PC Magazine June 2010

Please Don’t Take My TweetDeck Twitter is about to become a much more robust platform for doing, well, whatever it is we do on Twitter every day. Most of the people I follow — meaning those whom I actually pay attention to — use it in much the same way. Yes, there are the feeds, which deliver hard-news headlines, but the beauty of Twitter is what lies in between the news reports. In any case, I keep track of all things Twitter related with TweetDeck, a desktop Twitter management utility I’ve been using since 2008. Inside TweetDeck For those unfamiliar with the Adobe Air – based app, TweetDeck lets you customize your Twitter world in an organized, columnar view, with unfiltered tweets from those you follow in the first column, tweets that mention…

Rarely is the technology world privy to intrigue equal to the case of the missing iPhone. This spring, next-gen iPhone speculation reached a fever pitch when technology blog Gizmodo posted a hands-on analysis of what appeared to be a fourth-generation iPhone prototype. Gizmodo dismantled the device, finding real Apple components, providing more compelling evidence that the device was the real deal. The unit Gizmodo obtained had a front-facing video camera, a flash bulb next to a bigger camera, a larger battery, a slightly smaller screen, and a reworked industrial design that scraps the aluminum back for a ceramic one. After Gizmodo posted its analysis of the iPhone prototype, police raided Jason Chen’s home. How Gizmodo obtained the iPhone prototype is what has the public, Apple, and police very interested. The device was found…

WIKIPEDIA COMPANION Wikipedia Companion is an add-on that allows you to quickly search Wikipedia for any term you find, open the results in a new tab, or open them in a frame over your existing window. SEPIATOWN SepiaTown is a Web service that takes thousands of vintage photographs of cities around the world and matches them up with their modern-day locations on a map. CORRECTIONS AND AMPLIFICATIONS Our May Front Side story “Anatomy of a Hack” has been revised online to correct an inaccuracy and explain further about SQL injection. Click here to read the updated story.…

Despite warnings from privacy advocates to protect your personal information while online, many adults are still engaging in risky behavior via social networking sites, according to a new study from Consumer Reports. Of the 2,000 people surveyed by the magazine, about 52 percent of adult Internet users have posted data that could be dangerous, including home addresses, full date of birth, and information about their children. About 38 percent of people have posted their birth date to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, which could be used by identity thieves, the report said. Another 8 percent posted their street addresses. Combine that with an open profile and a status update that says you’ll be vacationing in europe for the next week, and it’s the perfect storm for a home invasion. The…

SECURITY WATCH Research firm Secunia released an advisory about an unpatched vulnerability in Apple’s Safari 4.0 Web browser. The advisory doesn’t specify a platform, meaning that it could affect all versions, including the iPhone. Secunia describes the flaw as an error in the handling of parent windows. A specially crafted Web page that opens and closes pop-up windows can cause the browser to execute a function with an invalid function pointer. This pointer can be manipulated so as to transfer control to the attacker in the context of the Web browser. But so far there are no reports to indicate that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild. — Larry Seltzer GEARLOG A Windows 7 Media Player Storage-solution provider Western Digital has developed the first networkable, live HD media player that’s compatible with…

A couple of months ago I examined the Emotiv EPOC 14-electrode EEG headset, which lets you control computers and video games with your thoughts rather than your hands. But in the process of writing that article, I learned that there wasn’t a strong application that took advantage of its capabilities. So I decided to write one myself. I wanted to see if I could use the headset to control a WowWee Rovio mobile webcam using my mind and facial gestures. I started with a program I wrote called Robodance, which already works as a control program for the Rovio. This provided a baseline for comparing the efficacy of the mousedriven interface to the headset’s. First, I decided what I wanted to control in terms of the Rovio and its camera’s movements. The…