Category: GReader

Officially recorded as the most downloaded singleplayer title in Xbox LIVE Arcade history to date, more than 200,000 people purchased Shadow Complex in the first week of its release.

There’s some sneaky, new malware on the loose, and this time, it’s after the users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. According to Laptop Magazine, the plug-in poses as an update for Adobe’s Flash Player. Users are taken through some fake steps and are lead to believe the installation was completed. No harm done, right?

Wrong. The plug-in replaces ads on Google search pages with its own ads, and worst of all, the spyware has the ability to track what pages you browse and what you search, according to TrendLabs Malware blog. In other words, you lose all privacy. This is certainly not the news folks want to hear. Especially since most users switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox because of malware problems similar to this one.

While this attack proves that not even Firefox is invincible, you can still safely surf the Web. All it takes is a little common sense. Remember, don’t download an add-on called ‘Adobe Flash Player 0.2.’ If you feel like you do need a legitimate update for a flash player or anything else, always make sure to download directly from the developer’s Web site. Think before you click, and you’ll avoid problems like this. [From: Laptop Magazine and TrendLabs Malware blog]

Filed under: Computers, Web

Spyware Posing as Flash Update Hits Firefox originally appeared on Switched on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news for BlackBerry owners who tether their phones—RIM has made the process easier by including a bulit-in version in the leaked 5.0.1. Desktop Manager update.

The pre-release version is available now in English and multilingual versions for those anxious to give it a spin. As always, make sure you have a plan that supports tethering so you don’t accidentally run up an outrageous data bill. [The BlackBerry Ninja via IntoMobile]

The future of the Marvel Superhero movies (once all current deals expire anyway) now fall under the house of the mouse. It was announced today that Disney has bought Marvel. The press release reads as follows:

Building on its strategy of delivering quality branded content to people around the world, The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment, Inc. in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced today.

Under the terms of the agreement and based on the closing price of Disney on August 28, 2009, Marvel shareholders would receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own. At closing, the amount of cash and stock will be adjusted if necessary so that the total value of the Disney stock issued as merger consideration based on its trading value at that time is not less than 40% of the total merger consideration.

Based on the closing price of Disney stock on Friday, August 28, the transaction value is $50 per Marvel share or approximately $4 billion.

“This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories,” said Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company. “Ike Perlmutter and his team have done an impressive job of nurturing these properties and have created significant value. We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney.”

“We believe that adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation,” Iger said.

“Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses,” said Ike Perlmutter, Marvel’s Chief Executive Officer. “This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.”

Under the deal, Disney will acquire ownership of Marvel including its more than 5,000 Marvel characters. Mr. Perlmutter will oversee the Marvel properties, and will work directly with Disney’s global lines of business to build and further integrate Marvel’s properties.

The Boards of Directors of Disney and Marvel have each approved the transaction, which is subject to clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, certain non-United States merger control regulations, effectiveness of a registration statement with respect to Disney shares issued in the transaction and other customary closing conditions. The agreement will require the approval of Marvel shareholders. Marvel was advised on the transaction by BofA Merrill Lynch.

Now… before getting too worried about Disney ruining everything that Marvel has accomplished… keep this in mind. Many were worried about the same thing when Disney bought Pixar, but the reality has been that Disney has allowed Pixar to function pretty independently and we can probably expect the same for Marvel as well.

Paramount still has the rights to distribute “Iron Man 2,” “Thor,” “Captain America” and “The Avengers” as per their pre-existing agreement, but Disney will probably take over all distribution rights after that deal lapses.

So what do you think?

Paul Kelly has been fired from his job as executive director of the NHL Players’ Association.

Mozilla recently updated its product roadmap through 2010. According to
the first draft, the current browser will see a minor update in Q4 2009
as well as Q2 2010. Version 4.0 is headed for an October or November
2010 release and will bring a new user interface and browser sync
integration.

If you’ve got a few minutes, stylish script, and a scanner, FontCapture can turn your handwriting into a font. That keeps all your mad-scientist notes on the computer, yet still gives them that essential lab bench grit.

Go to FontCapture and download their font template. Once downloaded, print it off and carefully fill in the single-sheet grid. You don’t need to fill in every slot for FontCapture to create your font. If you don’t use letters like ó, ò, or ñ in your daily writing, feel free to skip over them.

Once you’ve filled out the template, you upload it to FontCapture and it processes your handwriting into a font for personal use. That’s all there is to it, but it’s a pretty neat way of giving an image or document a consistent look, but a look you crafted yourself. FontCapture is a free service and requires no signup.

Windows: Want to turn your Windows installation DVD into an installation flash drive? WinToFlash can do that and more.

WinToFlash can transfer Windows XP, Vista, and 7 onto a flash drive as well as Server 2003 and 2008. WinToFlash can also transfer Windows Preinstallation Environments to flash drive.

The process is simple and mostly obvious. You tell WinToFlash where the installation files you want to transfer are located and either let the transfer wizard take care of things, or specify settings like what kind of format the flash drive will undergo. In our test using a USB 2.0 generic flash drive it took about 12 minutes to turn a Windows 7 installation DVD into a USB-based installer.

WinToFlash is freeware, Windows only.

There is no other way to put it. The summer of 2009 was probably one of most disappointing summer movie seasons I can remember in a long time. Of the 47 or so movies that came into wide release this season, I can almost count on one hand the number of films I really enjoyed. At the beginning of the summer I predicted it would be about 14. Soooo wrongggggg.

So as we come to a close, I thought I’d take some time to wrap up the summer of 2009 highlighting what I found to be:

1) THE BEST MOVIES OF THE SUMMER

2) THE MOST DISAPPOINTING MOVIES OF THE SUMMER

3) THE “NOT GOOD BUT NOT NEARLY AS BAD AS YOU THOUGHT OR HEARD” MOVIES OF THE SUMMER

and finally

4) THE WORST MOVIES OF THE SUMMER

So with that little intro out of the way… let’s proceed with this postmortem shall we:

THE BEST MOVIES OF THE SUMMER

#1 – UP Hands down, no questions asked, easily and by far and away the very best movie of the summer of 2009 and of 2009 in general

#2 – JULIE & JULIA Trust me, I’m as shocked as you are, but aside from “UP” there wasn’t another film this summer that so entertained me as this one. Meryl Streep MUST get nominated for an Oscar for this film. Touching, funny as hell and amazingly charming all at the same time. Fantastic story.

#3 – STAR TREK Many thought it couldn’t be done (including me to be honest), but somehow they found a away to faithfully re-invent Star Trek in a way that was both nostalgic and fresh all at the same time. Such a great job. Can’t wait for the next one!

#4 – DISTRICT 9 Highlighted by a brilliant break out performance by Sharlto Copley and some of the summer’s best visual effects and action with dramatic tension, District 9 becomes the sleeper hit of the summer.

#5 – THE HANGOVER What initially looked like just another throw away comedy, The Hangover had us in stiches and finally may have given Bradley Cooper a shot at being a legit leading man in Hollywood.

THE MOST DISAPPOINTING MOVIES OF THE SUMMER (not the worst, but high hopes leading to bad films)

#1 – TRANSFORMERS 2 I’m still angry about this. The first Transformers is one of my all time favorite summer popcorn flicks… this one… just shit all over me. From the new Jar Jar twins, the leg humping robot, Devastator who didn’t actually fight anyone and just a general lack of doing anything right. If it wasn’t for some of the mind blowing effects and frantic action, I’d put this on the worst list instead of this one.

#2 – FUNNY PEOPLE Before it opened I actually thought this film might have a chance at some Oscar hype. Not a chance. A dry and confused movie that had no sense of identity or direction populated with highly unlikeable characters who were unable to generate any sense of sympathy. Yes, it pretty accurately depicted the lifestyle of many comedians… but that doesn’t make it good. You can accurately depict the life of a parking attendant, doesn’t mean I want to pay to see it

#3 – TERMINATOR: SALVATION When we heard Batman decided to join the cast a wave of optimism flooded over the internet about this film. Trailers looked half decent too. Movie didn’t.

THE MOST “NOT AS BAD AS YOU HEARD OR THOUGHT IT WOULD BE” MOVIES OF THE SUMMER (finding entertainment value where you didn’t think any would exist)

#1 – THE UGLY TRUTH Not going to say this is a great movie or anything silly like that, but I found myself laghing my ass off most of this film and walked out entertained. Much more than I was expecting. Line of the movie: “You wanna know the secret to finding Mr. Right ladies? It’s called a stair master”. So wrong… yet so funny.

#2 – GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST Not even going to say this was a “good” movie… because it wasn’t overall. However, considering how horrible it looked, gotta say it had value. Was pleasantly surprised by how it turned out

THE WORST MOVIE OF THE SUMMER

THE LAND OF THE LOST Worse than Year One. Worse than The Proposal. Worse than Bandslam. I swear it’s like they didn’t even try. Reconfirming yet again that Danny McBride is the most overrated actor in comedy today.

So there is my little postmortem on the summer that was 2009. Such a let down. We can only cross our collective fingers and hope for better things next summer. Hope is a wonderful thing… till it punches you in the balls.

Pop star Michael Jackson’s death has been ruled a homicide by the L.A. County coroner.

Today the highly anticipated Batman Arkham Asylum game has been awarded a Guinness World Record for the Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever.

This one caught us by surprise, but it comes from a source that has always been 100% reliable: Not only Apple may be working on a 10-inch tablet, but also in 13″ and 15″ models, one running Mac OS X.

This source claims that the two touchscreen prototypes—made of aluminum, but on the shape of big iPhones—were in a factory in Shenzuen, China. One of them "was running Mac OS X 10.5." When I asked, the source didn't know if these were built for demonstration purposes, or if they were preproduction units. The company has a tight relation with Apple but "it's not FoxConn."

As I said before, with everyone focused on the 10-inch tablet with iPhone OS, this sighting is quite surprising. It is possible that Apple may be just exploring other form factors, and these two models may or may not end being future products.

According to rumors, Apple is in the final stages of developing the Apple wet dream, a 10-inch tablet allegedly running the iPhone OS. Several sources claim that Steve Jobs—back in Campus—is now personally driving this project. However, until now there has been no reliable rumors on 13″ and 15″ models, much less one running full Mac OS X.

This shouldn’t really come as too much of a surprise, but anyone wanting to enjoy Twitter and Facebook on Xbox Live will have to pony up for Gold member subscription, the same premium prerequisite currently needed for Netflix Instant Watch and pretty much all online gaming. Silver membership will be given a “free trial,” but exactly what limitations that entails, or if they’ll be an option to “upgrade” to the full version, is anyone’s guess.

Filed under: Gaming

Twitter and Facebook for Xbox Live will be free for Gold members, ‘free trial’ for Silver originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.

Facebook has agreed to make changes to better protect users’ personal information on the social networking site and comply with Canadian privacy laws within one year, Canada’s privacy commissioner said Thursday.

While most of us don’t frequently find ourselves needing to translate our documents to various languages on-the-fly, Google Docs just announced a new feature that’ll be great for those who do: The service now automatically translates docs in 42 different languages with a few mouse clicks.

Translating docs is a breeze: Just hit up the Tools menu, select Translate document, then choose the language you want to translate to. Docs will open the translated document in a new window, then offer to replace the original document with the translation or copy the translation to a new document. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s a nice feature, nonetheless, and yet another example of Google’s continued march toward integrating their various services.

Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft is planning a Windows 7 launch party on October 22 in New York City. Microsoft has been extremely secretive about the launch details but according to Foley company officials have begun sending out invites to bloggers and the media: "We also wanted to let you know that you will be receiving an invitation to a Microsoft event in NYC on October 22nd to celebrate the availability and launch of Windows 7. With Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaking and exciting new hardware from our partners, we're looking forward to sharing Windows 7 with the world." With Steve Ballmer looking after the launch it's bound to be a good show.

Read full story…

Owners of Sony eReaders, users of the Stanza iPhone book reader, and anyone else with a device that reads the ePub format can now grab more than 1 million works from Google Books’ archives. The books may contain some mistakes, as most were simply scanned and run through an OCR image-to-text process, but it’s free content in a free format, which is hard to beat. [Inside Google Books via ReadWriteWeb]

Royal Bank of Canada beat analysts’ expectations by posting a 24 per cent surge in third-quarter profits on Thursday.