By Ryan Paul
July 5, 2009 3:30 PM CT

The HTML 5 video element has the potential to liberate streaming Internet video from plugin prison, but a debate over which codec to define in the standard is threatening to derail the effort. Ars takes a close look at the HTML 5 codec controversy and examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of H.264 and Ogg Theora.

The increasingly competitive browser market has at last created an environment in which emerging Web standards can flourish. One of the harbingers of the open Web renaissance is HTML 5, the next major version of the W3C's ubiquitous HTML standard. Although HTML 5 is still in the draft stage, several of its features have already been widely adopted by browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

Among the most compelling is the "video" element, which has the potential to free Web video from its plugin prison and make video content a native first-class citizen on the Web—if codec disagreements don't stand in the way. In an article last month, we explored the challenges and opportunities associated with the HTML 5 video element. One of the most significant of these challenges is the lack of consensus around a standard media codec, a contentious issue that has rapidly escalated into a major controversy.

The debate has now stalled without a clear resolution in sight. The HTML 5 working group is split between supporters of Ogg Theora and H.264. Their inability to find a compromise that is acceptable to all stakeholders has compelled HTML 5 spec editor Ian Hickson to "admit defeat" and give up on the effort to define specific codecs and media formats in the standard itself.

Dr.WEB CureIt! is an antivirus and anti-spyware scanning tool that is developed on the Dr.WEB engine which will help you quickly scan and cure, if necessary, a computer without installation of the Dr.WEB Anti-virus. Dr.WEB CureIT! automatically detects the language of the OS it is installed to and sets the scanner interface accordingly (if the local language is not supported, English is enabled). Dr.WEB CureIt! supports the following languages: Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovakian, Spanish, Ukrainian. Dr.WEB CureIt! contains the most up-to-date add-ons to the Dr.WEB virus bases going up to twice per hour frequency at periods of high malware submissions

Dr.WEB CureIT! detects and removes
￭ Mass-mailing worms
￭ E-mail viruses
￭ Peer-to-peer viruses
￭ Internet worms
￭ File viruses
￭ Trojans
￭ Stealth viruses
￭ Polymorphic viruses
￭ Bodiless viruses
￭ Macro viruses
￭ MS Office viruses
￭ Script viruses
￭ Spyware
￭ Spybots
￭ Password stealers
￭ Keyloggers
￭ Paid Dialers
￭ Adware
￭ Riskware
￭ Hacktools
￭ Backdoors
￭ Joke programs
￭ Malicious scripts
￭ Other malware

Author: Doctor Web, Ltd.
Date: 2009-07-02
Size: 14 MB
License: Shareware
Requires: Win All

Lunascape5 Genesis is the World’s First Triple Engine Browser, the World’s Faster Browser, and is easily customized to your liking. Some of the newest and most interesting features include:

Since Lunascape 2.0, both Internet Explorer’s Trident and Firefox’s Gecko have been included in our browser. With Lunascape5 Genesis, Safari’s and Chrome’s WebKit are now also included. Switch between rendering engines to avoid browser specific issues with certain web sites and optimize for speed as you see fit.
Crash Protection Functionality

Lunascape is introducing better crash protection. In this new version of Lunascape, you do not need to terminate your browser in the case of a crash. You only need to close the defective tab. Lunascape displays the possible causes in a dialog window, which you can close when you’re ready to continue browsing.
Mouse Gestures

Lunascape offers you a useful feature to improve your browsing navigation. Just by clicking and moving your mouse you can execute common commands such as page forward and backward, close or refresh actions. All without using toolbars or the keyboard.
Tab Browsing

Tab browsing allows you to have multiple pages open in the same window, easily accessible in different tabs. This way, you can switch quickly and naturally between the pages you are viewing without opening any additional windows. Lunascape can open up to 100 tabs!
RSS News and Blog Info

Want to subscribe to a RSS feed? Just drag-and-drop an RSS feed into your Favorites (Bookmarks) and Lunascape will automatically provide you the last news and blog events as they appear. Similar to an electrical bulletin board, RSS feeds display constant news updates while you are using Lunascape. Easily register new RSS feeds with only few clicks and get your favorite news live.
Fully Customizable with Skins

Lunascape is one of the first browsers to be fully customizable. Our high quality Skins can be installed very quickly and easily. When installing a new Skin, only the appearance of the browser will change, the speed and features remain exactly the same. Lunascape Skins
Lunascape Skins
Abundant Plug-ins

Plug-ins permit expansion of the functionalities and features of Lunascape. Lunascape supports both IE and Lunascape made plugins. New plug-ins are added frequently. Plugin Center
Plugin Center
Podcast

As well as RSS feeds, you can subscribe to podcasts and Lunascape brings you the latest updates in real time.
Form Auto-Saver

Frustrated because you lost everything you have written in a webmail or a blog after clicking the wrong button by mistake or closing your page? Lunascape Auto-saver memorizes what you have entered and automatically repopulates forms as you use them.
Security Management

In order to protect you against phishing, viruses and spyware, you can deactivate Java and ActiveX scripts while downloading. Scripts can unfortunately also delete critical information such as encrypted login passwords, address bar history, and personal data. With Lunascape, it is easy to configure your security setup as you see fit.
Popup News

Lunascape provides a new way to keep an eye on important information in real time., Popup News will display the last updates from RSS feeds, Favorites or Ticker information in a pop-up window on a frequency you can set. Popup News will keep you informed even when Lunascape is minimized in the task tray.
Multi-Search Bar

Lunascape provides a useful tool for your Internet search. Enter words in the Search Bar, select the search engine you want to use in a pull-down list and get your results without type any URL. You can also add your own favorite search engine easily if it is not already listed.
Smart Favorites
Favorites in Lunascape is automatically optimized to your web browsing stats and presents the most visited web sites at the top for you to find them more easily. You can always turn this function off if you prefer good old Favorites.

Author: Lunascape Co., Ltd.
Date: 2009-07-02
Size: 8.41 MB
License: Freeware
Requires: Win 2K/03/XP/Vista

LockHunter is a free tool to delete files blocked by something you do not know. LockHunter is useful for fighting against malware, and other programs that are blocking files without a reason. Unlike other similar tools it deletes files into the recycle bin so you may restore them if deleted by mistake.

Windows 7/2000/2003/Vista/XP
Freeware
Uninstaller - Yes
Latest Changes
- 64 bit support added

Inkscape is an open source SVG editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc. Supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, node editing, svg-to-png export, grouping, and more. Its main motivation is to provide the Open Source community with a fully XML, SVG, and CSS2 compliant SVG drawing tool.

Windows 2000/2003/9x/XP
Open Source

July 2, 2009 11:55 PM ET

IDG News Service - In the story "Ask.com bets on semantic search, targeting special audiences," posted on Thursday, the last name of Ask Networks President Scott Garell was misspelled.

The story has been corrected on the wire and the paragraphs 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 and 16 now read: Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks, views things from a different perspective, pointing out that Ask.com's queries are growing. The search engine handled 486 million U.S. queries in May 2008 and 555 million in May of this year, according to comScore. "In a very tough and competitive market, we're holding our own," he said in an interview.

Garell also points out that Ask.com and the other sites that make up the Ask Network, like Dictionary.com, are collectively the sixth-largest Web property in the U.S., ahead of powerhouses like eBay, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon, according to comScore. Garell is particularly encouraged by Ask.com's advances in semantic search and in its attempts to attract specific audiences like NASCAR fans to the search engine. "People don't talk in keywords," Garell said.

According to Garell, that perception persists, although after the dot-com bubble burst, Ask Jeeves abandoned the consumer search market for several years to focus on enterprise search, before reversing course in 2003. Garell thinks Ask.com can pursue this "audience-centric" strategy with eight to 10 vertical markets per year, having seen that it's an effective and interesting approach to promoting and growing usage of the search engine.

By Sylvie Barak
Thursday, 2 July 2009, 16:42

RUMOUR HAS IT the next version of Nvidia's Ion platform will pack a much stronger performance punch and come with twice the number of shaders. The first we heard of the plan was at Nvidia's analyst day a few weeks back, when the Green Goblin mentioned it would be releasing two more versions of the modified GeForce 9400M processor it calls Ion, although it stingily neglected to give out either dates or specifications.

Our sources expect products based around Ion 2 to be available before the end of the year, however. New details have tipped up on the tech news site Fudzilla, claiming that the green machine's second generation integrated graphics platform will come complete with a die shrink and twice the shaders of its contemporary. Since the Ion 1 currently boasts 16 shaders, that means the Ion 2 will have 32 shaders, for all of you who forgot your calculators today.

The increase in shaders is apparently aimed at upping the system's 3D rendering capabilities, although why this would be so essential on a netbook or dirt-cheap notebook is a bit beyond us. But the die shrink should mean that the platform's current low power draw remains unchanged, and it probably also means it will be cheaper to produce, although it seems highly unlikely that price cut will filter down to consumers.

When the INQ asked graphics analyst Jon Peddie about the speculative specs, he heaved a heavy sigh and told us ""We are for better or worse trapped in the mantra of Moore's law," adding "We have to do more, make better, faster, and less expensive machines and components under the guise that if you build it they will come." How very fatalistic. Elaborating, Peddie explained "someone will see the new capabilities and say, 'Hey, I can use that to...' and then we get new exciting software developments. It's an act of faith, not a consumer demand."

by Marguerite Reardon
July 2, 2009 2:25 PM PDT

Net neutrality advocates got a boost of support Wednesday from the Obama administration when it released grant guidelines for spending the government's $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package.

Companies winning grants to help build new broadband infrastructure will have to follow the Federal Communications Commission's Internet Policy statement, which prohibits companies from deliberately blocking or slowing Internet traffic on their networks.

Proponents of that concept, Net neutrality, have been pushing the government to pass laws or set stricter requirements to ensure that consumers get access to content they want and that competitors are not run out of business by network operators. The phone companies and cable operators have opposed such legislation, a sentiment that seemed to be shared by the Republican-controlled FCC under the previous presidential administration.

But now that Democrats are in charge, Net neutrality advocates have been looking for indications of how the new FCC led by recently sworn-in Chairman Julius Genachowski will handle the issue. It is still too early to know whether Democrats will push for new laws. But it's becoming more clear that protecting access on the Internet is an important issue to many. Consumer and advocacy groups, such as Public Knowledge and Free Press, applauded the decision to make Net neutrality a condition of the grants.

By Chris Foresman
July 2, 2009 3:47 PM CT

Rumors concerning the latest negotiations suggests Apple is none too thrilled with NVIDIA, despite its 9400M chipset being the basis of nearly all of Apple's machines save Xeon-based Mac Pros and Xserves. Apple has nearly turned its entire line of computers over to NVIDIA-based GPUs, thanks mainly to the vastly improved graphics performance of its GeForce 9400M chipset over comparable chipsets from Intel.

However, rumors suggest that recent negotiations between the two companies over next-gen hardware have soured to the point that Apple may give NVIDIA a complete cold shoulder. According to SemiAccurate (the irony of the site's name isn't lost on us), Apple is supposedly done with the "arrogance and bluster" that NVIDIA showed in its proposals concerning chipsets for Apple's next-gen hardware, which should include Nehalem-based Intel CPUs.

According to the site's sources, the language used in Apple's rebuke was forceful and unfriendly, and amounted to Apple telling NVIDIA to "get lost" for three or four years. At issue is a major problem with previous-generation GeForce GPUs used in Apple's MacBook Pros. Due to a flaw in some of the materials used to make those chips, the GPUs have a significant chance of failing after extended periods of use.

Despite NVIDIA's claims to the contrary, Apple identified the GPUs as being defective after an internal investigation into the problem. The problem has become so widespread that Apple has already extended the period under which affected machines can be repaired or replaced, whether or not the owner has AppleCare for the machine or not. NVIDIA is still dealing with issues surrounding the GPU failures from a number of different fronts, including at least two lawsuits.

By Gavin Clarke
3rd July 2009 00:13 GMT

Debian, the foundation of Ubuntu, has rejected claims that it's potentially holding Linux's future hostage to Microsoft by including an open-source implementation of .NET in its code. A project spokesman has said GPL daddy Richard Stallman was wrong to say Mono will be featured in Debian's default installation, adding Mono would be used by just a mall number of users.

Installations affected will be those that implement the Gnome desktop using a meta package with a dependency on Tomboy. These installations will need to pull in Mono, the long-running open-source implementation of .NET now sponsored by Novell. Tomboy is a note-taking application for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X available under the LGPL. Debian developer and spokesman Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has written: "The default installation - or to be more precise: The default GNOME installation (there are installation media which install an KDE, Xfce or LXDE desktop by default, too) - hasn't changed. It still installs a more or less minimal Gnome Desktop without tomboy and without mono."

The reply came after Stallman, founder of the GNU project and a General Public License author, said the inclusion of Mono in Debian's default installation posed a "dangerous" risk to the open-source community. Stallman predicted Microsoft would challenge free and open-source implementations of C#, part of .NET and therefore Mono, using the threat of patents. In answer to Stallman, Reichle-Schmehl said Debian: "Has not [sic] 'to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy.'"

By Nick Farrell
Thursday, 2 July 2009, 11:50

A YEAR AGO Microsoft announced that Windows XP was deader than Elvis Presley and yet for some reason the operating system appears to still be going strong. But the June 30 kill date came and went. Based upon user complaints, the Vole kept XP going and even found it a new market in the netbook world.

Microsoft even allows PC makers to 'downgrade' new systems to XP, so Dell and Hewlett-Packard continue to offer XP on a selection of models. Reportedly they will not be able to do this from the end of the month, but it is still on offer at the moment. Then there are also online software sellers who are still flogging old licences that were bought years ago. Either way, it is impossible for the world to know how many copies of Windows XP are out there.

Analysts like Gartner's Michael Silver say the fact that the Vole allows downgrades for those who buy Vista means that we can't really be sure how much hardware still depends on XP. With companies not buying software or hardware because of the current recession, it is likely that Windows XP, rather than fading away, will remain in stable use on many PCs, particularly in corporate environments. Microsoft will have to convince those XP users that Windows 7 is worth the money.

Otherwise some of them might decide to jump to some of the more friendly XP-ish flavours of Linux instead. We should expect to see one of the Vole's most expensive marketing campaigns ever, all the way until Christmas. If that works, then it is likely that the outfit will make more money than it ever has before out of a single product. But in order to pull that off, Microsoft's marketeers will need to make both Windows XP and Vista users make the move to its shiny new operating system while also seeing off any rivals.

by Tom Krazit
July 2, 2009 3:40 PM PDT

Technical difficulties forced Google's Web application hosting infrastructure off the air for about four hours Thursday morning. Customers who run their Web applications on Google App Engine were forced idle Thursday by a series of issues involving "elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates," according to a Google employee posting in the Google App Engine Downtime Notify group spotted by TechCrunch.

A Google representative acknowledged the downtime and apologized for the outage. "Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem that caused the outage and service has now been restored to all applications. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site." Google's cloud-computing service allows Web developers who can't afford to host their own applications a place to get their work online. Amazon Web Services does something similar.

By Ars Staff
July 2, 2009 4:30 PM CT

Lori Drew was accused of breaking federal law last year after helping to orchestrate a MySpace hoax that left a neighbor's child dead. Now, a judge has overturned her convictions, saying that the law in question doesn't apply to mere terms of service violations. "MySpace mom" Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports.

Violating a website's terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all. The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an "overwhelming message" to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor.

Drew was due to be sentenced today. But the "message," legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a website without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns. Drew's story is, by now, familiar: Concerned that her daughter Sara was being badmouthed by a former friend, 13-year-old Megan Meier, Drew took protective parenting way too far.

Together with Sara and an employee, Drew created a MySpace account for a fictional teen boy, "Josh Evans," who would extract evidence of Megan's trash talk. But after luring the girl in with flirtatious banter, the prank took a crueler turn, and "Josh" unleashed a barrage of vicious insults—publishing a number of Megan's intimate messages to salt the wound. The sudden betrayal proved too much for Megan, who had a history of depression: The girl hanged herself in her closet on an October afternoon in 2006.

Does your burning software do everything but you can’t find anything? Did installing it take up several gigabytes of hard drive space and fill up your Taskbar?

Ashampoo Burning Studio 2009 is different. It's compact, fast and amazingly easy to use. You just choose from a list of tasks and the software guides you through every step. And even though it has all the functions you would expect from a complete burning suite, the entire software takes up less than 85 megabytes on your hard disk.

Main Features:
+ Burn and update data discs
+ Burn data to discs and update previously burned discs by adding and removing files and folders.
+ Back up your data to single or multiple discs
+ Back up your valuable data to one or more discs. Single backups can span multiple discs. Restore your backups in a single easy operation.
+ Rip and burn music
+ Rip music from CDs and burn music to audio CDs and MP3 discs on CD, DVD and Blu-ray in a variety of formats.
+ Burn movies and photos to DVDs and data discs
+ In addition to the new slideshow DVDs you can author and burn video DVDs, Video CDs (VCD), Super Video CDs (SVCD) and data video discs. Video files are automatically converted to the necessary formats.
+ Copy CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Just insert a disc, select Copy and you’re ready to burn.
+ Create and burn disc images: You can both create and burn ISO, CUE/BIN and Ashampoo’s own special ASHDISC image formats.
+ Erase rewriteable discs
+ Quick and easy erase functions for reusing rewriteable discs.
+ Burning experts can create modified copies of existing discs (read in data structure and make changes and additions) and burn discs of all kinds with full control of all main configuration options.

Regular sale price is $39.99. This version is free of charge (full version without any limitations) after e-mail registration. Otherwise there is a trial period of 10 days that you can purchase with out any email registration.

The email registration has you agree to occasionally let them send you some marketing information. (IE; new products, special deals, that sort of thing)

Author: Ashampoo
Date: 2009-07-02
Size: 51.9 MB
License: Free (with registration)
Requires: Win 2K/03/XP/Vista

Disk fragmentation is generally main cause of slow and unstable PC performance. IObit SmartDefrag helps defrag your hard drive most efficiently. With "Install it and forget it" feature, IObit SmartDefrag works automatically and quietly in the background on your PC, keeping your hard disk running at its speediest. Slow down, freeze-ups and crashes will be a thing of the past. IObit SmartDefrag is 100% free for personal, home and small business. Detected by many strictest tests, IObit SmartDefrag is 100% safe and has no spyware/adware.

Author: IObit.com
Date: 2009-07-02
Size: 2.88 MB
License: Freeware
Requires: Win 2K/03/XP/Vista