Tech News - Apple Launches MacBook Air.

Here is a round-up of this week's tech news and what's hot in the Web :

1. Apple Launches MacBook Air.
Apple unveiled a new super-slim laptop at the recent Macworld trade show. Dubbed the MacBook Air, it measures 0.4cm at its thinnest and 1.9cm at its beefiest and is being hailed as the world's thinnest notebook computer. There are two models : A US$1,799 1.6Ghz version with an 80GB hard drive and a 1.8Ghz 64GB version with a flash-based solid state drive for US$3,098. The laptop, however, does not comes with an optical drive for reading CDs and DVDs, a feature that Apple says will unlikely be missed as movies and music can be downloaded over the Internet and optical drives can be access from other PCs.

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The MacBook Air thinness and light weight of about 1.5kg have upped the cool factor for notebook design and is causing ripples among notebook makers such as Dell, Sony and Lenova as design is how these companies differentiate themselves. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the pack will come up with if they want to capture consumers' dollars.

2. Facebook Sues Over Alleged Hacking.
The popular social networking site is taking Istra Holdings, a Canadian operator of pornography websites, to court for allegedly trying to steal its users' personal information. Facebook claims that Istra tried to hack into its servers 200,00 times in June last year.

Being repositories of personal data ranging from e-mail addresses, dates of birth to users' preferences, social networking sites are attractive targets for data thieves and this case echoes what security experts have been harping on - that publishing to much information on social networks is dangerous. And with 55 million members, Facebook is the perfect mining ground for spammers, hoping to compile e-mail lists, and criminals seeking to steal identity.

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3. Sony Dumps Copy Protection.
Good news for music lovers. Sony BMG has announced that its entire catalogue of music will be available for download - without DRM - at Amazon's digital music store by the end of January. The record label had all along resisted selling tunes without DRM which prevents songs from being copied and is the last of the big four major music studios to finally give up copy protection.

The tie-up makes Amazon the only online music store to offer protection-free downloads for all its tracks from the big four music labels and makes them a much stronger competitor to Apple's iTunes store who has cornered 70 per cent of the digital music download market. With music downloaded from Amazon playable on all types of music players - unlike iTunes music downloads which are playable only on iPods - together with the limited selection of tracks from iTunes that are sold without DRM, the tie-up sets the scene for a battle for music lovers' dollars.

*More Tech News :
- Google's "Knol" Challenges Wikipedia.
- Members Blast Facebook.
- Google Opens Up Orkut.

Flock - A Versatile Social Web Browser.

Everyone is familiar with web browsers like the ever-present Internet Explorer, popular FireFox and others like Safari and Opera but here is a little known, but fast gaining in popularity browser called Flock.

Called a "Social Browser" by its creators, due to its ability to interact and share content with popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and various blogging and news aggregation services, Flock is a web browser based on fast, secure and open-source Mozilla technologies.

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Even though Flock was actually released about two years ago, the latest version is decisively different and increasingly relevant, considering the heavy social bent that is evident in today"s Web. Flock makes it very easy to share content, publish to your blogs and connect with your friends at the same time. Here are some of the cool features that makes Flock a strikingly different browser from Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari :

1. YouTube, Flickr and Photobucket Integration.
With the in-built Photo Uploader, you can edit and upload up to 1,000 photos at any one time to Flickr and Photobucket and through the Media Minibar, instantly find, stream and view photos and videos from YouTube, Photobucket and Flickr, and also get informed when your friends post new media content. Built-in quick links allows you to embed images in blogs and bookmark content streams that you like so that you can return to them in the Media MiniBar without having to go to Flickr.

2. Facebook Integration.
For fans of Facebook, Flock's superb integration features with the popular social networking site allows you to keep tabs on your Facebook life without ever having to go to Facebook. A left sidebar list all your Facebook friends, allows you to browse their photos, your invites, messages and other Facebook stuff. Updated profiles and any change in information from your friends can be easily seen at a glance.

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3. Superior Bookmarking Feature.
Flock's Favorites, with the ability to add tags and descriptions, has to be the best bookmarking feature among all the browsers. In addition to being able to save offline, it has a built-in ability to
save your favorite sites to ma.gnolia. or Del.icio.us, enabling you to access them from any browser on any PC. The favorites manager also comes integrated with a favorites and history section.


4. Flock's My World.
Keep up-to-date when your friends post new photos and videos or content from your favorite sites with Flock's custom homepage, "My World". It comes with a Yahoo search box and allows quick access to all the favorite sites you have visited recently together with your favorite feeds.

5. Easy Blog Publishing.
Flock's Blog Editor makes blog publishing easy. Draft online or offline or drag items from the Web Clipboard to put them in your posts and post them directly to blogs on Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Wordpress and many other blogging platforms.

6. Web clipboard.
This feature allows you grab your favorite images, text and links from the Web and save them in the sidebar for later use.

Besides the nifty features, most Firefox extensions like Google Toolbar and Greasemonkey work well in Flock and it is available for Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. It is truly a social browser and essential for those who participate in multiple social networks.

*Related posts :
- Free Web Browsers
- Free Media Players
- Alternatives To YouTube
- Free Specialised Software For Your Desktop

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Protect Your PC For Free With WinPatrol And Avast Anti-Virus Software

If you are tired of paying through your nose for security suites that are expensive, RAM-hungry and requires new subscription fees every year, there are plenty of free and tested anti-virus and anti-spyware tools in the web that do the same, if not better, job at protecting your PC as compared to paid versions. Besides well-known free security software like AVG, Spybot and Ad-Aware, here are two more free security tools that protects your PC while saving you money at the same time :

1. WinPatrol
Voted Tool of The Month by PCWorld for June 2007, WinPatrol's Scotty the Watch Dog monitors and alerts you whenever an unwelcome program tries to add itself to the set of applications that start up automatically whenever Windows boots. It detects, blocks and allows you to remove spyware and malware that make changes to your registry without your permission and helps to keep your system tray free of clutter.

The intuitive program comes with a cookie remover and through the Startup Programs function, provides a detailed list of each program that your PC launches at system startup. A smart feature, The Delayed Start, lets you delay the launch of non-essential programs for up to an hour after the system boots, enabling Windows to load faster. WinPatrol increases your PC speed and system performance, and by letting you know what programs are and should be running at all times, puts control of your computer back into your own hands.

2. Avast! Anti-Virus Software
A complete anti-virus package, Avast! Anti-Virus Home Edition is free for home users and has everything you need in an anti-virus tool. Providing real-time protection against nasty viruses and malware, Avast! also comes with an e-mail scanner for detecting web-mail borne viruses and through the P2P Shield, protects against virus attacks spread through peer-to-peer file sharing networks like Kazaa.

Additional features includes automatic updating of the virus database and the Network Shield, an intrusion detection system, which provides protection against known Internet attacks and worms by analysing all network traffic and scans it for malicious contents. Easy to use and highly customizable, Avast! comes with two interfaces - simple for novices and advanced for experienced users - and is compatible with all Windows operating systems.

*Related posts :
- Free utilities for computer security
- Free desktop utilities & applications


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The Top 10 Freebie Posts For 2007

Looking back, it had been a remarkable journey since the launched of this blog in July 2007. With the original intention of searching for open-source and free software and web services, and sharing it with readers, I was amazed at the amount of free software and web tools that I have been able to unearth in the short six months of this blog existence. From free security suites, free desktop utilities and productivity tools to free web services and even home entertainment freebies like free music, videos and games, the journey has been an extremely fun and fruitful one.

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Besides the obvious savings in turning to open-source and free software for my computer needs plus the benefits of not being tied down to unwanted and costly updates of propriety software, this blog have also expanded my horizon and opened my eyes to the many innovations available in the Web, and I hope that readers found the content in this blog as useful to them as it was to me.

And as an indication of this blog popularity, it is in fact the fastest growing in terms of traffic among the three hobby blogs that I have launched in 2007 and also has the unwanted distinction of having its content stolen and reproduced, thrice, at other sites by unscrupulous content thieves.

In thanking loyal readers and closing what had been a most rewarding year and hoping for a equally fruitful 2008, here is a recap of the top 10 posts, in terms of traffic, for 2007 :

1 - Linus - A Free Alternative To Windows.
2 - Free Specialised Software for Your Desktop.
3 - Google's Suite Of Free Utilities & Web Services.
4 - WatZatSong & Other Free Online Quirky Tools.
5 - Tips For Downloading Freebies - When "Free" Isn't Really Free.
6 - Free Keywords Suggestion Tools.
7 - Free Graphics Software.
8 - Free Utilities For Computer Security.
9 - Tech News - Google Challenges Wikipedia With "Knol".
10 - Free Online Nostalgic Games.

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