cleaned by a couple of my scanning tools) just hours after first reading about it. This itself was enough to make me put together this article to try and let everyone know!

When you stick a thumb drive infected with a worm like Conficker/Downadup into a clean system, the normally handy AutoPlay feature launches the worm and spreads the infection. So, what are you waiting for? Turn off AutoPlay! Panda Security offers a free “vaccine” program that will turn it off. But you can actually flip the master switch without any utilities. Here’s how:

On non-Home versions of Windows (for example, Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate): 

1. Click Start, click Run, enter gpedit.msc (launch Group Policy Editor); 
2. XP users: Open Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | System, 
Vista users: Open Computer Configuration | Windows Components | AutoPlay Policies; 
3. Find Turn Off AutoPlay in the right-hand pane and double-click it; 
4. Choose Enabled and set it for All drives.

Or, in any Windows version:

1. Launch the Registry editor (Start | Run | regedit); 
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ 
CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer; 
3. Double-click NoDriveTypeAutoRun in the right-hand pane and set its value to hexadecimal FF.

Good Luck and be sure to try this out if you browse the internet a good bit and also use your flash drive with your computer and others! If you have any questions or comments on how to do this feel free to leave a comment and I will be glad to help any way I can in getting you all setup!

Last month, Kanguru Solutions announced the first USB flash drive that also offers External Serial ATA (eSATA) connectivity. This month, OCZ Technology Inc. also announced an eSATA-enabled flash drive with up to 32GB capacity, as did Advanced Media Inc.’s Ridata-brand.

So it seems this is a trend. The question is, why? Kanguru’s answer is that you can have blazing fast data transfer on your home system, then pocket the device and plug it in anywhere using the USB port. Kanguru’s eFlash drive, with its eSATA 3Gbit/sec. throughput, potentially offers five to six times the speed of USB 2.0, which is 480Mbit/sec. The key word here is, potentially.

Dave Bresnick, senior product manager of the Kanguru e-Flash drive, said the drive would realistically offer read speeds of 75MB/sec. compared to USB 2.0′s 30MB/sec. and write speeds of 25MB/sec., up from USB’s 20MB/sec. He wasn’t kidding. Kanguru’s e-Flash drive comes in a 16GB version for $84.95, with the 32GB model selling for $119.95; It’s really not very expensive considering the capacity. The company expects to release a 64GB model in the next three months.

Kanguru’s eSATA flash drive is a nice shape and size, about the same dimensions as a pack of gum, but only half as thick. It also has a sleek black finish. One cool feature is that when transferring data to or from the drive, the eSATA connector emits a red band of light and the USB side glows blue.

The one thing that immediately turned some off about the drive was the end caps covering the eSATA and USB connectors. They found them flimsy, and the eSATA cap has a lanyard protruding through it, which I guess keeps you from losing one of the caps, but also makes it somewhat awkward when trying to plug it into the laptop. Kanguru, however, assured everyone that they are correcting that “design flaw” and will be removing the lanyard from the cap and body and reinforcing the cap as well.

One test of the drive involved transferring a big, ugly 4GB folder consisting of 1,653 files with 85 JPEG photos and a dozen short videos. The data transfer using the eSATA port took 10 minutes, 4 seconds; using the USB port, it took exactly 15 minutes. So with new stuff starting to hit the market like this, all the geeks out there should be getting pretty excited with the possibilities this is going to open up for everyone!