Cut the contract: How prepaid smartphones can save you money
Smartphones may make our lives easier, but boy, they sure do make our wallets lighter. A typical smartphone setup with one of the major U.S. carriers costs around $70 to $80 a month -- and that's on the lower end of the spectrum. So what if there were a way you could get the same kind of service for less than half the cost?
It turns out there is -- if you're willing to make a few trade-offs. The secret lies in a rapidly growing but rarely discussed segment of the smartphone market known as prepaid or contract-free service. Prepaid service has been around for some time, but in the last couple of years it's started to transform from a source of cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel phones into a viable outlet for compelling smartphones.
So what exactly do you give up by going the prepaid route and is the sacrifice worth the gain? Read on; you might just be surprised. Read more...
MIT’s mind-reading Mosh pits itself against SSH daemons
Researchers at MIT have refined the Secure Shell network protocol and boasted their replacement system overcomes some of SSH's more annoying drawbacks.
Mosh (aka mobile shell) is designed to keep connections alive when clients roam across Wi-Fi networks or switch to mobile data connections. Read more...
Intel targeting Ivy Bridge processors at Windows 8 tablets
Intel's upcoming Core i-series processors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture are being pitched at Ultrabooks, but the company is now extending the chips to high-performance tablets with Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system.
Intel hopes the new Ivy Bridge chips will make it to tablets, according to a slide from this week's Intel Developer Forum trade show in Beijing. The slide shows one tablet with gaming controllers attached on both sides and another tablet with a keyboard attached to it.
The tablets will provide "leading performance," Intel said on the slide. The tablets could have processors with up to four CPU cores, low-power memory, and other power-saving features to extend battery life, according to the slide. Read more...
Why you can’t print your TurboTax tax return
If you made the mistake of installing this month's Microsoft Black Tuesday patches, you might find yourself unable to print your tax return this weekend.
The cause? Yet another botched patch to the bungled mess that is the .Net Framework. Microsoft sent it down the Automatic Update chute on Tuesday. There was no confirmation of the problem on Microsoft's official site until Friday. Microsoft yanked the patch, MS12-025/KB 2653638 on Friday, but as of this moment, there's no indication of when the problem will be solved, or the patch reinstated. Read more...
Google’s False Start gets a real stop
Google security researcher Adam Langley has announced that Google is abandoning attempts to bring its secure connection speed-up False Start technology to HTTP/S enabled sites. False Start was introduced in Google's Chrome open source browser and attempted to speed up secure connections by reducing the number of round-trip passes involved in setting up an SSL connection – this was achieved by getting the client to send the "Finished" message and first ApplicationData message in one packet, rather than sending "Finished", waiting for a response and then sending the first ApplicationData message. False Start could reduce the time taken to start connections by 30 per cent. Read more...
Snap, Snap: Scientists create a basic, crab-powered computer
We're prepared for all sorts of nightmare scenarios of the end of modern society, from hordes of marauding zombies to a Terminator-like robot apocalypse. But mankind's downfall may instead be caused by trillions of crabs, lashing out at humanity because they've been put to work powering our computing systems. In one of the oddest technological advances of recent times, scientists in Japan have created a very basic computer using swarms of soldier crabs. Read more...
Bird Flingers Beware: Android users targeted with fake Angry Birds malware apps
The Angry Birds franchise is beyond massive, and with an animated series, movie tie-ins, and hundreds of millions of downloads, it's one of the prime targets for counterfeit app makers. Since Angry Birds Space launched in late March, the title has sold predictably well, but developer Rovio is now putting out a warning that there are in fact fake versions of the game creeping about Google Play which treat you to malicious malware instead of the birds' newest adventure. Read more...
‘Shrek’ studio joins Wal-Mart disc-to-digital plan
DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., the maker of "Shrek," ''Madagascar" and "Kung Fu Panda," is teaming up with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to help people convert their old DVDs into an online movie library.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks' chief executive, says that the new "Disc to Digital" service will help consumers adapt to technological change. The service launches Monday at Walmart stores nationwide. Read more...
What’s In A Name? Australia Wants Apple To ‘Change The Name’ Of The iPad Over 4G Incompatibility
Looks like we may see another development today in Apple’s ongoing iPad/4G controversy in Australia. The country’s Competition and Consumer Commission is meeting with Apple in court again today to try to get Apple to officially change the name of the device when it is sold in Australia.
Although many people know the tablet as “the new iPad” since launching the product in March, Apple has also been marketing the product as the new iPad with ‘Wi-Fi +4G’ in Australia and elsewhere. Apple quickly ran into trouble in Australia when the ACCC said Apple was misleading consumers: in fact, the tablet is not actually compatible with the country’s 4G networks. Read more...
Apple delivers Flashback malware hunter-killer
Two days after Apple promised to decontaminate Macs infested with the Flashback malware, on Thursday the company delivered.
Yesterday's newest Mac OS X Java update includes a tool that will "remove the most common variants of the Flashback malware," Apple's advisory read.
On Tuesday, Apple for the first time acknowledged the Flashback malware campaign that exploited a Java vulnerability to infect hundreds of thousands of Macs. At the same time, Apple pledged to craft a detect-and-delete tool that would scrub compromised machines of the attack code. Read more...
Leaked Microsoft roadmap shows 2013 launch for Office 15
A leaked Microsoft roadmap shows that the next version of Office won't ship until the first quarter of 2013, according to the Dutch developer who found the document.
Maarten Visser, the CEO of Meetroo and a decade-long Microsoft partner, stumbled upon the roadmap a week ago after clicking on a link posted on Microsoft's Dutch website. The PDF was not password protected.
"I'm always curious about the roadmaps," said Visser in a YouTube video he posted yesterday. "For me, since we build SharePoint applications, the release of SharePoint 15 is an important thing. The better I know when this will happen, the better I will be to ready my products before launch."
Visser's Meetroo is building project management software that relies on SharePoint. Read more...