Orbit Downloader Contains DDoS Malware, Report Finds

First launched in 2006, Orbit Downloader is a popular file downloading software that can integrate with nearly every popular web browser and speed up download of files over the Internet. With features like clipboard monitoring, peer-to-peer transfer to increase speed, and URL sniffing that enabled download of embedded videos from streaming websites made it one of the most successful download managers. Now a new research by security firm and anti-virus product manufacturer ESET has revealed that the program includes code designed to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on other machines.




The discovery came to light during a routine examination of the Orbit Downloader software package by the security firm. Apparently, when the main Orbit Downloader executable is run, it communicates with the orbitdownloader.com site, silently downloading a DLL file and a configuration file containing a list of targets to attack and a randomly-generated IP address for each.
The program then conducts either a SYN flood attack or a wave of HTTP connection requests on port 80 (the HTTP port) and UDP datagrams on port 53 (DNS). The IP address that accompanied the URL in the config file is used as the source address for the attack.
On a test computer set up in their lab with a gigabit Ethernet port, HTTP connection requests were sent at a rate of about 140,000 packets per second, with falsified source addresses largely appearing to come from IP ranges allocated to Vietnam. These blocks of IP addresses were hardcoded into the DLL file.
At this point, nobody is sure who is to blame for its possible that the servers of Orbit Downloader were compromised unbeknown to them, although its apparent that the author has gone to some lengths to hide the malware, as explained by ESET:

The first step is that files are encoded in base64, an encoding scheme most often used to send binary files as file attachments.  After decoding, the data is then XORed with a fixed 32-character string.  That 32-character string is actually the MD5 hash of a 9-character password that is hardcoded into the DLL file.  After this operation, each pair of consecutive bytes are XORed together to generate a single byte of plaintext.
While each download of the encrypted data from the server varies, the actual content, once converted to plaintext, has remained constant for considerably longer periods of time.

The additional malware code appears to be added sometime between the release of version 4.1.1.14 (December 25, 2012) and version 4.1.1.15 (January 10, 2013).
Following this news, many file download sites including BetaNews, Softpedia, Softonic and MajorGeeks have all removed Orbit Downloader from their sites. If you are using this program, you should uninstall it too.

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RSS Feed Reader ‘The Old Reader’ Closes its Doors

When Google Reader closed shop, a bunch of alternatives popped up over the next few months. A few of them that existed before Google decided to terminate the service, welcomed the decision and worked hard to pick up the slack. Feedly gained the most with 8 million new users signing up for the service, as of June 2013, while another smaller startup - The Old Reader – reportedly added 350,000 new users following the shutdown announcement. Unfortunately, the sudden and unexpected influx of Google Reader refugees was too much for the modest servers of ‘The Old Reader’ to handle, as the team behind the simple RSS reader struggled to balance their work and personal life. In the end, they had to make a decision.

Today, the team announced in a blog post, that they are giving up development on the product because they're simply exhausted from building it. The web app will no longer accept new users, and in two weeks, The Old Reader will turn into a private site for those who've registered before March 13th. If you're an Old Reader user who signed up after March 13th, you will need to download your data and move to another product.

“We’d rather provide a smooth and awesome experience for 10,000 users than a crappy one for 420,000,” wrote Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov, the site’s operators.

“The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all. The “life” variable was out of equation: you can limit hours, make up rules on time management, but this isn’t going to work if you’re running a project for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me tell you why: it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that. We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday. Talk about “laid back” attitude now. And I won’t even start describing enormous sentimental attachment to The Old Reader that we have.”

“We have been sleep deprived for 10 days and this impacts us way too much,” they wrote.

“That’s why The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.”

The sad demise of The Old Reader is a lesson for all – both startup developers and users. If you can’t scale well to an increasing user base, your product is a failure, which is what happened to The Old Reader. For users, it’s time to reassess the services they are relying on. Is the service profitable to the operators? Is it run by a small team or backed by corporations or huge donations from capitalists? Will the service exist 3 years from now? Two years? One year?

Where to Go: Forget the run-of-the-mill RSS feeds readers that have been popping all over the web, and stick to reliable ones. Currently, there are only three RSS readers that can be called trustworthy. They are Feedly, Digg Reader and AOL Reader.

Among these three, I like AOL Reader the best – it has good features, has a nice polished interface and doesn’t look like a beta product. Digg Reader is trying hard to be a good one, but somehow its failing to impress me. Feedly has a certain attraction and is currently the only one that provides an API so that other feed readers can build apps based on the service. It is already the most popular RSS reader app.

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Request Your Yahoo Username Now

Last month Yahoo announced that they will reset accounts that were inactive for more than a year, so that they could free up usernames for new users to pick up. The company has started the ball rolling. Last Monday, all dormant Yahoo accounts were reset. Immediately after, the company opened up a wish list allowing users to request username they’d like to own, before actually letting people get hold of these names. Users can request up to 5 usernames, in order of preference. If the first choice isn’t available, Yahoo will try one of the backups. Then in mid-August, users who filled the wish list will get an email letting them know which of their picks is available, with a link to claim it within 48 hours.

Request your Yahoo username here.

You may remember, when the decision to reset accounts and make registered usernames once again available to the public was announced, I expressed concern over the issue of privacy and security. Yahoo attempts to minimize the damage by providing a way for e-commerce and social networking sites to identify whether the user is the new owner of a Yahoo username, or the previous owner.
Yahoo seeks to do this by allowing sites to “ask” for a new type of validation when sending an email to a specific Yahoo! user. The field, which can be requested via an email’s header is called “Require-Recipient-Valid-Since.”

If a Facebook user with a Yahoo! email account submits a request to reset their password, Facebook would add the Require-Recipient-Valid-Since header to the reset email, and the new header would signal to Yahoo! to check the age of the account before delivering the mail. Facebook users typically confirm their email when they sign up for the service or add new emails to their account, and if the “last confirmed” date that Facebook specifies in the Require-Recipient-Valid-Since header is before the date of the new Yahoo! username ownership, then the email will not be delivered and will instead bounce back to Facebook, who will then contact the user by other means.

Facebook will implement the new authentication method, so new owners of an old Yahoo username can’t possibly log into the previous owner’s Facebook account. Yahoo intends to partner with more sites so that they could adopt the new authentication method.

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Google Takout Now Allows Export of Blogger and Google+ Pages

Google Takeout, the service that allows Google users to export and download their data from various Google products on to their computer, has just added support for two new products. Starting today, you will be able to download your Blogger blogs and Google+ Pages in a variety of formats. Google Takeout was launched in mid-2011 and initially allowed users to export their data from 5 Google products. The service has since expanded to cover a number of Google products and services including YouTube, Picasa Web Albums, Google Contacts, Drive, Google+ Streams, Circles and +1’s and more.

Data from your Blogger blogs are offered as Atom XML files, while Google+ Pages are split out into two different formats - html files with posts to your page and json files with the circles that your page is a part of. You can download all your Blogger blogs at once or do it one at a time.

It should be noted that Blogger already allows users to export their blog through the Blogger dashboard. Blogger’s addition to Takeout is simply a consolidation of the data exporting abilities offered by Google.

via Data Liberation Blog and TheNextWeb

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Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code Released

Last month, Adobe inadvertently made public the entire Creative Suite 2 of applications for free download, and then decided to keep it that way when the fault was discovered. Today, Adobe decided to do more good. The company has just released the source code of the first version of Photoshop for free. Adobe has given the Computer History Museum rights to distribute the source code to the 1990 version of Photoshop with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. The entire code can be freely downloaded, but the terms of agreement forbade anyone from reusing the code in any software or distributing derivative works of the code.

The code which is written primarily in Pascal for the Apple Macintosh consist of 179 individual files, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68,000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts.

Originally, the program to display and modify digital images was called “Display” and it was written by Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, for personal use. His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product. That was 1987.

Gradually the program became more sophisticated. In the summer of 1988 they realized that it indeed could be a credible commercial product. They renamed it “Photoshop” and began to search for a company to distribute it. About 200 copies of version 0.87 were bundled by slide scanner manufacturer Barneyscan as “Barneyscan XP”.

Adobe bought bought a license to distribute it in April 1989, and version 1.0 started shipping early in 1990. Over the next ten years, more than 3 million copies of Photoshop were sold. Now, more than two decades later you can view the original code to a program that changed digital imagery for good.

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Opera Dumps Own Rendering Engine in Favor of WebKit

Opera Software today announced that the company will switch rendering engine of all their products to WebKit, confirming rumors that broke out when the Norwegian browser maker unveiled a WebKit based browser for Android a few weeks ago. Until now, Opera used their own in-house rendering and JavaScript engines called Presto and Kraken, that were in active development since 1995. These will be replaced by WebKit and V8 JavaScript engine, the same ones used by Chrome.

Opera promises that the change is primarily "under the hood" and that the move won’t affect existing extensions as these can be converted into a format that can be used by Chromium-based Opera. The company is however silent whether this will affect the dozens of other Opera features which are unique to the browser. Features like Mail, RSS reader, Speed Dial, Turbo compression, Mouse gestures, Tab grouping and hundreds of nifty tricks that makes Opera stand apart from the rest of the flock.

As a long time Opera user I’m both elated and apprehensive of the direction Opera is taking. Embracing WebKit would greatly enhance website compatibility, but I’m not sure whether it justifies sacrificing a 20-year old rendering engine and all the features it supports.

The first product using WebKit will be for Smartphones, which we'll demonstrate at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of the month. Opera Desktop and other products will transition later.

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SETI Invites Public to Help Name Pluto’s New Moons

The SETI Institute has just opened a public poll to decide the names for two newly discovered moons of Pluto. The moons are currently orbiting the former planet with drab names of "P4" and "P5," indicating that they are the 4th and 5th discovered moons, but will eventually be named after characters in Greek or Roman mythology following traditional naming convention. Mark Showalter, senior research scientist at the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center, who found the moons using the Hubble telescope, opened a web site yesterday calling netizens to cast their votes against 12 chosen names. So far the response has been phenomenal.

The website for renaming P4 and P5 also offers a write-in ballot for those uninterested in the current selection, but the Showalter says any proposed names "must come from Greek or Roman mythology, and must be related to Pluto/Hades and the underworld." The names of the other three moons orbiting Pluto -- Charon, Nix, and Hydra -- also originate from characters in Greek mythology.

Submitted names will be reviewed by the team and could be added to the ballot. Interestingly, the poll welcomes you to cast more than one vote on your preferred name but implores you to restrict your votes to once per day. Voting will end on February 25, 2013. The final names will be announced after their formal approval by the International Astronomical Union.

At the time of this writing, more than 90,000 votes has been cast with “Cerberus” and “Styx” leading the tally.

P4 was discovered in 2011 in images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. P5 was discovered a year later during a more intensive search for previously unseen objects orbiting the distant, dwarf planet. The moons are only 20 to 30 km (15 to 20 miles) across. Currently, Pluto is receiving special scrutiny by astronomers, because NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is slated to arrive there in July 2015.

via SETI

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Windows Applications Coming to Android via Wine

Wine emulator, the popular open-source application that is used to run Windows applications on Unix-like systems such as Linux and OS-X is being ported to Google's Android platform. Soon you will be able to run Windows apps on your Android smartphones or tablets.

According to a report from Phoronix, Alexandre Julliard, the original developer behind the Wine project, delivered a keynote yesterday at the FOSDEM open source conference in Brussels, where he demoed Wine running on Android. The report said that the performance was horrendously slow but noted, it was because Wine was running on an “emulated Android environment” rather than on an actual device.

“A Windows application running on Android. While Wine is coming to ARM and there's quite a lot of interest there, CodeWeavers is quite interested and hopeful for the success of Intel x86 Atom CPUs for tablets. If Android gains traction on x86-based tablets and other mobile devices, CodeWeavers has a lot of commercial opportunities for pushing the running of Windows software on Android.”

The port is still in development and definitely not ready for public use.

via Ars Technica

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40 Public Universities to Offer Free Online Courses With Full Credit

As many as 40 US public universities has entered into an unusual agreement with a commercial company that plans to offer introductory online course for free and with full credit, in the hope that those who pass will pay tuition to complete a degree program. The new initiative, know as MOOC2Degree where MOOC stands for massive open online course, is being run in a partnership between the universities and Academic Partnerships, a commercial company that helps public universities move their courses online.


While universities like MIT, Harvard and Stanford has been offering free educational materials from its undergraduate and graduate-level courses, these were merely intended to be used for reference and have not been tied to a university credential. But MOOC will be part of a degree program, not a novelty.
Through this new initiative, the initial course in select online degree programs will be converted into a MOOC. Each MOOC will be the same course with the same academic content, taught by the same instructors, as currently offered degree programs at participating universities. Students who successfully complete a MOOC2Degree course earn academic credits toward a degree, based upon criteria established by participating universities.
"Making the first course in an online degree program a MOOC brings real value to both the student and the university," said Randy Best, Founder and Chairman of Academic Partnerships. "The free start is just the encouragement many working adults need to enrol in a degree program that will have a big impact on their future success. For universities, MOOC2Degree will potentially attract larger numbers of qualified students into their degree programs."
Some of the early participants in Academic Partnerships' MOOC2Degree initiative include: Arizona State University, Cleveland State University, Florida International University, Lamar University, University of Arkansas System, University of Cincinnati, University of Texas at Arlington College of Nursing, University of West Florida and Utah State University. Additional universities are joining the initiative in the months ahead as they work through their processes for providing MOOCs.
The first MOOC offerings will start this spring.
via The Verge, Academic Partnerships
Photo credit: Classroom from BigStockPhoto

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Twitter Starts Rolling Out Option to Download All Your Tweets

Finally you can access all those things that should have been left unsaid. Taking a cue from Google’s data portability initiative, Twitter has started rolling out an experimental feature that will allow its users to download all of their tweets, since the beginning of their relationship with the service. The downloadable tweets will be packaged in a nice little archive, that you can open in a web browser and read like a webpage.

Just last month, Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo promised that users will be able to download everything they ever posted on Twitter. The feature is not available to all users right now. Twitter says that it is currently testing the ability to download tweets with “a very small percentage” of users. To see whether you are influential enough to be included within the small percentage, head over to Twitter’s settings page and scroll down until you see the section “Your Twitter Archive” along with a button to “Request your archive”.

One Twitter user Navjot Singh who found this option on one of his accounts, has briefly blogged about the process:

On clicking this, twitter informs that they will mail you the download link when the archive is ready. Yes, its just like how Facebook’s archive system works. Once you get the mail and download it you will get a zip file with archive in html form. Extracting it and you will see all your tweets sorted in calendar format.

According to TheNextWeb, the HTML file opens to display a page similar in layout to Twitter’s own website. It allows you to browse your tweets by month, and search the complete archive. The archive also includes CSV and JSON files, the latter complete with each tweet’s metadata.

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Google to Discontinue Google Sync for Free Users. Several More to Go

Google continues to drop support for one free service after another. Last week they closed signup for the free Google Apps edition, today the company announced that Google Sync will be no longer available for Gmail and free Google Apps users, although existing connections will continue to work. Google Sync will continue to be fully supported for paying customers of Google Apps for Business, Government and Education.

Google Sync was designed to allow access to Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts via the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol. It allows users to synchronize their Google Apps mail, contacts, and calendars to their mobile devices. They can also set up alerts (sound or vibration) for incoming messages and upcoming meetings.

Starting January 30, 2013, consumers won't be able to set up new devices using Google Sync; however, existing Google Sync connections will continue to function. Google Sync will be replaced by CardDAV, a new protocol that Google launched last September. CardDAV along with IMAP and CalDAV enables third party developers to build a seamless sync experience using open protocols alone.

Several other services will be no longer available.

• Google Calendar Sync will retire on December 14, 2012
• Google Sync for Nokia S60 will retire on January 30, 2013.
• SyncML, a contacts sync service used by a small number of older mobile devices will retire on January 30, 2013.
• Appointment slots for Google Calendar will be discontinued on January 4, 2013, but existing Appointment slots will continue working for one year.
• Smart Rescheduler and Add gadget by URL for Google Calendar will also be discontinued. Google suggests Find a time view or Suggested times as alternatives.
• Check your calendar via SMS and Create event via SMS – features available to the U.S. for creating and checking meetings by texting information to Google will be discontinued today.
• The Issue Tracker Data API that allows client applications to view and update issues on Project Hosting on Google Code in the form of Google Data API feeds will be shut down on June 14, 2013.
• Punchd Android and iOS apps will be discontinued and merchants will no longer honor loyalty cards on June 7, 2013.

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Microsoft Live Mesh To Shut Down On February 13, 2013

Earlier this year, Microsoft removed Windows Live Mesh - the file synchronization and remote desktop app - from Windows Essentials 2012 suite of program, replacing it with SkyDrive. The writing was already on the wall. Today, Microsoft confirmed that Windows Live Mesh will be retired in favor of SkyDrive. The day when this is going to happen has been fixed on February 13th, 2013.

Microsoft's reasoning is plain and simple – there isn’t enough Windows Live Mesh users to justify supporting the product. The company says that at one point there were a few million users but now there are less than 25,000, while there are over 200 million users on SkyDrive many of which were former Live Mesh users. It’s not clear whether those Live Mesh users voluntarily moved to SkyDrive or they were forced by the update on Windows Live Essential. If I were to take a guess, I would pick the latter.

Microsoft is already reaching out to all affected users and if you are one of these loyal Live Mesh user you will get a set of instructions on how to keep their files in sync and alternative options for some of the features they’re still using.

For instance, Microsoft suggests Live Mesh users use Remote Desktop Connection or LogMeIn to remotely access files on a PC, which was one of the real advantage of Live Mesh. But neither of these solutions are quite like Live Mesh. As for selective sync, a prominent feature of Live Mesh, Microsoft couldn’t offer any solution other than reassurance that they are working on it.

Currently, the only true alternative to Windows Live Mesh is Cubby.

Cubby offers all the great features of Windows Live Mesh such as sync any folder on your hard drive, and direct PC to PC sync which is unlimited and doesn’t count against cloud storage limits. With 5GB of free storage upgradable to 25GB with free referrals, Cubby makes an excellent replacement for Windows Live Mesh.

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Google Stops Offering Google Apps for Free

Google just announced a significant decision that’s going to affect millions of small businesses and developers who were using the free offerings of Google Apps suite of service for their clients. In a blog post the company announced that it will no longer accept any new sign ups for their free version of Google Apps.

Starting from now, all users who wish to use Google Apps for their business or even for their personal website/blogs will have to sign-up under the premium service which stands at $50 per user per year. The pricing appears to be rather high considering that previously Google Apps for Free allowed businesses up to 50 users to use their products for absolutely no cost.

“When we launched the premium business version we kept our free, basic version as well”, wrote Google in the post. “Both businesses and individuals signed up for this version, but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group. Businesses quickly outgrow the basic version and want things like 24/7 customer support and larger inboxes. Similarly, consumers often have to wait to get new features while we make them business-ready.”

The paid package includes round the clock customer support, a 25GB inbox and its 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. While these are good perks to have, most customers who want to use the free services for personal email hosting would be hardly impressed.

There is no need to panic yet, as the change will have no effect on existing customers, including those using the free version. And as before, Google Apps for Education will be available as a free service for schools and universities.

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Hidden Microsoft SkyDrive Code Hints at Web-Based Music Player

If the source codes in the current version of SkyDrive.com is any indication, then Microsoft is planning to add a web-based music playing feature to SkyDrive.com.

Editors over at LiveSide.net have found out some compelling evidences hidden in the SkyDrive.com page that confirms that Microsoft is actually testing what seems to be a music playing feature for the cloud storage service. While digging around the codes in the page, LiveSide noticed references related to a SkyDrive music player, as shown below:

They were also able to obtain a CSS image sprite that reveals the various UI buttons of the upcoming music player.

We were unable to confirm whether the SkyDrive music player feature will have any relationship with Xbox Music, however we certainly hope so. SkyDrive’s competitors, including iCloud, Amazon Cloud Player and Google Play Music, has had the ability to allow users to upload their own music onto their cloud storage services, and stream them via the web or onto any other devices. It would be interesting to see how SkyDrive’s music player offering, hopefully highly integrated with Xbox Music, will pan out compared to its competitors next year.

Rumors about Microsoft bringing cloud music playing to SkyDrive had been floating around for a long time, but these were systematically denied by the Redmond company.

Later on during E3 2012, Microsoft announced the Xbox Music service, and speculations of music integration in SkyDrive had surfaced once again, with sightings of music album arts appearing in SkyDrive folders. When Microsoft officially launched Xbox Music in October, the company officially acknowledged that cloud storage is coming next year to the Xbox Music service, however there were no mentions of whether this cloud storage will be based on the SkyDrive platform or not.

Microsoft SkyDrive web-based music player will be in direct competition with Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music, and it’s going to be quite exciting to see which one prevails in the end.

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Microsoft Releases ‘Bing Top Searches of 2012 Report’

Microsoft has released the ‘Bing Top Searches of 2012 Report’ – a list of the top most searched keywords, celebrities and events performed by users of the Bing search engine. Usually this kind of data is published in mid to end December, but this year Microsoft decided to release it almost a month in advance.

Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries of the last 11 months, the Bing Top Searches of 2012 Report highlights the most searched in a number of different categories that include, people of different professions (such as sports star, musicians, Olympians, celebrities, etc), celebrity events, news stories, movies, song, tech, TV, fashion, holiday destination and others.

Here is the report in brief.

Most Searched Person Of The Year

Top 10 comparison for 2011 and 2012:

Rank	2012	2011
1	Kim Kardashian	Justin Bieber
2	Justin Bieber	Kim Kardashian
3	Miley Cyrus	Jennifer Aniston
4	Rihanna	Lindsay Lohan
5	Lindsay Lohan	Jennifer Lopez
6	Katy Perry	Britney Spears
7	Selena Gomez	Katy Perry
8	Jennifer Aniston	Megan Fox
9	Nicki Minaj	Lady Gaga
10	Taylor Swift	Miley Cyrus

Most Searched Sports Stars

Rank	Sports Stars
1	Peyton Manning
2	Tiger Woods
3	Tim Tebow
4	Maria Sharapova
5	Kobe Bryant
6	Serena Williams
7	Lamar Odom
8	LeBron James
9	Cristiano Ronaldo
10	Terrell Owens

Most Searched Musician

Rank	Musicians
1	Justin Bieber
2	Whitney Houston
3	Katy Perry
4	Selena Gomez
5	Rihanna
6	Nicki Minaj
7	Taylor Swift
8	Beyoncé
9	Chris Brown
10	Jennifer Lopez

Most Searched Olympic Athletes

Rank	Olympian
1	Serena Williams
2	Lolo Jones
3	LeBron James
4	Michael Phelps
5	McKayla Maroney
6	Hope Solo
7	Misty May-Treanor
8	Gabby Douglas
9	Usain Bolt
10	Ryan Lochte

Most Searched Reality TV Stars

Rank	Reality TV Star
1	Kim Kardashian
2	Khloe Kardashian
3	Kourtney Kardashian
4	Kate Gosselin
5	Honey Boo Boo
6	Snooki
7	Emily Maynard
8	Bethenny Frankel
9	Kim Richards
10	Teresa Giudice

Most Searched Celeb Couples

Rank	Celebrity Couples
1	Chris Brown & Rihanna
2	Kristen Stewart & Robert Pattinson
3	Khloe Kardashian & Lamar Odom
4	Kim Kardashian & Kanye West
5	Selena Gomez & Justin Bieber
6	Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt
7	Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes
8	Will Smith & Jada Pinkett Smith
9	David & Victoria Beckham
10	Beyonce Knowles & Jay-Z

Most Searched Celeb Event

Rank	Celebrity Event
1	Beyonce's baby
2	Jessica Simpson baby
3	Whitney Houston death
4	Snooki's baby
5	Kourtney Kardashian baby
6	Coachella
7	Rodney King overdose
8	Grammy Awards
9	Jennifer Garner baby
10	Academy Awards

Most Searched News Stories

Rank	News Stories
1	iPhone 5
2	2012 Elections
3	2012 Olympics
4	Hurricane Sandy
5	Honey Boo Boo Reality Show
6	Gangnam Style Dance
7	KONY 2012
8	Academy Awards
9	Kindle Fire HD
10	Facebook IPO

Most Searched Tech

Rank	Social Media		Rank	Consumer Electronics
1	Facebook		1	iPhone 5
2	Twitter		2	iPad
3	Myspace		3	Samsung Galaxy S III/Samsung Galaxy S3
4	LinkedIn		4	Kindle
5	Tumblr		5	iPad 3
6	Instagram		6	iPod Touch
7	Reddit		7	Xbox
8	StumbleUpon		8	PlayStation 3
9	Digg		9	iPhone 4S
10	Klout		10	Windows 8

Most Searched Movies

Rank	Movies
1	The Avengers
2	Dark Knight Rises
3	Titanic
4	Magic Mike
5	Prometheus
6	Breaking Dawn Part 2
7	Flight
8	Bachelorette
9	Snow White and the Huntsman
10	Dark Shadows

Most Searched Song

Rank	Song
1	Psy - Gangnam Style
2	Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe
3	Justin Bieber - Boyfriend
4	Gotye - Somebody that I used to know
5	Fun.- We Are Young
6	One Direction - What Makes You Beautiful
7	Drake- The Motto
8	Maroon 5 Feat. Wiz Khalifa - Payphone
9	The Wanted- Glad You Came
10	Katy Perry- Part Of Me

Most Searched Videos

Rank	TV Shows
1	American Idol
2	Dancing with the Stars
3	The Young and the Restless
4	The Walking Dead
5	Family Guy
6	Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
7	Glee
8	Vampire Diaries
9	The Bachelor
10	Game of Thrones

View the full report and a presentation at the Bing blog.

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Security Hole Allows Pirates to Get Windows 8 For Free

A new security hole has been discovered in Microsoft’s product activation process that allows pirates to get a legitimate copy of Windows 8 for free. The loophole is based around the ongoing Windows Media Center promotion that is giving away free Media Center keys to Windows 8 Pro users until January next year. Essentially, all pirates need to do is receive an upgrade key from Microsoft and use it to convert an illegal copy of the operating system into a genuine one.

With previous versions of Windows pirates relied on volume keys to activate illegal copies of the operating system. Windows would bypass activation when volume keys were used to make it easier for OEMs to mass deploy the operating system on their machines. Since there is no technical limits on the number of possible activations, some software pirates have exploited volume licensing to acquire illegitimate copies of Windows.

This is not possible with Windows 8 as Microsoft no longer allows volume keys – each copy of Windows 8 requires a unique activation key. Until the discovery of the new security hole the only way out for pirates was to use local KMS (Key Management Server) to activate their copies for 180 days, and then rearm their copies every six months. However, this new and embarrassing security hole could enable practically anybody to acquire a genuine copy of Windows 8 without paying anything, thanks to Microsoft’s generous promotion.

Basically, this is how it works: pirates install Windows 8 Pro using any valid key, even if it's in use and, once the system is installed, activate it with a KMS server. Then request a free Windows Media Center upgrade key from Microsoft, install the Windows Media Center pack using the key provided and then activate Windows. Since your new product key is valid and unique, you'll activate permanently with no issues.

This is made possible because Microsoft don’t bother to check if the key you are currently using is valid. As long as the system is activated, even if it is activated with KMS, it will take the key and apply the upgrade. Since the WMC key comes directly from Microsoft and is unique for each user, it activates Windows 8 Pro permanently.

Now that the word is out through Reddit, Microsoft will likely to add a key check before they allow product activation.

Photo credit: Computer pirate from BigStockPhoto

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Windows Service Packs No More

Earlier this month Microsoft rolled out a massive 170MB update for Windows 8 targeting various areas like performance, power management, media playback and compatibility issues. This is the first time the company has released updates for Windows before the public debut of the operating system, and very much out of schedule.

Typically, Microsoft releases security patches every Tuesday which are fed to customers through Windows auto update. Non-security and non-critical updates along with changes to the operating system like new features or improvements of existing ones are held back to be released collectively as “Service Packs”. Service Packs also include previously released security patches and bug fixes making Service Packs extremely valuable and time saving devices in corporate environments where several computers need to be updated with minimal fuss.

Starting with Windows 8, there will be no more service packs as all updates - security or not - will be pushed through auto-update allowing users to keep the operating system up-to-date at all times without worry and without waiting for the release of a service pack.

But that’s only for Windows 8, right? Nope. Microsoft plans to extend the strategy to Windows 7 as well. Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 released on February 2011 will be last one, ever.

Instead, Microsoft will keep updating Windows 7 using patches released each month until support for Windows 7 comes to an end. That date is currently slated for January 14, 2020, if everything goes according to plan.

What does this mean for end users? This means that if you were holding out for the non-existent service pack 2, you have to manually install every update to Windows 7 released since SP1 in February 2011. For corporate environments, it brings an entirely new level of headaches. Enterprises will often test service packs before they're deployed throughout an organization, a task that becomes difficult if large number of smaller updates need to be tested and installed individually.

As to why Microsoft is breaking their tradition, The Register speculates:

Service packs are a pain for Microsoft, because they divert engineers’ time and budget from building new versions of Windows. In this case, the anticipation for Windows 7’s SP2 comes around the same time as the launch of Windows 8, out later this week. Also, by ending SPs, Microsoft could be pushing customers towards the completely new Windows 8.

With no service packs, Windows users will have to rely solely on auto-update. But there are many Windows users who don’t like to use Auto-update. For them there are several third party solutions like WSUS Offline Update and AutoPatcher. These were discussed in details in an earlier article.

There is no official announcement from Microsoft yet, so we might still see a SP2 for Windows 7, but don’t hold your breath.

Photo credit: Professional window cleaner from Big Stock Photo

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Thunderbird 16 Released. Comes With 25 GB of Free Cloud Storage

Mozilla has rolled out Thunderbird 16 with an utterly short list of changes, and a handful of bug and security fixed and fixes concerning stability. The new revision has only two new features – the integration of Box.com to the list of online storage services which you can use with Thunderbird Filelink, and the addition of silent updates.

Thunderbird Filelink, for those who are not familiar with the newer editions of the email program, is a feature introduced in version 13 that allows senders to upload attachments to an online storage service instead of using the email service providers attachment service. Thunderbird then automatically replaces the attachment in the message with a link to the uploaded file. This not only helps users overcome the attachment file size limit of the email service provider, but helps conserve space on their inbox – for both the sender and the recipient. As additional benefit, sending and receiving large files is much faster particularly when multiple recipients are involved.

Starting with Thunderbird 16, users will be able to choose between Box.com, YouSendIt and UbuntuOne as the storage provider. To help users jump start, Box.com is offering 25 GB of free cloud storage space for new users who signup using this special link prepared for Thunderbird users.

The other new features is the inclusion of silent updates. If you have the auto-update featured enabled under Thunderbird’s settings, the email program will silently download and install updates in the background without bothering you with prompts, nagging messages and permissions. As soon as an update becomes available, Thunderbird downloads it in the background. The updates are automatically installed the next time Thunderbird is launched.

The latest version of Thunderbird can be downloaded from the official website.

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Gmail Now Searches Inside Attachments

Gmail supports dozens of advanced search operators that can help you locate particular messages in your inbox. To find attachments one has to use the operator “has:attachment” followed by keywords that occur on the body of the email, or combine this operator with other search operators. If someone sent you a text file or an HTML file, it is possible to search for keywords within the attachments, but Gmail couldn't index PDF files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and other popular attachment formats, until now.

It has been discovered that Gmail has finally added support for searching inside attachments for files other than text and HTML. The search function is reported to work on PDF files, DOC documents and PPT presentations. I’ve discovered that the search works even when the document or file is archived inside a ZIP file.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the word “zendesk” doesn’t occur anywhere on the body of the message or on the subject, and the attachment is inside a ZIP file, but Gmail still managed to find it.

Evidently, Gmail has unzipped the archive to index the contents inside. While it does appear a bit creepy, it only reinforces what I’ve always believed – Google sees and reads all.

[via Google Operating System]

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How to Install Opera Extensions from Third Party Websites

Opera has decided to follow suit after Google Chrome regarding protection of users from potentially harmful third-party extensions. In a new blog post, Opera developers explained that starting Opera 12.50, the browser will block installation of extensions that do not originate from the official repository. Opera already alerts users when they try to install extensions outside addons.opera.com, but does not prevent the user from installing the extension. The alert is a mere message that warns the user that the extension is not located on the trusted source. A simple click on the “OK” button is enough to dismiss the alert box and proceed with the installation.

Opera developers now feel that current security measures are not enough.

Having studied how people install and use extensions we came to the conclusion that current security dialog is somewhat deficient, in that many users will simply click-through it and add new repositories to the trusted list, without fully understanding the consequences of such an action.

Starting Opera 12.50, the browser will proactively block installation of extensions from third-party websites. To install extensions from these websites, the user must add them to the list of trusted websites. While this doesn’t actually protect users from malicious extensions from untrusted websites, it does make installation of third-party extensions “require a little more thought”. Users who click “OK” out of habit will now have to pause and think whether they really want to take the risk of trusting an unknown website. The change also eliminates accidental additions.

To add URLs as Trusted Websites, follow these steps:

Click on the Opera button and then click on Preferences. Or just press Ctrl+F12. Move to the Advanced tab and then click on Security. Now click on the Trusted Websites button and add the URLs you wish to whitelist.

Once a URL has been added to the list of trusted websites, Opera will no longer prevent users from installing extensions from the site.

The new behavior has already been implemented on Opera Next 12.50.

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