How to Use Windows

Even after many high-profile hacking and phishing attacks on social networking accounts, and constant messages urging people to be vigilant, the biggest problem with web security is still weak passwords. Speaking at South by South West Interactive, an industry panel of security engineering managers from Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft discussed the approaches they use to secure their web services. Del Harvey is Director of Trust and Safety at Twitter.

The full story can be found on Tech Radar

Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said on Friday that he sees mobile internet devices making up the vast majority of the company’s profits, possibly as much as 70-80% , in as little as 5 years. Currently, most sales come from the Thinkpad and Ideapad line of notebooks.  Lenovo plans to accomplish this changeover by expanding into emerging markets. Devices likely to make up these sales are tablets, smartphones, and smartbooks.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

In January 2009 Vodafone made what seemed like a good investment buying mapping software maker Wayfinder for about $30 million. A year later it’s looking like a pretty awful deal in the wake of free navigation solutions from both Google and Nokia. Facing the inevitable, Vodafone is closing Wayfinder saying, “We could not charge for something that others gave away for free.” Vodafone has also invested several million additional dollars in Wayfinder, so it can’t be easy to walk away. It’s unlikely they’d do so without being sure they could not compete with Nokia’s Ovi Maps. This really isn’t much of a surprise, especially considering Nokia’s huge presence in Europe.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

Ever since its release, Google has tagged Chrome installs with a unique ID. The search giant is now reportedly abandoning that practice . Future versions of the browser will still install with a unique ID that will be used to check for the first automatic update. After that task is complete, the ID will be deleted

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

It hasn’t been a good week for Microsoft’s updates to Office . Today, Microsoft came clean on some problems with a recently released seven-patch update for Excel. Apparently, users are seeing Chinese where they’d normally expect to see English. This comes on top of an early faux pas in an update for Office 2007 that caused it to crash under certain circumstances

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

You might remember this news from a while back. In order to improved the predictive ability of its movie recommendation system, Netflix cranked up a $1 million contest for research and business –build us a better mousetrap and the money is yours. Besides the money Netflix offered up its subscriber data, which included their viewing recommendations and choices, but didn’t include names. Netflix believed it had protected the identities of its subscribers this way.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

Mozilla this week made available the first beta of Thunderbird 3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Codenamed “Lanikai,” the latest release introduces a few changes to the open-source email client, many of which take place under the hood. Built on top of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform (the same engine powering Firefox 3.6), Mozilla says you can expect improvements in stability and memory, fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2, fixes for auto complete, tabs, and activity manager, and several design improvements and corrections to the interface. As with any beta software, you should expect a few bugs, and there are a handful of known issues in Thunderbird 3. Kaspersky’s Anti-Spam extension is disabled, for instance, and you may run into some SMTP issues

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

FujiFilm’s Z700EXR digital camera was first announced about a month ago , but one feature that has been overlooked is its animal face recognition. Looking to give the feature its due, FujiFilm has been demonstrating the camera’s canine (and feline) facial recognition at this week’s Camera and Photo Image Show in Yokohama, Japan. FujiFilm used stuffed toy dogs and cats to show off the camera’s capabilities, which works just like face detection for humans.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

In what ranked as a poor month in overall console sales, analyst group NPD reports Microsoft’s Xbox 360 outsold Nintendo’s Wii console in February. In doing so, the Xbox 360 claimed the top spot in U.S. monthly sales, a feat it hasn’t achieved in over two years.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

What’s on your PC?  It’s a fairly innocuous question, one that even the most tired of geeks should be answer without a moment’s hesitation.  But let’s face it — you sometimes spend a decent amount of time between upgrades.  So much so, that you might have very well lost track of the exact names of the parts and pieces inside your system.  Do I personally remember the exact model name of my motherboard?  Nope!  I won’t tell you the manufacturer, but I’ve definitely had to pop off the side of the case and scan around, flashlight in hand, just to find my motherboard’s actual model number for a firmware update search. Yuck. Don’t let that be you.  Furthermore, now’s as good a time as any to get a solid inventory of not only the parts and pieces attached to your rig, but a full list of your installed software (and running services) as well.  Why’s that?  Suppose your rig crashes tomorrow–I’m talking about the big one.  No hard drive.  All your data’s wiped out.  Can you honestly tell me that you’ll remember each little freeware app or utility you installed on your system when you go to rebuild your machine?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little checklist to help you along? And thus enters this week’s download of the week–an application that goes above-and-beyond the call of duty to give you a full load-out of every little thing, hardware or software, that’s in any way connected to your system.  It’s called LookInMyPC , but it’s not just the name of this freeware app that’s clever.  The program starts by listing out every possible element of your computer, everything from the brand and size of your hard drives, to all the software you’ve installed, to your networking information.  This baseline report is a key element of LookInMyPC, as you can then come back to the application months later (presumably after you’ve made some changes) and compare specific elements of your new system against the baseline you previously established.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC