Features » Computers and Internet
TECH BITES - 14th NOVEMBER 2011
James Bone / 2011-11-15 15:32:28
This week Google added its Pages facility to Google+ in an attempt to lure more users away from its rival, Facebook. The US firm says “the Google+ Pages facility will help companies, campaigns and groups engage with their audience”. More than 40 million people have already opened an account on Google+, however, they still have a little way to go to knock Facebook from its perch having 10 times the amount of users.
Security expert and hacker Charlie Miller has proven that Apple’s App Store is not as bulletproof as they would like us to believe. Mr Miller created a fake App that looked like a Stock Price Tracker but it contained malicious code which would have allowed him to download pictures and address books from infected iPhones and iPads. Mr Miller plans to present his research at a security conference in Taiwan on 17 November and has since been banned from the App Store and the Apple Developer Program.
Adobe has decided to cease production of Mobile Flash. The plugins demise has been mainly blamed on Apple based on the fact that they refused to include it in their iOS software for iPhones and iPads. Blackberry and Android mobile platforms have been happily running Flash despite Apple calling it “a security risk and battery drain”. Adobe will now focus on HTML5 which is able to display rich content and video without the need for heavy plugins.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold an impressive 6.5m copies within 24 hours of launch earning its makers an estimated $400m. It has set a new record for the biggest ever entertainment launch. These impressive figures are based on UK and US sales alone. The previous titles in the series sold 4.7m and 5.6m copies respectively. Other than Call of Duty, there has never been another entertainment franchise that has set opening day records three years in a row.
Steam, the video game service used by 35 million people has been compromised and personal details including credit card details, email addresses and billing addresses have been taken according to its operator, Valve. The intrusion took place on November 6th and originated from a security breach of its discussion forums. Valve has issued a statement saying “so far, it had no evidence that credit cards were being misused or Steam accounts abused”.
Mozilla have this week released the latest version of the ever popular browser, Firefox. Now on version 8 and sticking to their rapid release schedule, it is a cleaner, faster, more polished version of its predecessor. Among the changes are; third party apps can no longer install add-ons without your consent, any add-ons installed are disabled by default until the user enables them and you can now search Twitter directly from the drop down search tool.
Del.icio.us
Digg
Menéame
Technorati
Yahoo
Facebook
MSN Reporter
