We played with almost all devices on the market and need to know the top tenmoney. It must be good after all are in sight, in the pocket for the next two years. Our ranking of the best mobile phones in the UK today celebrates the brilliance of the smartphone: Love phones that add functionality to enrich our lives in many ways. We also see the price of the phone room too - which means your bottom has not always high spec features to be in our top 10.
Adobe Systems has started distributing an update for the latest Flash security flaw, which is already being exploited in malicious advertising attacks.
The fix repairs a vulnerability, CVE-2015-0313, which could potentially allow a hacker to take complete control over a user’s system. It affects Flash Player on all supported platforms including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
People who have auto-update enabled for the Flash Player desktop runtime should soon receive get the repaired version of Flash, which is version 16.0.0.305. Adobe will have an update that can be applied manually ready by Thursday, Adobe said.
The company was less specific about the auto-update mechanism in browsers, writing that “we are working with our distribution partners to make the update available in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 and 11.”
Researchers from Trend Micro and Microsoft found the flaw after seeing it used in attacks. Code that takes advantage of it was in the Angler exploit kit used by hackers, Trend Micro said Monday.
Trend found that a malicious ad running on video streaming site Dailymotion.com was redirecting people to pages hosting Angler, which then attacked their computers. The Hanjuan exploit kit is also thought to use the flaw.
Websites are often unaware they’re running malicious advertisements. The ads are distributed by online advertising companies that for various reasons don’t detected the malicious content.
Flash has been hit hard recently. In the last few weeks, Adobe fixed two other zero-day vulnerabilities in Flash, both of which were incorporated into Angler.
Users can check their version of Flash Player here.
Tarek El Nabawe’s PC has 8GB of RAM, but Windows is using only 3.45GB. What happened to the rest?
It sounds as if you’re running a 32-bit version of Windows. A 32-bit operating system has only enough addresses to handle 4GB of memory. Once you get past that, it just doesn’t know what to do with the rest.
[Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.]
To find out for sure in Windows 7 or Vista, click Start, right-click Computer, and select Properties. In Windows 8, go to the Search charm, type system, and select System. Either way, it will bring up the System dialog box. The “System type”field will provide the answer.
Okay, so you have a 32-bit operating system. Why can’t you at least use a full 4GB? The operating system needs some of those addresses to interface with the hardware. The exact amount can vary, but it’s usually a half or more of a gigabyte.
To take full advantage of 4GB, and any advantage of more RAM than that, you need a 64-bit operating system. All three current versions of Windows—Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8—come in both 32- and 64-bit flavors.
But be aware that you need a 64-bit computer to install a 64-bit operating system. If your PC, like Tarek’s, can accept 8GB, there’s a good chance that you have the right hardware. To make sure, download and run Gibson Research’s free program, Securable. If the program displays a big 64, you can upgrade to a 64-bit version of Windows.
You can buy 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8. You’ll have to do a full install, after which you’ll have to reinstall all of your programs. Unless you’ve got some very old programs from the last century, they should all work.
The installation program should move all of your existing files to a folder called C:\Windows.Old. After the install, you should move your library files back to the new libraries.
And just to be safe, you should make a full backup before doing the install.
raspberrypi.org The Raspberry Pi 2 is now shipping, and you can buy it for the same price as the previous model. And get this: For the first time the mini-computer will support Microsoft’s Windows—specifically, Windows 10 for the development of smart devices and appliances.
At $35, the new computer retains the low-cost appeal of the original Raspberry Pi, which has sold more than 4 million units. Raspberry Pi 2 is also six times faster than the original computer.
Raspberry Pi 2—which will ship on Monday—is an uncased computer that could be held in one hand, with all the important components on one board. The new computer is the same size as its predecessor, which spawned the development of robots, electronics, gadgets and even a Bitcoin ATM.
The Raspberry Pi 2 has a faster CPU and more memory than its predecessor. This could make it a true PC replacement, said Eben Upton, founder of Raspberry Pi Foundation.
“This is obviously fantastic news for Raspberry Pi—in terms of performance it takes us over the line into being a ‘real’ PC you could use for web browsing and productivity applications,” Upton said.
The faster performance will also bring new applications like computer vision to robots, smart devices, drones and other electronics. For example, the extra horsepower will allow the Pi 2 to comprehend images from attached 3D cameras, which was not possible on Pi 1.
The Raspberry Pi 2 could also improve the agility of robots and drones through faster calculations. The computer will also be faster at processing sensor data.
“I’m just incredibly excited what people are going to do...in particular in the maker community,” Upton said.
Raspberry Pi 2 will support Linux-based Raspian OS, but Raspberry Pi also worked with Microsoft to bring Windows for the first time to the computer, Upton said. Raspberry Pi 2 will support a customized version of Windows 10 for embedded devices.
Users will be able to use Raspberry Pi 2 to develop Windows-based smart devices, robots and appliances. Microsoft is looking to expand in the Internet of Things market and offers development boards like Intel’s Galileo and Galileo 2 as part of its Windows on Devices program. Raspberry Pi 2 may become part of that program.
Raspberry Pi 2 won’t run a full edition of Windows 10, or allow access to applications like Internet Explorer or Office. Instead, developers can use the command-line interface to develop and prototype IOT devices.
“I’ve seen it running, it’s incredible,” Upton said. “I think there’s a lot of potential for Windows on IOT.”
Windows wasn’t an option for the original Raspberry Pi in 2012 because the computer was too slow, Upton said.
The speed boost made it feasible to put Windows on Raspberry Pi 2, and Microsoft quickly whipped up a version of Windows 10 for the device, Upton said.
“We’ve always had a good relationship,” Upton said. “Obviously with Pi 1, there was no way we could work together.”
Windows 10 brings some unique things to Raspberry Pi 2 in the areas of device updating and system security, Upton said.
Microsoft has talked about a version of Windows 10 code-named Athens for power-, cost- and size-constrained devices. The OS will be developed for both ARM and x86 processors.
The original Raspberry Pi, which started shipping in 2012 and was priced from $25 to $35, became popular for its sheer versatility. One of its most popular uses was as a home media server with XBMC, with the computer serving movies and shows to TVs. It was also used by programmers to test Linux applications and by students to learn programming.
But Pi’s popularity ended up hurting it the most. Many users clamored for an upgrade to its aging CPU and components. Some users moved over to faster boards with better graphics.
Component prices have come down, which made it possible to build the faster Raspberry Pi 2 in the same price range as its predecessor, Upton said.
The biggest upgrade in the Raspberry Pi 2 is the CPU, which provides much faster processing power. It has a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 CPU, which is used in many smartphones today. At 900MHz, the CPU speed isn’t blistering, but it will capably run a Linux distribution with a browser and a productivity application like LibreOffice, Upton said.
It has a Broadcom VideoCore IV graphics processor, which will be able to render 1080p video. It will be also possible to play basic 3D games with support for OpenGL ES 2.0. The computer has 1GB of RAM, which is double that of the original Raspberry Pi.
The new computer is also backward compatible with the original Raspberry Pi, which was important to Upton in developing the board. That will ensure electronics made for the original Raspberry Pi will work with the new computer. Applications will also be cross-compatible.
Otherwise, components on Raspberry Pi 2 are similar to that on older Model B+. It has four USB ports, an HDMI outlet, an ethernet slot, microSD slot for storage and GPIO pins.
Raspberry Pi Foundation will retain the original models that shipped in 2012, including the $35 Model B+ and Model A+, which is now to be priced at around $20.
Windows is full of so many handy little features it's easy to forget some of them if you aren't using it every day. One such feature is Jump Lists, which is the app-specific menu that appears when you right-click a desktop app icon on the taskbar.
What you see in a Jump List is almost totally dependent on the app developer. By default, all Windows will provide is an option to open/close the app and pin/unpin it from the taskbar. Beyond that it's up to the app maker to add what makes sense for their app
Many apps, if they use Jump Lists at all, simply use the feature to show your recently opened files, along with an option to permanently pin specific files to the list. That's a great feature, but Jump Lists can be far more useful and productive than that. They can, for example, allow you to jump to a specific section of an app or open the app with a specific mode or setting. There's really no limit to what a Jump List can do.
Here are a few examples of apps that make Jump Lists really shine.
The Jump List for Steam for Windows.
Valve's Steam desktop app is a great example of what you can do with Jump Lists. Steam's Jump List provides shortcuts to multiple frequently used sections of the app, including the storefront, your personal game library, your friends list, the music player, the Steam community, and more.
The Steam Jump List makes it that much easier to leap right into the section of the app you need instead of waiting for the app to open and then navigating through the app's UI to the section you need. And if you never use any of the Jump List's default sections, you can remove specific listings in the Steam client's settings, and they'll be replaced by your most recently played games.
Bravo, Valve.
OneNote 2013's Jump List.
Microsoft's OneNote has a Jump List that makes it easy to use the note-taking app's extra features, such as screen clippings, sending content to OneNote, and starting a new quick note.
The three major Windows browsers share some pretty common Jump List features that can help you be more productive with your web browsing.
Chrome's Jump List lets you switch between profiles.
Chrome offers a list of recently closed tabs, while Firefox and IE opt for listing frequently visited sites. Jump Lists for Firefox and IE allow you to open a new tab, Chrome and Firefox let you open a new window, and all three let you start a private browsing session (incognito mode in Chrome) from the taskbar.
Another nice feature that Chrome's Jump List offers is the ability to switch between user profiles.
There are far more apps we could talk about that have productive Jump Lists, such as email apps that let you compose a new message or Windows Media Center's Jump List, which shows you your latest TV recordings.
The next time you're in front of your PC have a look at the Jump Lists available on your favorite apps. It might surprise you just how handy they can be if you get in the habit of right-clicking your taskbar.
Perhaps this is why Windows 10 will be a free upgrade to both Windows 7 and Windows 8 owners: Windows 7 users simply refuse to give up using Microsoft’s older OS.
Net Applications’ NetMarketshare numbers for January show the number of Windows 7 users at 55.92 percent, which is near their 11-month high of 56.41 percent. And the number of users of Windows XP—whose share had plunged to 13.57 percent last November—are back up to 18.93 percent of the total.
Net Applications Microsoft has repeatedly warned that the older Windows XP operating system is subject to security vulnerabilities that will eventually put users at risk. (A registry hack will help protect it by identifying itself as an embedded version of Windows XP, which continues to receive updates.) Microsoft stopped officially supporting the Windows XP OS last April. Still, the majority of users continue to prefer using Microsoft’s older operating systems.
Meanwhile, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 continue to chug along: Windows 8.1 stands at 10.04 percent, up from 9.49 percent in December but still down compared to the 12.1 percent it enjoyed in November. Windows 8, however, continues to decline, most likely indicating that users are simply upgrading to the latest version of the OS.
When you combine the market share of Windows 8 and 8.1 together, however, the numbers tell a slightly different story: From March 2014 until January 2015, the combined market share has steadily increased from 11.30 percent to 13.83 percent. An anomaly seemingly occurred during the holiday season, however, when the combined market share shot up to 16.80 percent in October, then 18.66 percent in November—then fell back to the slow, steady increases of the months before.
In browsers, Internet Explorer continued its dominance, with 22.26 percent of all users, up slightly from December. Internet Explorer 8, used by Windows XP, totals 19.07 percent. Google’s Chrome 39 is used by 11.89 percent of users, down slightly from December.
Why this matters: So far, Microsoft’s customers have stubbornly clasped their Windows XP and Windows 7 systems to their chests, refusing to let go. That’s fine, at least where market share numbers are concerned. But as Microsoft continues to build its business model on services and subscriptions, those older Windows XP users—and to a lesser extent, Windows 7 users—are just there, not really contributing anything to Microsoft’s bottom line. What can Microsoft do to kill Windows XP once and for all? That has to be a problem that’s vexing Redmond right now.
Google has expanded its bug bounty programs to cover the company’s official mobile applications, and is seeking to stimulate vulnerability research on particular products by offering money in advance to bug hunters.
The company launched an experimental Vulnerability Research Grants program Friday, through which it will pay researchers to look at specific categories of products regardless of whether this results in any issues being discovered.
Google’s existing vulnerability reward programs that pay researchers for individual security flaws found in Chrome or the company’s online services have been hailed as a great success. In 2013, the company also launched a program though which it rewards security fixes made in third-party open-source software that’s deemed critical for the Internet infrastructure.
“Researchers’ efforts through these programs, combined with our own internal security work, make it increasingly difficult to find bugs,” Google security engineer Eduardo Vela Nava said Friday in a blog post. “Of course, that’s good news, but it can also be discouraging when researchers invest their time and struggle to find issues. With this in mind, today we’re rolling out a new, experimental program: Vulnerability Research Grants. These are up-front awards that we will provide to researchers before they ever submit a bug.”
Google has paid over US$4 million to researchers through its existing programs since 2010. In 2014 alone the company paid $1.5 million in rewards to over 200 researchers who reported more than 500 security bugs, Vela Nava said.
The highest reward for a single vulnerability was $150,000, paid to well-known researcher and PlayStation hacker George Hotz for a Chrome exploit. Hotz, known online as geohot, went on to join Google’s Project Zero research team as an intern.
The new research grants will vary in size from $500 to $3,133.7 (eleet in hacker speak) and will be available for three categories of targets: newly launched services and features; services considered highly sensitive by Google and critical patches for flaws that affect multiple Google products.
Incentivizing researchers to scrutinize patches for already reported vulnerabilities is valuable and different than what other companies have done through their bug bounty programs so far. There have been many cases in the past where researchers discovered that a company’s patch for a vulnerability was ineffective or didn’t cover all possible attack scenarios.
The most interesting aspect of Google’s new vulnerability research grants is that actually finding vulnerabilities is not mandatory.
“We decided to try something different that was also aimed at rewarding researchers’ time in situations when they pentest services that are likely not to result in vulnerabilities, as we believe we also benefit from knowing about products in which finding bugs is hard,” Google said in the program’s description.
If vulnerabilities are found as part of a research grant, those vulnerabilities will also qualify for individual rewards through the other programs, so the grants do not replace individual bug bounties but complement them.
Furthermore, researchers who have already participated in the company’s existing reward programs and received bug bounties for their findings will have a higher chance of obtaining a grant. Their applications will be prioritized over those of newcomers.
The company also extended its Vulnerability Reward Program to cover mobile applications developed by Google and distributed through Google Play and iTunes. The VRP previously covered only Google’s online services and its extensions and apps for Google Chrome
Sorry: Big businesses who use Microsoft’s products will not receive free upgrades to Windows 10, the company said Friday. Microsoft is, however, letting companies upgrade to Windows 10 as conservatively as they wish—and accelerate once they’re on board with the new OS.
Microsoft framed its new enterprise upgrade policies —known as the “Long Term Servicing Branch” and the “Current Branch for Business”— in the context of Windows as a service, a little-known but intriguing aspect of the Windows 10 upgrades. Microsoft reiterated Friday that will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 for free from Windows 7 or Windows 8 devices, and receive free feature upgrades to Windows 10 “for the supported lifetime” of the device—whatever that means. A spokeswoman said that Microsoft still won’t clarify how all that will work.
Meanwhile, Microsoft effectively requires big businesses to subscribe to its Software Assurance program, which supplies patches and feature updates on a timely schedule. Consumers may enjoy receiving new features on a regular basis, but enterprises don’t. The Windows updates need to be tested against legacy applications to ensure they don’t break when the updates are deployed.
A feature as innocuous as a change to the Windows 10 settings seems like something an enterprise wouldn’t worry about—but the smart ones do. So one part of Microsoft’s enterprise branch strategy blocks these updates from occurring.
Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 8/8.1 Enterprise users are not eligible for the free upgrades to Windows 10. But Software Assurance subscribers using those operating systems will be able to participate in one of two branches: the conservative, Long-Term Servicing Branch, or the somewhat more aggressive Current Branch for Business.
The Long Term Servicing Branch is basically fixed in stone. One of its features for enterprises is that it will not add any new features for the duration of mainstream (five years) and extended support (also five years). However, Microsoft will deliver patches and other security updates on a regular basis. Microsoft said it actually plans to roll out additional Long Term branches on a periodic basis, but customers won’t be obligated to upgrade; IT managers can jump their systems from branch to branch, skip a branch, or refuse to upgrade at all.
Microsoft said that the first Long Term Servicing branch would be rolled out at about the time that Windows 10 is released to consumers.
For slightly more adventurous Windows shops, Microsoft will offer the Current Branch for Businesses. Current Branch updates will be rolled out after “quality and application compatibility has been assessed in the consumer market,” Microsoft said—which likely means the company plans to work out any OS kinks with consumers before deploying a more polished version to businesses.
“Based on what we are hearing from customers, we expect most will take a mixed approach in how they keep their Windows 10 systems up to date,” Jim Alkove, the lead of the Windows enterprise program management team, in a blog post announcing the new rollout. “They will likely target a different pace of updates for different users and systems, depending on the specific business needs of each group.”
As might be expected, PC and peripheral makers will need to ensure their products are compatible and issue driver updates where needed. That’s always caused a few headaches where new OSes are concerned.
The story behind the story: Many businesses looked at Windows 8 and essentially said, “pass”—preferring to remain with Windows 7 (or even Windows XP). Microsoft desperately wants those customers to sign up for Windows 10 and continue paying those sweet annual fees. One of the trouble spots Microsoft identified in its recent conference call was Japan, which chief financial officer Amy Hood called a “non-annuity geography” for us—financialspeak for a country whose consumers and businesses prefer one-time purchases of Windows and Office. The bottom line? Microsoft is going to bend over backwards to make the business transition to Windows 10 as easy as possible.