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(Credit:
Secunia)

For example, my most recent Secunia scan indicated that Apple’s iTunes and QuickTime, Adobe Systems’ Flash player, and Sun Microsystems’ Java Platform were out-of-date. I opened the Apple Software Update app to get the latest versions of iTunes, QuickTime, and the
Safari browser (which Secunia did not identify as out-of-date).

Secunia’s online scanner gives you the option of checking “Enable thorough system inspection” to have the scanner look for applications in nondefault locations. Using this option can add several minutes to the scan–with the option unchecked, the scan usually takes only a few seconds to complete.

The Java site claims that you should retain old versions of the Java Runtime Environment because some older apps may be incompatible with more recent releases. Still, if you’re running out of disk space, you can remove old Java versions via Windows’ Add or Remove Programs Control Panel applet (or Vista’s Programs and Features).

Secunia's online software scanner will identify old, vulnerable versions of the applications installed on your PC.

I also visited Adobe’s site to get the latest release of the Flash player and Sun’s site for a Java update, but Secunia’s scanner still identified these programs as vulnerable. It turns out, the old versions of Flash and Java aren’t uninstalled when the new versions are added.

You don’t have to wait until your devices or applications start to act up to update them, however. Scanning your system for out-of-date programs can help you avoid trouble by pointing out the unpatched security holes on your PC.

A couple of weeks ago, my notebook lost its ability to connect to AT&T’s 3G data network. Downloading and installing the latest version of the company’s communications management application restored the network link. (I had to use the notebook’s built-in Wi-Fi adapter to download the program, of course.)

On my year-old notebook, there are six different Java versions, each using about 136MB of disk space. To play it safe, keep at least the last two Java releases installed.

Just yesterday, my
iPhone started acting up: the screen would freeze, and phone calls wouldn’t hang up, among other symptoms. Once I connected the device to a PC and downloaded the most recent release of the iPhone software, the glitches disappeared.

In the past, I have recommended Secunia’s online software scan and the PC-based version, the free Personal Software Inspector. I use Secunia’s online scanner to get a snapshot of my software’s update status. But rather than applying any necessary patches via Secunia’s service, I go to the vendor’s site to download the latest version.

The in-depth scan did uncover a handful of outdated applications on my PC that the online scanner missed, though none posed the same security threat as the old versions of the iTunes/QuickTime and Flash player did. Still, the patches are free, so why not?

If only all PC problems could be solved simply by reinstalling the software. It may be the shotgun approach to hardware and software troubleshooting, but sometimes a software refresh will clear out whatever cobwebs were futzing up the works.

You can remove old versions of the Flash player by downloading and running Adobe’s Flash Player Uninstaller (scroll to the bottom of the page to find the uninstaller download).

Icahn is backing a change of management in part because he does not think Microsoft can negotiate with the current board. But Legg Mason said that is an unacceptable reason to change management.

“We believe the current Board acted with care and diligence when evaluating Microsoft’s offers. We believe the Board is independent and focused on value creation for long-term shareholders,” Bill Miller, chairman and chief investment officer of Legg Mason said in a release. But the investment house did say that it supports continuing efforts to negotiate.

The investment firm controls about 60.7 million shares of Yahoo, which represents about 4.4 percent of outstanding Yahoo stock.

Legg Mason Capital Management said Friday it will back Yahoo’s existing management at the company’s shareholder’s meeting next month.

“While boards are there to protect shareholder interests, shareholders own the company. If Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo, it can make the terms and conditions of its offer public. If Yahoo shareholders support it, I am confident the Board of Yahoo will accept it,” Miller said in the statement.

“We would prefer that the company and Mr. Icahn reach a mutual agreement on the composition of the Board and end this disruptive proxy contest,” the statement says.

Investor Carl Icahn has proposed an alternative slate of board members, as part of a bid to get Yahoo to agree to some sort of takeover or deal with Microsoft.

AOL has formally launched the third-party mobile-advertising division of its Platform-A ad-serving technology, the company said Monday. The division has sprung out of Third Screen Media, a mobile-ad start-up that AOL acquired last spring.

Platform-A’s mobile-ad options extend from text and picture messages to mobile Web ads to video and downloadable applications.

Mobile advertising got a big boost upon the launch of the
iPhone 3G, with entire ad networks and start-ups popping up around Apple’s device–making it the hot new platform for both Web and third-party app development.

Third Screen Media runs its own mobile-ad network, but Monday’s announcement is focused on a new technology that enables publishers to put their ads on multiple networks using a strategy that AOL calls “inventory partitioning.” They can, in other words, use a Web interface to pick and choose what percentage of their available ads go on which networks.

Plus, Yahoo loses a couple of high-level employees–and it’s getting set to announce a deal with Google. And Microsoft might inspire raging debates in tech circles, but as far as our nation’s politicians are concerned, the vote for Redmond is unanimous.

What’s in the future for Funny or Die?

Cities’ green action plans; Yahoo loses a couple of prominent employees; and Republican and Democrats cast a vote for Microsoft.

Study: U.S. retains lead in science, tech

Full Road Trip 2008 coverage

Mobile broadcaster Flixwagon hitches to iPhone

Today’s stories:

Microsoft gets bipartisan support

Yahoo to announce reorg, Google ad deal

Cities take lead in climate change

Also, Charlie Cooper checks in with News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman, who is now a few days into his Road Trip 2008 through the South.

Download today’s podcast

City governments’ response to climate change ranges from cutting-edge distributed energy to adding more bike lanes and trees. Climate change experts from four cities–London, Toronto, Chicago, and New York–spoke at the Mass Impact Symposium Monday in Cambridge, Mass., and CNET News.com intern Holly Jackson had the chance to chat with reporter Martin LaMonica about what they said.

Algae farm in Mexico to produce ethanol in ‘09

Prominent open-source developer bids Yahoo adieu

Listen now:

Update 6:50 p.m. PT: I updated with Google’s no-comment, too.

Yahoo has been trying to fend off Microsoft’s advances, arguing that it doesn’t value the search pioneer highly enough. But the possible deal, as described by the Journal, could theoretically result in a tight tie with Microsoft, too.

Yahoo could announce a deal within a week to carry Google search ads, potentially including a nonexclusive arrangement to allay antitrust concerns, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Yahoo and Google declined to comment on the report.

The argument is that opening the system to others could allay concerns that the partnership could be anticompetitive and therefore run afoul of antitrust regulators. Google already dominates the market for ads delivered alongside search results, and Yahoo is in second place.

As envisioned, the system would employ a real-time auction that would draw ads from Yahoo, Google, and potentially other companies including Microsoft. The ads would be selected on the basis of maximum revenue, which would be shared between Yahoo and the other search partner, the Journal said.

Yahoo and Google recently concluded a limited two-week test to see how well a partnership might work–and to get some bargaining leverage in Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Yahoo.

The two programs are much the same in features, although some of the differences may matter greatly to certain users. iPhoto, for example, has a slick way to batch-edit photos, including the capability to update dates and times embedded in photos and to apply the same custom image corrections to several shots at once. Picasa also has batch-editing features, but it doesn’t give you as much control. In single images, though, Picasa lets you insert text directly into photos, and offers a few handy enhancement tools missing in iPhoto, like graduated tints (useful for improving landscape shots). But overall, both products offer flexible image correction and enhancement, including variable rotation for out-of-kilter images, red-eye correction, and white-balance correction.

Even though this early build of Picasa is missing some features, I’m going to use it and not iPhoto. It has a cleaner and less intrusive organizational system, stronger photo-editing features, it’s fast to use, and setting up online albums is free. When I want to print calendars and books I’ll drop back to iPhoto, but Picasa’s feature set makes it a better day-to-day product.

As Stephen Shankland reports, Picasa also integrates with the online Picasa Web Albums photo-sharing site, just as the Windows version does. Changes made on the sharing site (captions or name tagging) don’t migrate back into your computer’s library, though. iPhoto, of course, connects to Apple’s Mobile Me service for online, shared galleries. Picasa Web Albums is free, though. Mobile Me costs $99 a year.

Other features coming over to Picasa Mac in the future include Webcam capture, screensaver control, and the photo preview feature from Windows (which I believe is superfluous in OS X, given its strong Preview app).

Picasa organizes the photos on your hard disk. It also manages importing from your cameras and memory cards.

iPhoto currently offers much better support for printing books, calendars, and cards through Apple. Picasa should get the capability to print similar services later. iPhoto’s on-screen slideshows are also better; it lets you use the “Ken Burns effect” to make watching stills more compelling.

I’m a somewhat dissatisfied owner of a new MacBook. One of the things I was looking forward to with the computer was the vaunted easy photo management I kept hearing about. But I found the
Mac’s free photo management app, iPhoto, frustrating to use, compared to the product I had become accustomed to on Windows: Google’s Picasa. I didn’t like the fact that I had to manually import photos into the product–even photos already on my Mac–and that the import process made duplicates of my photos when I did so. I much prefer Picasa, which simply scans your computer’s directories and shows you the photos it finds on your disks.

The editor in Picasa lets you add text and graduated filters to images.

Monday, Google is releasing Picasa 3 for Mac OS X (download). I got an early look at the new product, still marked “beta,” and found it a faithful port of the PC version (Picasa is also available for Linux), minus a few features like the timeline view and geotagging (the former is probably gone for good; the latter is coming in a subsequent build). Picasa lacks some of the fun features in iPhoto, too: It doesn’t take full advantage of the multi-touch trackpad features in the new MacBooks, like zoom and rotate. It does, though, read ratings and tags from iPhoto libraries, so it would be easy to use Picasa alongside an iPhoto library. But as it doesn’t export back to iPhoto; it’s a one-way trip for the metadata.

On the other hand, Picasa lets you pin photos to the “photo tray” for batch operations like e-mailing, uploading, or making items into a collage. You can multi-select images in iPhoto to do the same thing, but the intermediate tray concept in Picasa is much easier to use–one stray mouse click won’t undo your selection.

The problem is the standard Penryn chip consumes more power than the chip currently used inside the MacBook Air. Phone News thinks Apple will compensate for the increased power draw with a larger battery and a more powerful charging adapter.

Apple’s MacBook Air could be getting a fresh new look–inside at least–in the coming weeks.

(Credit:
Apple)

Engadget points out that Intel will likely have low-voltage and ultra-low voltage Penryn-class chips out fairly soon, in line with Intel’s historical product segmentation. That would ease some of the power concerns, although the lower voltage chips have historically underperformed their standard counterparts.

Rumors of new Apple notebooks have been all over the place this summer, given the length of time since the last redesign of the MacBook and Intel’s new Montevina chips. But Phone News believes that the MacBook Air will also get a new Penryn chip that will improve performance at the cost of battery life.

The MacBook Air could be getting a new chip in short order.

The MacBook Air’s performance doesn’t really compare to that of the rest of the MacBook lineup, but it was designed to be thin and light, not as a gaming rig. Still, adding one of the new Penryn chips to the MacBook Air could help improve performance for things like video playback, noted by some as an issue with the early MacBook Air units.

So how long is that window between where an event ends and when the photos are uploaded? From what I can tell, it’s not long. About 18 hours post-party I uploaded two separate images, both of which were taken on the same device and at the event. One was uploaded from my phone while the other from my computer. Oddly enough, neither was picked out for auto-tagging even two hours after being uploaded. In comparison, the one I took (and uploaded) during the hours of the party got flagged for tags almost instantly.

If your photos come from a certain time or place, Facebook will suggest tags for you if they correlate to an event you were attending.

All of this might seem like a lot of fuss over a minor feature, but it could be the precursor for some very advanced tagging automation that’s on the horizon. For instance, the pictures I snapped came with geo-locational information as part of the EXIF data. I can see this information when I upload the same shots to Flickr, but Facebook doesn’t seem to do anything with it. Take into account that most parties include an address, and the same auto-tagging system could work to retroactively help tag your photos based on time and location alone.

Of course, more important than simply matching up photos to albums (something humans can easily do on their own) is using facial recognition to tag faces automatically. Facebook was one of the innovators in supplying a way for people to tag their friends in photos, which has even managed to carry over well on the
iPhone application, but it’s time-consuming and doesn’t work well with people you don’t remember the next day. Having a system that would automatically go through uploaded photos and offer up suggestions of who it thinks the people are based on one part actual analysis and another off the known guest list (provided by the Facebook RSVPs) Facebook could have a very powerful offering indeed.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

One of my favorite Facebook features is auto-tagging. It happened to me last night by accident and ended up being one of those very rare moments of using a product where I got a big grin on my face. The feature comes into play when the service recognizes that a photo or video upload happened around the same general time of an event you said you were planning to attend through Facebook’s party planning tools. If your photo or video upload occurs within these conditions you’ll be prompted to have it automatically tagged and dropped into the event’s photos and videos section.

The key to using this feature is that you don’t have to plan ahead. Auto-tagging was designed to help seed the photo and video sections of events with digital media without users having to remember to add it later. This simple one-click-to-add feature has likely increased the amount of photos that get added to events in the days that follow.

(Credit: The Beatles)

Beatles fans can now download the Fab Four’s tracks legally for free. But there’s one catch: they can only do it by subscribing to, and downloading, a podcast from Norwegian Broadcasting. According to a deal inked by the organization late last year, Norwegian Broadcasting can offer podcasts containing music as long as no more than 70 percent of the entire duration of the show contains music. Using that to its advantage, the organization has started offering daily podcast episodes that feature a three-minute discussion about an individual Beatles track and the actual recording of that track subsequent to the discussion. The podcast is available for free by subscribing via iTunes.

PropertyRoom.com, an online auction site that works with law enforcement agencies to sell previously stolen merchandise, announced Monday that it witnessed a significant upswing in traffic over the holiday season as shoppers were using online auction sites to find better deals on goods. According to the company, it welcomed over 1 million visitors in December, representing a 35 percent increase over the previous year. It also saw a 25 percent revenue increase over December 2007.

Israel Defense Forces has launched a YouTube channel containing bombing footage, surveillance video, and daily updates about the movements of Israeli forces on the ground. The channel’s official description says the videos are made available to show “documentation of the IDF’s humane action and operational success in Operation Cast Lead.”

Amazon announced Monday that it has partnered with Roku to deliver video-on-demand services through the hardware company’s Netflix set-top box. Amazon said over 40,000 titles will be made available for the Roku Netflix box and will cost the same price–around $3.99–as titles currently offered on Amazon’s page. Amazon’s films will be available on the box in the coming weeks.

TraderPlanet.com, a service that offers users investment advice, has launched a new social-networking platform that aims at becoming the investment world’s “cross between MySpace and WebMD.” TraderPlanet.com will allow users to interact with each other over trading strategies and investment returns, while supplying its users with market news, an index of trader opinions, as well as chat rooms, blogs, and forum discussions to help improve interaction. Registration is free and available now.

Microsoft, when it initially announced its buyout bid, had valued Yahoo at $31 a share. Last week, it raised the bid to $33 a share.

Will it or won’t it?
Wall Street has conflicting views on whether Microsoft will return to the negotiating table.

UBS analysts, meanwhile, believe that Microsoft still needs Yahoo and that a deal is still doable. But any chance for reigniting negotiations, they said, depends on whether Yahoo moves forward with its Google ad-outsourcing deal, as is expected midweek.

On Saturday, Microsoft said the two companies could not overcome differences in opinion over the price of a potential acquisition. Microsoft was offering $33 a share; Yahoo wanted $37 per share. Yahoo’s two largest institutional investors were willing to take $34 a share, according to a source familiar with their thinking.

Since the opening bell, shares of Microsoft, which remain in positive territory, have been edging slowly south, while Yahoo, which plunged into the red following Redmond’s withdrawal over the weekend of its unsolicited buyout bid, has been pushing upward. Whether this convergence is a sign investors believe the parties may lock horns again has yet to be seen.

This blog was also updated at 9:50 a.m. PDT.:

“We see the bid premium diminishing but not disappearing given…precedents for a thwarted bidder returning, such as Oracle/BEA,” James Mitchell, a Goldman Sachs analyst, stated in a research note.

“Microsoft is far enough behind in (its online services business) that it needs to commit to a strategy, and waiting on a Yahoo acquisition simply puts the company further behind,” Pritchard stated in a research report.

Pritchard predicted in his report that Microsoft stock will do well following the weekend’s news. “We believe (Microsoft) shares can outperform the market by 10 percent over the next 12 months, although upside beyond this is likely capped due to worries of higher online services business spending coming,” Pritchard wrote.

“However, it remains unclear if this deal alone will enable Yahoo to hit the aggressive (2009 and 2010 financial) projections it recently set forth, and we believe some large Yahoo shareholders are unhappy with the prospect of outsourcing a meaningful portion of the company’s strategic business,” May stated in his report.

This post was updated at 1:45 p.m. PDT with updated information following the market’s close:

Shares in the software giant have been under pressure since Microsoft announced its buyout bid. Microsoft closed at $32.47 a share on January 31–the day before it announced its unsolicited bid. During the past three months, the stock had traded as high as $32.10 and as low as $26.87.

Microsoft shares creep up
Microsoft, meanwhile, opened at $29.95 per share on Monday, up 2.4 percent from Friday.

Yahoo shares fought back some of their losses in late morning trading, reaching $24.70 a share, down 13.85 percent from Friday’s close.

Yahoo, prior to the bid’s original announcement, had closed at $19.18 on January 31. Over the course of the three months since then, Yahoo’s shares had traded as high as $30.25 and as low as $25.72.

He added that instead of buying Yahoo, Microsoft would be better off acquiring “smaller but more innovative Internet companies” and taking an aggressive approach to signing advertising deals.

At the start of the session, the Internet search pioneer was down nearly 20 percent, and in premarket trading down 22 percent.

Microsoft, which had been relatively quiet on its plan B while its Yahoo quest was still alive, outlined a few of its options in a letter to its employees after the pullout.

Microsoft closed out the session at $29.08, down 0.55 percent.

“We believe that Microsoft’s decision to walk away is driven by its desire to expose Yahoo management as apathetic to shareholder interests,” Heath Terry, a Credit Suisse analyst, said in a report.

Microsoft’s gains have been shrinking through the morning, leaving the software giant up 0.24 percent to $29.48 a share in late morning trading.

Yahoo kicked off at $23.02 per share as the markets opened Monday–down 19.7 percent from Friday’s close. The Internet pioneer regained a bit of ground compared with its premarket price on Monday of $22.41.

Yahoo’s shares took a hammering early Monday morning. But by the market’s close, a badly beaten, but not mortally wounded, Yahoo ended the day down 15 percent at $24.37 a share.

Needham analyst Mark May, meanwhile, anticipates Yahoo will make a move to appease its shareholders by announcing a “transformational partnership or transaction,” such as a Google ad outsourcing deal.

But Walter Pritchard, an analyst with Cowen & Co., doesn’t believe Microsoft’s decision to walk away was a negotiating tactic.