Thunderbird 17.0 Beta 3

Thunderbird is a great email client from the same people who brought you the Firefox browser.

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Foobar2000 1.1.17

foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

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NASA Moves to Secure Laptops After Breach

NASA this week informed staffers that a laptop containing their personally identifiable information was stolen from another employee's locked car.

As a result, the space agency is now working to encrypt all employee laptops that contain sensitive information.

The theft occurred on Oct. 31 and included a NASA laptop and official NASA documents issued to an employee who works at the space agency's Washington, D.C. headquarters.

"The laptop contained records of sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) for a large number of NASA employees, contractors, and others," according to a notice posted on spaceref.com. "Although the laptop was password protected, it did not have whole disk encryption software, which means the information on the laptop could be accessible to unauthorized individuals."

NASA did not reveal how many employees the theft might affect, but said it could take up to 60 days to notify all those involved. The agency said it is "thoroughly assessing and investigating the incident, and taking every possible action to mitigate the risk of harm or inconvenience to affected employees."

That includes partnering with ID Experts, a company that specializes in data breaches, to send letters to affected employees. They will have the option to protect their identities at no extra cost through ID Experts.

NASA warned employees not to give out personal information to people who claim - via phone or email - to be NASA staff. "NASA and ID Experts will not be contacting employees to ask for or confirm personal information," NASA said. "If you receive such a communication, please do not provide any personal information."

While this issue is sorted out, NASA has banned employees from removing laptops with sensitive information from its facilities unless whole disk encryption software is enabled or the sensitive files are individually encrypted. NASA's IT staff has been ordered to encrypt a large number of its laptops by Nov. 21 and to complete the process by Dec. 21. NASA ordered workers not to store any sensitive data on smartphones or other mobile devices.

NASA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is not the first time NASA has lost a laptop with sensitive information. In February testimony before the House, Inspector General Paul Martin informed members of Congress that an unencrypted laptop was stolen from NASA in March 2011. It contained codes to control the International Space Station, and was just one of "5,408 computer security incidents [in 2010 and 2011] that resulted in the installation of malicious software on or unauthorized access to [NASA] systems," Martin said.

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NEC Unveils Facial-Recognition System to Identify Shoppers

The famous scene from Minority Report depicting a consumer walking into a Gap store and being instantly recognized, prompting the system to suggest new purchases based on that customer's purchase history, may have once seemed like an interesting movie fantasy, but it has now become reality. NEC has unveiled a new system in Japan that will allow stores to identify new and returning customers using facial recognition.

NEC's service, called NeoFace, was previewed recently at the C&C User Forum & iEXPO 2012 in Japan. NeoFace allows a retailer to use the system to analyze a shopper's face to determine approximate age, gender, and whether or not that shopper has been to the store before. Using a technique called Adaptive Region Mixed Matching, NeoFace can even identify shoppers regardless of random factors such as changing facial expressions, facial hair, or eyeglasses.

The system is so accurate that it passed a test conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), earning it the highest marks for high-volume identification matching. Although NeoFace is not yet a common tool for major retailers, the company says the system has already been deployed at Universal Studios Japan, assisting the company in its efforts to manage the arrivals and departures of the thousands of customers that visit the site on a daily basis.

"This service is mainly intended for retailers that have several stores," an NEC spokesperson said in an interview with Japan's DigInfo. "It provides retailers with customer attributes based on facial images. That information is helpful for sales strategies… Retailers can find out how many customers visit their stores at each time of day, and what customer's attributes are. This enables them to fine-tune their sales strategies. For example, the data could be used to run campaigns targeting men and women in their 20s."

For those concerned about the security of a store holding biometric data, NEC said that although the faces are captured by the system, the biometric data is encrypted, thus preventing it from being inadvertently disclosed to third parties. Despite the sophistication of NeoFace's technology, it is likely to become a staple in many stores, particularly because it is being offered at what some retailers will consider an affordable price: $880 per month.

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Adobe Forum Shut Down After Data Leak

A data breach forced Adobe to temporarily shut down one of its user forums earlier this week.

The Connectusers.com forum, where customers can discuss Adobe's Connect online conferencing service, was at the center of the attack, and is currently being investigated, according to Adobe.

The hacker, hailing from Egypt and hiding behind the alias ViruS_HimA, posted a file dump with more than 150,000 emails and passwords for Adobe employees, the U.S. Military, USAF, Google, and NASA.

"Adobe is a very big company but they don't really take care of them security issues," the hacker wrote in a message on Pastebin. "When someone report vulnerability to them, It take 5-7 days for the notification that they've received your report!! It even takes 3-4 months to patch the vulnerabilities!"

In a Wednesday blog post, Adobe Connect director Guillaume Privat confirmed that the site had been compromised "by an unauthorized third party," though no other Adobe services, including the actual Adobe Connect, were impacted.

Adobe customers were only a part of the hacker's larger leak, which included a screenshot of emails ending with adobe.com, .mil, and .gov, with the promise that the Egyptian hacker is "not looking to ruin Adobe['s] business."

Adobe took the Connectusers forum offline Tuesday evening, and is "working diligently to restore forum services as soon as possible," Privat said. Additionally, the company is in the process of resetting the passwords of those impacted by the hack, and will release instructions on how to set up new passwords once the forum is restored.

Adobe apologized for "the inconvenience this may cause to our forum members."

"Your security is of critical importance to us, and we appreciate your patience as we work towards restoring Connectusers.com forum services," Privat said.

ViruS_HimA may not be finished, though. The hacker warned that a Yahoo leak will be coming soon. "It gonna be very hot leak," the Pastebin document said.

Also this week, NASA revealed that a laptop with sensitive employee information was stolen from a worker's car. The agency is now moving to encrypt all employee machines.

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Move Over, Apple: Amazon Launches Mac Download Store

Today, Amazon launched the Mac Download Store. This new venue offers hundreds of software and games for Macs, and this directly challenges Apple's own Mac store.

Amazon's offerings undercut Apple's products with lower prices. A search in the Apple website for Microsoft Office Home & Student 2011 Family Pack will yield a $149.99 price. The same program is being offered on the Amazon page for $115.00 for immediate download. Apple will ship the program to you.

The Amazon page conveniently separates the software and video games. A click on software yields 201 results, and video games will yield 51 results. In offering these products digitally, Amazon removes the often cumbersome physical aspect of software and video game installation, and there are no CDs to keep track of. Additionally, as with everything digital on Amazon, all purchases are backed up on their servers which means they can be downloaded again at no additional cost, should the need arise.

Amazon has a history of combating existing markets. March saw the introduction of Amazon's Android App Store which has offered discounted games and apps, much to the dismay of the Android Market.

Amazon also faced a lawsuit from Apple earlier this year over the "App Store" moniker. Apple has claimed that it had rights to "App Store" nomenclature, but Amazon countered that it was not doing anything wrong because the name is very generic.

This Mac venture is a bold move on Amazon's part, and time will tell how Apple will respond. Certainly, the Cupertino Kingdom is thoroughly unenthused about this recent development.

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Windows MultiPoint Server 2011

One of the more interesting products displayed at this year's Microsoft TechEd was . MultiPoint server allows multiple users to share one computer at the same time. This is achieved by connecting workstations and thin clients on a LAN via the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Hardware used to connect to a MultiPoint server can include traditional thin clients like products by Wyse, multiport graphics cards, USB Zero clients and repurposed workstations. There are several economic and admistrative benefits for deploying multipoint client for several users to share over the traditional "one computer to one user" common deployment. Think of large institutions like schools, for example.

MultiPoint Server 2011 has been recently released to manufacturing and includes several new features and upgrades to MultiPoint Server 2010. Desktop Orchestration is a new administration feature. It gives admins a thumbnail view over all MultiPoint desktops in a network. With it, administrators can instantly block a station, close or open a stations's applications, project one station to another and limit website browsing. Software integrators have new capabilities as well with MultiPoint Manager extensibility. They can add new tabs or sub-tabs to the MultiPoint Manager interface and create new controls. MultiPoint Server has a common SDK with both Windows Small Business Server 2011 and Windows Home Server 2011 and is built on the Windows Sever 2008 RS SP1 platform.

Other key features include a Windows 7 desktop experience at each station, multiple language support, private USB and unique IP addresses for each station.

MultiPoint Server comes in two editions: Standard and Premium. Standard gives up to ten simultaneous station connections and Premium, by default, gives 20. Premium also gives the ability to join a domain plus support for Hyper-V. The Standard edition is priced at $330 while the Premium is $817. CALS—which are licenses for the station—are $139 but academic and charity organizations can purchase them for $29.

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Top Google Search Tricks

While the search-engine competition is the hottest it's been since the early days (Remember Alta Vista and Hotbot?), Google remains king and is, arguably, as great as ever.

You don't become synonymous with the term "Internet search" by resting on your laurels, even if some pundits anecdotally believe the quality of Google's search results are declining as the company focuses on its other services.

Nevertheless, you're still using Google for search, right? And do you think you're using it to the best of your—and its—search abilities? Randomly typing in a word or phrase is good way to search. It's even better if you know to put the phrase in quotation marks, so Google will search for the exact term. But there's so much more you can do. Google has spent over a decade fine-tuning crafty tricks to help you search more efficiently.

With these ten tips, you'll be able to dazzle your friends by finding the most obscure information, long lost data, and that maddening bit of trivia no one else can score. Even just everyday information, like what time it is, becomes a power tool in Google search. To complete your search skills tutorial, we'll also show you how to rub your new mutant super-search ability in the faces of those around you.

The Best Google Search Tricks

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Ballmer: Office 365 to Launch in June

Speaking at the Confederation of Indian Industry Cloud Summit last Thursday, Steve Ballmer revealed that Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service will launch in June.

While there is still no firm official launch date from Microsoft, Ballmer said, "We're pushing hard in the productivity space. We'll launch our Office 365 cloud service, which gives you Lync and Exchange and SharePoint and Office and more as a subscribable service that comes from the cloud. That launches in the month of June."

Ballmer also spoke about Skype's position in Microsoft's cloud services. "...if about 200 million people who use Skype today to be able to talk to people at work and vice versa [you have to] be able to count on integration with your corporate systems when you're working inside the enterprise, to count on the security inside the enterprise, but then to be able to reach out in some of the same kinds of scenarios with your customers across Skype."

He stated that Microsoft has done a lot of work on cloud infrastructure particularly with Windows Azure and SQL Azure in the public cloud. He also spoke on the concerns of businesses with the cloud, "Many companies are saying, I can't go to the public cloud exactly yet or I can't go for all of my applications; we have too much concern about privacy and security and reliability." He addressed those concerns by pointing out the advantages of low-cost management and ease of deploying applications in the cloud back to the enterprise datacenter.

Ballmer reinforced Microsoft's focus on cloud computing. "This cloud computing phenomenon will drive growth, it will enable businesses to use IT more productively, and it will enable growth in the IT sector."

PCMag contacted Microsoft representatives to confirm the launch date of Office 365. So far there has been no comment, but representatives promised to look into it. This article will be updated with any new information.

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Survey Finds Cloud Computing Has Matured, But It Can Be a Pain

74 percent of enterprises are using cloud computing; a 25 percent growth since Avanade's September 2009 survey. Of organizations yet to adopt cloud services, three-quarters say it's in future plans.

60 percent of companies say cloud computing is a top IT priority for next year. The sentiment is even higher among C-level executives with 75 percent reporting cloud computing as a top priority.

43 percent of companies surveyed use private cloud services.

The United States has seen steady cloud computing adoption rates with a 19 percent increase since a survey conducted in 2009. The highest cloud adoption rates among those surveyed were in Italy, Canada, France, Germany, and Australia, respectively.

The survey also revealed cloud growing pains. One in five executives reports that it's impossible to manage all of the disparate cloud services within their organizations. About 60 percent are worried about unmanaged cloud sprawl.

The concerns about managing cloud services, especially employee access to public cloud services is well-founded. One in five respondents said they have personally purchased a cloud service without the IT department's knowledge. The reasons given were that many thought it takes too long to go through IT and that it's easier to provision cloud services themselves. About 27 percent say their company's cloud policy actually prohibits the cloud services they want to use.

While 60 percent of these companies do have corporate policies in place to prohibit such actions, those surveyed say there is no real deterrent for purchasing cloud services against policy guidelines. 29 percent reported there were no ramifications whatsoever and 48 percent say it is little more than a warning.

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