Angry Birds Space flings 10 MILLION downloads in 3 days
The latest outing of Angry Birds - this time in spaaaace - has been downloaded 10 million times since it launched three days ago. The catapult-pinging galactic avian game was unveiled amid huge publicity on Friday. Rovio announced the expectation-smashing numbers on its Twitter feed this morning.
Angry Birds Space, which features zero-gravity physics and a new square Ice Bomb bird, went on sale alongside a line of plush toys, animation and books for keen fans. Read more...
SAS promises pervasive BI with new tool
SAS Institute this week unveiled new technology designed to allow a broad swath of enterprise users to do advanced analytics on massive volumes of data.
The new Visual Analytics technology, part of the SAS High-Performance Analytics suite, allows business users to explore data gathered from corporate databases and the Web, and to generate easy to understand charts, graphs, dashboards and the like.
SAS said the Visual Analytics technology takes advantage of in-memory processing techniques to handle data at much faster speeds than the company's existing analytics tools can support. Read more...
Eclipse readies browser-based IDE
The Eclipse Foundation for open source development tools is eyeing July as the release date for the 1.0 version of its Orion browser-based IDE for building Web applications, which will be discussed at this week's EclipseCon 2012 conference in Reston, Va.
Unlike the signature Eclipse desktop IDE, which is geared to Java and C++, Orion is intended for HTML and JavaScript development, said Ian Skerrett, Eclipse vice president of marketing, in an interview. "The benefit [of Orion] is your development tool is where your apps are running," he said. Orion is particularly useful for cloud application development, Skerrett added. Read more...
Facebook scammers host Trojan horse extensions on the Chrome Web Store
Cybercriminals are uploading malicious Chrome browser extensions to the official Chrome Web Store and use them to hijack Facebook accounts, according to security researchers from Kaspersky Lab.
The rogue extensions are advertised on Facebook by scammers and claim to allow changing the color of profile pages, tracking profile visitors or even removing social media viruses, said Kaspersky Lab expert Fabio Assolini in a blog post on Friday.
Assolini has recently observed an increase in the number of Facebook scams that use malicious Chrome extensions and originate in Brazil.
Once installed in the browser, these extensions give attackers complete control over the victim's Facebook account and can be used to spam their friends or to Like pages without authorization. Read more...
Mozilla sets end of Firefox for Win2K, early XP
Mozilla on Friday announced that next month's Firefox 12 will be the last version to run on early editions of Windows XP and the 12-year-old Windows 2000.
The company also reiterated that it will stop serving security updates for 2010's Firefox 3.6 in April.
Starting with Firefox 13, the browser's minimum requirements will be XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). Firefox 13 will not work on Windows 2000, Windows XP RTM (release to manufacturing, the original mid-2001 build) or XP SP1.
Firefox 12, set to ship April 24 and due to be replaced by the next edition on June 4, will be the last that supports the three older Windows.
"This support change allows us to significantly improve Firefox performance on Windows by using a more modern build system," Mozilla said in a Friday post to a company blog. Read more...