IE9 and Firefox 4 post top marks in Web browser power use comparison

Over on the Internet Explorer Blog, Microsoft has posted results from an extensive comparison of the top five Web browsers. The goal: to determine whether Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, Safari 5, or Opera 11 is able to squeeze the most life out of your laptop's battery.

A baseline was determined with test systems sitting idle, and then browsers were pointed at about:blank, a news site, the HTML5 Galactic demo, and the IE9 fish tank demo. Perhaps unsurprisingly, IE9 came out on top -- though Firefox 4 was a very close second on nearly every test. As you can see, the other browsers didn't necessarily fare quite as well, with Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera all posting significantly worse scores. In Opera 11's case, a laptop battery would last over one hour more with Internet Explorer 9 installed.


But what we'd really like to know is where did Microsoft find the dilithium crystals required to run a Galactic Total Power Consumption test...

IE9 and Firefox 4 post top marks in Web browser power use comparison originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/30/ie9-and-firefox-4-post-top-marks-in-pc-power-use-comparison/

Michel Rohr Hilde Baaden Hartmut Theobald Nicholas Graul

Black Hat hackers demo Square card skimmer, feed it stolen credit card numbers

Square
Here's some more fun out of Vegas, this time involving Jack Dorsey's Square and a little thing we like to call credit card fraud. Researchers from Aperture Labs (seriously) held two demonstrations at the Black Hat Conference. The first used a script, written by Adam Laurie, to convert stolen credit card data into a series of audio tones that were then fed to the Square app via the headphone jack on a phone -- removing the need to have a physical card. A second avenue of fraud, also using code authored by Laurie, turned the Square dongle into a skimmer. It intercepted incoming data, which is unencrypted, and spit out human readable numbers that could easily be used to clone a card. New hardware that encrypts information pulled from the magnetic strip is in the pipeline but, until then, it seems everyone's favorite smartphone-based payment service has some troublesome holes to fill.

Black Hat hackers demo Square card skimmer, feed it stolen credit card numbers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/-Udad5dsSK0/

Annette Lechner Margarethe Lachner Lutz Yalcin Birte Höß

Gargantuan SQL injection infects 3.8 million URLs, installs rogue antivirus

LizaMoon SQL injection rogue AV
Over the last few days, a mass SQL injection attack has been quickly gathering speed. Just three days ago only 28,000 URLs were affected, but at the time of writing, there could be up to 3.8 million infected URLs.

Websense
has a complete write up the attack, dubbed 'LizaMoon,' but here's the basic gist: it looks like someone is exploiting a vulnerabilty (or vulnerabilities) in hundreds of thousands of websites running on Microsoft SQL Server 2003 and 2005. It's not yet known whether this is a vulnerability in SQL Server, or simply a case of outdated, unmaintained, and easily-exploitable CMSes.

The attack takes the form of an SQL injection, which then inserts a link to a JavaScript file hosted on the attacker's server. This is repeated over and over until every Web page in the SQL database has been infected -- and considering 3.8 million URLs have been infected, you can see that this is a very easy, and automated, attack.

Fortunately, the JavaScript isn't particularly malicious: it pops up a rogue AV program called Windows Stability Center, but that's it. Better yet, the rogue antivirus is already recognized by a bunch of real antivirus suites, including Avast, Panda and Microsoft Security Essentials.

The real problem with SQL injection attacks is that there's nothing we surfers can do about them. There will always be old and unmaintained websites, and thus SQL injections will remain one of the easiest and most lucrative tools of hackers and spammers alike. All you can do is keep your antivirus and anti-malware software up to date, and pray.

Gargantuan SQL injection infects 3.8 million URLs, installs rogue antivirus originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/01/massive-sql-injection-infects-3-8-million-urls-installs-rogue-a/

Nicola Kohnen Laura Ungricht Edith Berner Lea Linden

Zen Coding high-speed HTML shorthand plug-in updated

zencoding
Zen Coding made quite a splash when we first covered it almost a year ago. For those who aren't familiar, Zen is a fantastic form of shorthand for quickly hand-coding HTML. And today, a new version is out!

Here are some of the goodies version 0.7 brings to the party:

  • Text nodes: Writing something like a[href=/]{Click here} now works, and puts "Click here" within the link.
  • New actions added: Increment/decrement number under cursor, evaluate math expressions, and more.
  • Wrap with Abbreviation was upgraded.
There are several other improvements but they're all rather technical. If you use Zen Coding (or are intrigued by the concept) go ahead and read the release notes for this new version.

Zen Coding has official implementations for a ton of editors, including TextMate, Apatana, Coda, E2, Komodo, Notepad++, PSPad, and more. It also has unofficial builds for Vim, UltraEdit, Visual Studio and more.

If you want to play with Zen Coding without installing it, you can use the online demo to see some of its magic in action.

Zen Coding high-speed HTML shorthand plug-in updated originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/15/zen-coding-high-speed-html-shorthand-plug-in-updated/

Kevin Fickenscher Amelie Schweizer Elfriede Oltmanns Janine Hillenbrand

Amazon Cloud Player review: functional, not mind blowing, and still US-only

Amazon Android Cloud Player appIt's hard to believe: our world-spanning network, our Internet, which is the cornerstone of free speech and free society -- which, on a good day, is capable of causing populist revolutions -- is still crippled by banal geolocation restrictions. We are, of course, talking about Amazon's two latest offerings, both of which are only available in the United States. Last week it was the excellent Android Appstore for Android, and today it's the Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Android.

Along with Cloud Player, Amazon also launched Cloud Drive, which is basically just like any other cloud storage digital locker. It's not particularly feature rich, and there's no real reason to use it over something like SugarSync or SkyDrive -- it does work outside the US, however.

Its primary purpose, as far as we're concerned, is that it stores your your Cloud Player music in a subdirectory. You get 5GB of Cloud Drive storage for free, and then it's $1 per gigabyte per year if you need more space.

The Amazon Cloud Player itself will not, to put it bluntly, blow your mind. It works, but it's very much an early, and possibly rushed, release. Let's dive in to the Web and Android players for a closer look.

Continue reading Amazon Cloud Player review: functional, not mind blowing, and still US-only

Amazon Cloud Player review: functional, not mind blowing, and still US-only originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/29/amazon-cloud-player-hands-on-review-functional-not-mind-blowin/

Hans-Jürgen Haake Arno Zimmerling Jacqueline Kiesel Michel Rohr

RIM Blazes Into Smartphone Market With New Torches, New Bolds

Research In Motion announced five new smartphones based on its new BlackBerry 7 operating system on Wednesday. AT&T, Sprint and U.S. Cellular will all get new devices that maintain some of the feel of earlier products while offering functionality competitive with the leading smartphones on the market.

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/73000.html

Steven Walnsch Lennart Tonn Simone Temme Heidemarie Stegmann

TechCrunch Giveaway: An iPad 2 Loaded With ?Cut The Rope? Games #CTRExperiments

ctr_exp_iconIt's Friday and today we are giving away an iPad 2! Thanks to ZeptoLab, not only are we giving away an iPad 2, but we are giving one away that is loaded with all of the Cut The Rope games, including ZeptoLab's brand new game, Cut The Rope: Experiments. Cut The Rope was the first game ever to come along and knock Angry Birds from their #1 spot back in October of 2010. The game has never left the top ten since. ZeptoLab's sequel, Cut The Rope: Experiments, promises to not disappoint.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/g7sWLnO-WoQ/

Ingeburg Otte Moritz Beller Gabriela Prell Sylvia Lösche

Skype two-way video chat finally arrives on more Android handsets

An updated version of Skype just appeared on the Android Market sporting a crucial improvement: it now supports two-way video calling on a wide range of current Android handsets, rather than the meager four that had previously received preferential treatment. If you have a recent phone from HTC, Samsung or Sony Ericsson (excluding the Arc), then you're probably in luck. Oh, and LG Revolution (Verizon) and Acer A5 owners can get their vogue on too. Running Gingerbread is a must, though, because Froyo will only let you use your device's rear camera, which is obviously quite difficult to pose for. Check out the source link for the full list of supported handsets and let us know if you run into problems.

[Thanks, Nathan]

Skype two-way video chat finally arrives on more Android handsets originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Aug 2011 04:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/04/skype-two-way-video-chat-finally-arrives-on-most-android-handset/

Angelika Frey Mika Bernhardt Ingeburg Liebermann Elsa Alexander Furtmann

Line Grapefruit is a tricky Flash "path" game

linegrapefruit
Okay, see that snaking line coming in from the right on the screenshot? That's you. And see those large round circles? Those are supposedly grapefruits, only they won't sit still - they keep moving up and down and cutting across your path. And if you touch one, you die!

That's what you have to deal with in Line Grapefruit. But that's not all - you're also on a time limit. In fact, you have a very limited amount of time to make it through the "path" (for lack of a better word). You need to snake your way through the winding trail without touching anything. The good news is that a grapefruit only kills you if it touches the end of the line - once you've made it past the grapefruit, nothing happens if it crosses the path you've made.

This is not an easy game, but it's quite unique - I can't recall seeing another game quite like it.

Line Grapefruit is a tricky Flash "path" game originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/01/line-grapefruit-is-a-tricky-flash-path-game/

Elsa Alexander Furtmann Siegrid Holstein Michael Vollmar Robin Jones

webOS 3.0 beta now available to developers

hp touchpad webos 3.0
With the webOS 3.0 SDK available for almost two months, HP has now given developers access to a beta download of webOS 3.0 -- which powers the upcoming TouchPad and will likely ride along on HP desktops and laptops in the form of an emulator.

Right now, the webOS 3.0 beta is only available to Early Access developers. The crew at PreCentral states that HP appears to have eased up on access restrictions, however, so hopefully more devs will get on board and those of you who are planning to buy a TouchPad in the next couple months will have plenty of slick webOS 3.0 apps to install on your new tablet.

webOS 3.0 beta now available to developers originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/31/webos-3-0-beta-now-available-to-developers/

Mika Bernhardt Ingeburg Liebermann Elsa Alexander Furtmann Siegrid Holstein