Code Retard

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

The Macworld expo is not what it once was, but you wouldn’t know it from the excitement from both vendors and
Mac faithful who attended this year’s show.

Macworld 2012 started today at Moscone Center North in San Francisco. Though Macworld no longer attracts the big crowds and big-name vendors it once did, I saw plenty of excited vendors and show goers checking out the latest wares for Mac and other Apple products.

When Apple stopped presenting at Macworld in 2009, everyone wondered what would become of the show. As Apple’s launching point for new products until 2009, Macworlds of the past often took up two giant rooms at Moscone Center and everyone involved with making Macs, iPhones, and the products that surround them would come for the event. Ever since Apple stopped showing at Macworld and making product announcements on its own, the show has lost some of its magic, but you wouldn’t know that by talking to some of the vendors on the floor.

In this slideshow, I give you a taste of what it’s like to walk around the floor from my perspective. I couldn’t take a picture of everything, but hopefully it will give those who have never been an idea of what it’s like to check out the current state of the yearly Macworld show.

A visit to the Macworld 2012 floor (photos)

Google hopes to cut down on Web browsers’ autofill confusion.

(Credit:
Google)

I’ll be honest here. I disabled Chrome’s autofill ability. I hate it.

Maybe it’s because I have too many e-mail addresses, or even regular addresses–I moved a lot in the last couple years. Maybe it’s because my wife and I use the same computer. Maybe it’s because my international life involves too many formats for phone numbers, postal codes, and codes guichet.

But filling out forms is certainly tedious, so I was delighted to hear that there’s going to be a way for Web developers to straighten this out.

Specifically, Google and others are working on a technology that will label fields on Web pages so that browsers can know what data they’re supposed to fill in–e-mail address, phone number, or first name, for example.

Support for the “experimental” technology is now built into Chrome, Google programmer Ilya Sherman said in a blog post yesterday. Sherman also encouraged Web programmers to try the autofill feature out.

Next up: standardization.

“We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors. Like any early-stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the Web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec,” Sherman said.

Hewlett-Packard kicked the first open source component to WebOS out the door today, along with a calendar for when its source code will be completely open.

The first part of WebOS to go open is Enyo, which also received a version bump to 2.0 today. Enyo is a developer’s tool for writing a single app that will work across multiple mobile devices and PC browsers, including
Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, iOS,
Android, and WebOS itself.

The company plans to release several components per month from now until September. February will get the intended project governance model, QT WebKit extensions, JavaScript core, and UI Enyo widgets. March will see the standard Linux kernel, graphics extensions EGL, LevelDB, and USB extensions. Node services, Ares 2.0, and an update to Enyo land in April, followed by a break until July, when the Luna system manager, core applications, and Enyo 2.2 will be opened. August gets a build release model and an Open WebOS beta, with version 1.0 of the source code landing in September.

HP added that all WebOS code will be released under the Apache license.

As my colleague Roger Cheng noted in December when the company announced its decision to open WebOS, with the exception of Linux, the most successful open-source projects receive great scads of cash. What HP didn’t reveal was how much backing the struggling operating system will continue to receive.

Diane Gilbert, a South Carolina teacher, shows off a Chromebook and says students like to customize them with skins.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google has won over three school districts with its Chromebook vision, bringing more than 27,000 of the browser-based laptops to Iowa, Illinois, and South Carolina.

Rajen Sheth, Google’s leader of Chromebook work for business and education, announced the deals in a speech today to the Florida Educational Technology Conference.

Including those three districts, Sheth said in a Webcast speech, “we now have hundreds of schools across 41 states that have outfitted at least one classroom with Chromebooks.”

The support is a nice feather in the Chromebook cap, especially since today’s impressionable, fast-learning students are tomorrow’s technology buyers. But Google should also be paying attention to what one of its new Chromebook advocates had to say about what the students really want.

“Students love the
tablet. I am not going to hide that from you. They will bow down and kiss your feet,” said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom. She said that Chromebooks, though, are better when it comes to typing and to letting students publish their work the way she wants it done.

The first-generation Chromebooks have been roundly criticized for slow performance, but Samsung showed off a faster Chromebook model at
CES earlier this month. And Sheth said Chromebooks work well for schools that need easy administration and for students who appreciate 8-second startup times and 8.5-hour battery life.

“A lot of schools are on OSes that are 5 to 10 years old because of the cost and labor to bring that up to the latest standard,” Sheth said. “The Chromebook updates itself automatically and gets better over time.”

A first-generation Samsung Chromebook

(Credit:
Samsung)

A few thousand devices are drops in the bucket when compared with the global education market. But Google has to start somewhere, and school representatives on a panel discussion were happy to tout the Chromebook’s advantages.

“This is the right device for student learning,” said Bryan Weinert, technology coordinator for the Leyden Community High School District in Illinois. “We plan to deploy 3,500 to students next year. Every single student will be issued a Chromebook they can use at school and at home.”

The Chromebooks will replace Netbooks, he said. “We were looking for a device that can be invisible. We want teachers to focus on instruction,” not technical support, waiting for laptops to boot, or making sure they’re charged, he said.

Richland School District Two in South Carolina, which will use 19,000 Chromebooks in a three-year program to bring the devices to students in 3rd through 12th grades, said Donna Teuber, technology integration coordinator for the district.

And Council Bluffs Community School District in Iowa plans to use 2,800 at its high schools and 1,500 in middle school, said David Fringer, executive director of information systems for the district. “Next fall we hope to give each student one of these,” he said.

The Chromebooks are closely linked to Google Apps, Google’s online suite for word processing, e-mail, presentations, and more. It also can run any number of applications downloaded through the Chrome Web Store or simply loaded as Web pages.

Updated at 9:22 a.m. PT
to correct Sheth’s title. He leads Chromebook work for business and education at Google.

Ubuntu has announced a change to their version of Linux that ought to get hot key junkies and voice control enthusiasts alike to raise their heads with glee.

Ubuntu 12.04 will introduce a new Heads-Up Display for interacting with the operating system in April, wrote Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. The HUD will allow you to “express your intent” with the operating system and the programs running on it, wrote Shuttleworth.

Currently, it’s activated by hitting the Alt key, which opens a translucent box into which you can speak or type your commands. As you start to type the word
Firefox, for example, the predictive menu will pull up launching Firefox as an option.

More than a streamlining of how the menu looks, though, Ubuntu 12.04 also will have extensive voice command support. This Vocabulary User Interface, or VUI, is going to let you control Ubuntu by speaking to it. Shuttleworth explained some of the benefits as including fuzzy matching, where imprecise commands are matched to user intent; “smart” learning so the operating system can prioritize habitual behavior; and it will work with the system itself as well as the focused app. This last one means that the VUI is designed to let you go offline in Skype, or change your instant message status, through the HUD because, “those apps all talk to the indicator system.”

“When you’ve been using it for a little while it seems like it’s reading your mind, in a good way,” he wrote.

If Ubuntu 12.04 remains on schedule, the HUD will land on April 26.

His blog post is lengthy and worth reading for the way it details how the purpose of menus has driven their development. He also explains how he sees menus naturally transitioning to a VUI, even in traditional use cases like corporate environments. The VUI, he says, not only allows people to control their program by voice, but it also can learn repeated behaviors, thus making it computer use more productive.

Some of the innovations Ubuntu has attempted have suffered setbacks, he acknowledged. The biggest one being that it hid the menu structure before the replacement was ready.

Shuttleworth cautioned that there was still work to do on the HUD. Things like the secondary aspects of menus, the lack of discoverability, and other patterns of interaction have yet to be mapped.

Threat Tracker’s information screen shows some interesting facts about mobile security threats.

(Credit:
Lookout Mobile Security)

Lookout Mobile Security‘s latest project app peels away some of the secrecy and uncertainty surrounding mobile threats. Debuting today, the Threat Tracker provides information about mobile threats going back two weeks.

The app is meant to help people understand that mobile threats do exist, explained Derek Halliday, senior product manager for Security at Lookout. “We’re showing people what they’re being protected against,” he said. It was originally created by a Lookout summer intern in 2011.

Here’s how it works. Tap the home screen that opens when the app launches, and the app jumps to a spinning blue globe of Earth. It populates the globe with green dots, representing people around the world that Lookout says it has protected from threats. You can drag the globe around to see how different parts of the world are affected.

Below the globe is a timeline chart of mobile malware threats over the past two weeks. It gets updated hourly, and you can slide your finger along it to change the map of blocked threats above. At the top of the app are three links. The one in the upper left corner goes to the Lookout Mobile Security listing in the
Android Market, while the question mark explains the app’s features.

The i in the upper right corner shrinks the globe and pulls up more information on threats. A slider shows the percentage of spyware versus malware (41 percent to 59 percent, as I write this on Monday) and below that are the top three threats over the past two weeks. Tap one to get an explanation of what the threat is and what it does.

At the time of writing, the top two mobile threats according to Lookout are RuPaidMarket, Depositmobi, and Legacy. The first two send premium SMS without permission, a growing threat on smartphones of all kinds. Legacy contains a Trojan that exploits a vulnerability on some Androids to gain control of the device.

The app is a bit thin on features. For example, it doesn’t tell you the countries where the top threats lurk. They’re currently bigger problems in Eastern Europe than in the United States. Halliday admitted that it doesn’t do much now, but said that more of Lookout’s security data would be revealed in future updates to the app.

Lookout Threat Tracker isn’t going to make you more secure in and of itself, but it ought to help end questions about whether mobile malware exists and what threats mobile malware can pose to people. Halliday concluded, “This is a way to answer those questions without having to experience the malware yourself.”

High-performance PC hardware doesn’t always deliver the speed users expect. But you probably shouldn’t blame the hardware. The slowdown may be due to a software conflict.

A reader named Abe Ibrahim contacted me last week to ask about the cause of his slow
Windows 7 PC:

My system: Asus Rampage III Extreme MB, Intel i7 980x CPU, 12GB Tri-Bus Memory, 128GB SSD (OS), and 9TB RAID-5 storage. One would think no matter what you ran, the system would scream through it. That is not the case with my system: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit boots in 51 seconds… [When] I use it to zip and unzip files, video or photo editing, the system crawls…. Low system performance while in low CPU and memory usage! Why?

One of the greatest challenges PC users face is figuring out why the machines run so slowly. You can easily spend more time trying to fix the problem than the problem causes you to lose in the first place.

Windows 7′s built-in diagnostic tools can help you find the source of startup and other performance woes. I’ve had mixed results with the OS’s troubleshooting utilities, which I described in a post from last June, “Handy Windows 7 utilities you may not know about.”

Tech Republic’s Greg Schultz explains how to use Windows 7′s Event Viewer to root out the source of slow startups. Sandro Villinger of IT Expert Voice goes into even more detail on snooping through Windows 7′s performance and troubleshooting utilities to hunt down the causes of startup delays.

Another option is to use Microsoft’s free Process Monitor utility to find slow-loading startup items and figure out whether you need the laggards to start automatically. Martin Brinkmann steps you through the process on Ghacks.net.

If you use the Ultimate, Professional, or Enterprise editions of Windows 7, you have access to the Group Policy Editor, which lets you track down startup slowpokes. More information on the diagnostic tools in Group Policy Editor is available on the Guiding Tech Network.

Most likely causes of Win7 startup delays
The first thing most people do to speed up Windows’ boot times is to trim the list of programs that start automatically. Microsoft’s free Autoruns utility simplifies the process by categorizing the programs that start with Windows. You can set the program to hide Windows’ own entries to minimize the chances of unchecking an entry that needs to auto-start.

Your PC’s slow bootup could be due to a malware infection. Make sure your antivirus definitions are up-to-date and your real-time protection and firewall are active. Then perform a full-system malware scan. To make doubly sure your system isn’t infected, scan again with a different antivirus program, such as the free Malwarebytes Anti-Malware.

Sometimes the slowdown is caused by your system creating too many restore points. The Microsoft Support site describes the problem and offers a hotfix. Another Microsoft hotfix addresses delays resulting from displays being changed from the default 96 dots per inch.

Unfortunately, the source of your PC’s slow start could be relatively obscure, such as a faulty hard-drive power connector (switching the drive to a different power connector solved the problem) or use of a solid-color background (start times improved after using a photo as a background).

Free Windows diagnostic utility shaves seconds off startups
It seems counterintuitive that you can improve your system’s performance by adding yet another program. In addition to the time required to download and install the software, there’s the chunk of system resources the new program uses itself. That’s why I was skeptical of the performance benefits promised by Kingsoft’s free PC Doctor, one of which was faster starts.

I tested the program on a 5-year-old PC running Windows 7 Ultimate. During installation, the program offered to install the Maxthon browser–in fact, the option was prechecked. Be sure to uncheck this option to prevent installing more software than you bargained for.

The PC Doctor installer preselects the option to add the Maxthon browser, so uncheck the setting to prevent the unsolicited addition.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dennis O’Reilly)

After restarting the PC to complete the installation, PC Doctor generated a pop-up alerting me to six potential hazards.

PC Doctor identified six potential security risks the first time the program ran after installation.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dennis O’Reilly)

The test system is set to download and install required Windows updates automatically, so the notice of pending updates was a surprise. (To prevent PC Doctor from starting automatically, click Settings General and uncheck the option under Boot Configuration at the bottom of the window.)

Uncheck the option under Boot Configuration in PC Doctor’s Settings to prevent the program from starting with Windows.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dennis O’Reilly)

PC Doctor includes many security, diagnostic, and troubleshooting tools, but my focus was on the program’s Startup Booster. Initially, PC Doctor timed my test system’s start at 57 seconds, which garnered a Good rating. The utility suggested that I disable several of the 85 startup items it identified.

PC Doctor’s Startup Booster tool recommended that I disable several of the auto-start programs on my test PC.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dennis O’Reilly)

The My Startup tab lists the PC’s auto-start apps and shows the number of seconds each requires to get going.

See a list of your system’s auto-start apps on PC Doctor’s My Startup tab.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dennis O’Reilly)

After running PC Doctor’s System Optimizer, the program reported that it had shaved nine seconds off Windows’ start, which still rated as Good. According to my own unscientific timing, the test machine’s starts were reduced from 72 seconds to 64 seconds.

After running PC Doctor’s System Optimizer, the utility reported that Windows’ start time dropped from 57 seconds to 48 seconds.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dennis O’Reilly)

In the course of its optimization, PC Doctor knocked out the the driver for the machine’s Wacom
tablet. The time it took to reinstall the tablet driver and restart the system likely wiped out any performance gain resulting from the optimization–not to mention the time the optimization itself required.

So I was left pondering once again whether the time lost by installing and running the optimizing utility will ever translate into time saved by faster Windows 7 starts and enhanced performance generally. Chances are it’s a wash, but there is some comfort in knowing your software isn’t slowing down your hardware unnecessarily.

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Over the past year we have regularly covered new malware threats that have emerged for OS X, which included attacks like MacDefender, BlackHole RAT, Flashback, and Revir, among a number of others.

While our coverage of these threats may make them appear significant, when looking at the overall
Mac malware scene in review it’s apparent that despite the increase in Mac malware prevalence, the threats for the Mac platform are still quite minimal. Additionally, data suggests Mac malware trends may not follow market share as many suspect it does.

Recently security company F-Secure released an analysis of the Mac malware that was released Q2 through Q4 of last year. Overall, there were a mere 58 new variants that were released between April and December of 2011, most of which were Trojan horse or backdoor attempts, and none being viruses or worms.

The breakdown of the malware shows that as with other platforms, social engineering is the primary means of spreading malware, but the main observation is that the overall number of 58 threats is nothing when compared to other platforms. According to UK-based security company GData, starting in 2009 the number of new malware threats for computers and Web-based services has surpassed 1,000,000 per year. Therefore, even though the threat level for OS X is higher than it has been in past years, when compared with the rest of the industry malware on the Mac is almost negligibly minuscule.

F-Secure’s analysis shows two general time frames where Mac malware was released last year, suggesting a break from an expected continuous rise that follows market share.

(Credit:

F-Secure)

An interesting point of argument that F-Secure’s data does bring up is to the notion that the number of threats to the Mac platform will increase as its market share rises. While it might seem logical to expect that as the Mac becomes more popular one would see an increase in attacks, the data from F-Secure suggests this may not be the case.

F-Secure’s analysis clearly shows two time frames where malware has been released for OS X: one instance around June and another instance around October of last year. F-Secure describes these as “opportunistic bubbles” sandwiched between periods of inactivity. This is different from the steady rise in the Mac’s market share in the past year, which according to NetApplications has increased by 17 percent from February 2011 to 6.36 percent worldwide, and which has recently surpassed 12 percent in the U.S., according to Gartner.

This bubblelike malware trend in the face of steadily increasing market share counters the idea of a continuous rise in malware releases that one might expect from a steady rise in Mac malware; however, this interpretation may be a bit premature.

While it is possible that Mac malware could maintain a release pattern of “opportunistic bubbles,” it is entirely possible that these bubbles could start increasing in prevalence and eventually blend into each other to form a steady increase of malware that is more continuous in nature.

So far there is not enough data to either support or refute this possibility, since right now we’re observing this bubble trend with only 58 samples strewn out over the course of a year. Additionally, it’s worth noting that successive releases of malware variants for one or two malware programs contributes to these bubbles, and not the release of multiple independent malware programs. For instance, BlackHole and FakeMacDef variants were released around June, and a number of Flashback and Revir variants appeared around October.

Some additional considerations against the notion of malware being released in “bubbles” is that this suggests malware developers somehow work in conjunction with each other to release their attacks in coordination, which is likely not the case. Additionally, it suggests that malware is released seasonally, which besides holiday scams, would be highly unlikely and does not parallel with the continuous nature of malware release on other platforms.

Despite these considerations, right now the data we have shows that Mac malware was released in two general timeframes, though whether this trend will continue remains to be seen.

Overall while these observations are interesting, ultimately it is important to keep in mind that despite the reports of malware throughout the past year, the level of malware for OS X continues to be minuscule when compared with the millions of malware programs released through the year.

Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!
Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.

It can be frustrating to receive an attachment or find a file online that you can’t open. Maybe you don’t have the latest version of MS Office, or maybe you just don’t know what program is required. Open Freely is a great, free tool that lets you peek inside many popular file types. Here’s how to use it: 

1. Download and install Open Freely here. 
2. When confronted with a file you can’t open, launch Open Freely and click the open icon in the top left, then browse and select your file. (You may want to check the list of supported file types here first.) 
3. Open Freely offers simple editing tools for documents, spreadsheets, and other such files. These should be familiar to most users. They’re not as advanced as those you’d find in Office or similar suites, but they’re functional. 
   

   Step 3: Review and edit document.

4. It’s also easy to print using Open Freely. Just click the printer icon at the top and you’re all set. 

That’s all there is to it. It’s easy to enjoy media files or to review documents even on computers that aren’t set up to handle the right file type.

Thanks to GHacks for the link!

Loading Chrome extensions based on your needs will spare some system resources and keep you on task.

It’s so easy to grab extensions for Twitter, Facebook, and even music services. Unfortunately, while these extensions are great for socializing and surfing, they may be resource hogs or distracting you with animated icons while attempting to be productive. There is one extension that can help solve this conundrum for you: Context. Basically, this extension groups your other extensions for situational use. So if you’re working, shopping, or just surfing for fun, you can load only the relevant extensions. Here’s how to get started:

Steps 1 and 2.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Nicole Cozma)

Step 1: Head to the extension page for Context in the Chrome Web Store.

Step 2: Click the blue Add to Chrome and then press Install on the pop-up that follows.

A small tutorial will load to show you how to use the add-on (steps also provided below).

(Credit:
Screenshot by Nicole Cozma)

Step 3: Click the New Context button in the bottom left-hand corner. Name the context and choose an icon to represent it. You can repeat this as many times as you like until you have all of your contexts created.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Nicole Cozma)

Your contexts can be organized by dragging their tiles with the move arrow in the top right-hand corner. So if you want extensions for work to be listed before extensions for shopping, it’s an easy fix.

Step 4: Drag your extensions from the list at the top to the correct Context in the area below. If you make a mistake, simply click the X on the right side of the extension’s tile.

Extensions in their respective Context groups.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Nicole Cozma)

In some cases, you may want an extension to load for all contexts–like a theme for Chrome or your Gmail checker.

Step 5: Press the Save button at the bottom of the screen. Now you’re ready to get started using the Context extension.

All you need to do is click on the small, white puzzle piece in your Chrome toolbar to choose which Context group you want to load. There’s also an option to load all extensions, if you want everything available.

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