The VideoLAN team has this weekend released the 2.0.0 version (codename Twoflower) of their VLC open source media player. This build includes a heap of updates including reworked Mac and Web interfaces, a new rendering pipeline for video, multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM, new filters, support for 10 bits codecs and two new languages (Telugu and Kurmanji), subtitles improvements, (experimental) support for Blu-ray discs, and hundreds of bug fixes.

VLC 2.0.0 is available here for Windows and Mac OS X (or just OS X).

The waving flag logo of Microsoft's Windows trademark has reportedly undergone a facelift to keep up with the radically new user interface called "Metro". The new logo will take effect with the next major version of Windows. Metro is Microsoft's most drastic user interface change since Windows 95, and consists of organizing interactive information (smart application shortcuts, gadgets, images, and slideshows), in rectangular slices of the screen-space. The Windows flag logo is redesigned to reflect this change, it's now flat, angled, with all four rectangles in the same plane. CNBeta scored a 1-color version of the logo, and made mock-ups of what it could look like on devices (such as tablets and keyboards).

Microsoft Store's Indian site was compromised, by a hacker group that calls itself "Evil Shadow Team". The site's landing page was briefly taken over by the group, which gained access to the user database. The group then replaced the front-page with its signature, that warned that an "unsafe system will be baptized." The outrageous part of this episode is that the group claimed Microsoft was storing the user database in plain text, which contains usernames, email addresses, and passwords. The site is now offline, the company is probably back in control. Microsoft Store was started in India to discourage piracy and offer genuine copies of Windows, Office, Visual Studio, at the lowest possible prices; Xbox consoles and accessories; and Microsoft hardware (peripherals).

February's Patch Tuesday is closing in fast and, according to Microsoft, it's going to see the arrival of no less than nine updates - four rated 'Critical' and nine 'Important', that will crush 21 vulnerabilities.

The incoming patches tackle bugs that could lead to remote code execution and privilege elevation. As (almost) always, Microsoft didn't go into specifics but it did say the vulnerabilities affect Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and .NET/Silverlight. All the updates will be made available on Valentine's Day (February 14th) at about 10 am PST (6 pm GMT).

After going through a month-long beta stage, Chrome 17 has now been promoted and is available as a Stable release for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Chrome 17 (build 17.0.963.46) features new Extension APIs, updated Omnibox Prerendering, download scanning protection, various tweaks and fixes for about 20 vulnerabilities.

Chrome 17 Stable can be downloaded via this page.

Microsoft today launched Kinect for Windows, a unique gesture-recognizing input device it launched for the Xbox 360. Kinect for Windows enables a whole new kind of interaction with the software that's three dimensional and spatial, compared to the two dimensional input of mice, tablets, and trackballs.

Along with it, version 1.0 of the Kinect for Windows SDK (stable) was launched, enabling organized software developers to start working on applications right away. The new SDK also features several feature additions and improvements over previous beta versions. The general pricing of Kinect for Windows device is US $249, but it is also available at US $149 for qualified educational users.

It's no secret that Microsoft's proprietary gesture-recognition technology it originally launched on the Xbox platform, is making its way to PCs, as software developers have access to Kinect for Windows SDK. What's interesting, though, is that soon people won't need a creepy-looking three-eyed device facing them to recognize their gestures. They will, instead, be embedded into notebook display bezels the way web-cameras are.

The Daily reports that it has seen a pair of notebook prototypes that appeared to have been "ASUS notebooks running Windows 8," with their web-cam replaced by a row of optical sensors on top of the screen, and a row of LEDs said to be at the bottom. Some might think that this is ASUS' very own Kinect-alternative WAVI Xtion, but The Daily also confirmed with a source at Microsoft that these prototypes are indeed of notebooks that are Kinect-enabled.

Microsoft Corp. today announced quarterly revenue of $20.89 billion for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2011, a 5% increase from the prior year period. Operating income, net income, and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $7.99 billion, $6.62 billion, and $0.78 per share, compared with $8.17 billion, $6.63 billion and $0.77 per share, respectively, in the prior year period. Prior year results include recognition of $224 million of deferred revenue related to the Office 2010 technology guarantee program.

"We delivered solid financial results, even as we prepare for a launch year that will accelerate many of our key products and services," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer at Microsoft. "Coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show, we're seeing very positive reviews for our new phones and PCs, and a strong response to our new Metro style design that will unify consumer experiences across our phones, PCs, tablets, and television in 2012."

Search giant Google has once again updated the Chrome Dev Channel and released two new Chrome builds, version 18.0.1010.0 for Mac and Linux, and 18.0.1010.1 for Windows. According to their maker, these builds include the following updates:

All

- The PDF plugin now adds 'Rotate Clockwise' and 'Rotate Counterclockwise' commands to context menus, so users can more easily view documents scanned horizontally.
- Updated the first-run bubble text and added a link to change the current search engine.
- Fixed HTML5 showing download bar in fullscreen mode.

Japanese company Elecom unveiled a nifty new gadget for those on the move, and don't mind long sessions of thumb-typing, the TK-FBP029 Mini Bluetooth Keyboard. Measuring 146 x 78 x 21 mm, and weighing 96 g, the keyboard features a clam-shell form-factor like the electronic pocket organizers of last century. The keyboard works over Bluetooth 3.0, and is compatible with Apple iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Apple Mac OS devices (Macbook, Mac, Mac Pro), Windows devices (Windows PC, Windows Phone, Windows Embedded), and even Sony Playstation 3. The hinge of its lid can get locked into an obtuse angle, letting you place a portable device (such as your iPhone) on it. It comes in lid color options of black, white, and hot pink. The company did not give out pricing information.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced it has acquired SANRAD Inc., a privately held provider of flash caching and virtualization software and hardware.

"This transaction is an important step in OCZ's enterprise solid state drive strategy," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. "It significantly enhances the ability for customers to increase datacenter performance and efficiency by putting more virtual machines (VM) on a server without slowing down the VM's ability to access stored data, thus substantially lowering the overall cost of deployment. SANRAD's VXL has the ability to optimize caching strategies based on the application and support for VMware's vMotion, which sets the solution apart from others in the industry, allowing enterprises to finally realize the benefit of running a single unified virtualized environment," concluded Mr. Petersen.

Very quietly Microsoft has released two new patches available for the Bulldozer platform. According to the AMD blog these patches seem to offer little more then a 10% boost but the do improve over all performance. This is what Adam Kozak a product marketing manager at AMD had to say,

"Some of you may remember that AMD FX processors use a unique dual-core module architecture codenamed "Bulldozer", which current versions of Windows 7 were not specifically architected to utilize. In essence, for those with an AMD FX-8150 Processor, for example, Windows 7 sees the eight available cores and randomly assigns threads to them.

In initial testing of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, we've seen performance improvements of up to 10% in some applications, when compared to Windows 7. This is because the system correctly recognizes the AMD FX processor architecture and cores. Thanks to close collaboration between Microsoft and AMD, Microsoft recently completed back-porting some of the Windows 8 scheduler code for AMD FX processors into a hotfix for Windows 7."

BitTorrent, a leading peer-based technology company, today announced that the company's flagship BitTorrent Mainline and µTorrent software clients have grown to over 150 million monthly active users worldwide.

In December 2011, the classic BitTorrent Mainline client boasted over 20 million users, while the legendary tiny-but-mighty µTorrent client grew to over 132 million users. The numbers represent an aggregate count of both software clients running on Windows, Mac, Android and Linux platforms.

The company also announced four new strategic "BitTorrent Certified" device partnerships at CES in Las Vegas including TVs, set-top boxes, media adapters, and Blu-ray players. BitTorrent Certified devices are designed to enable consumers to discover, play, share and move all types of personal media, regardless of size, type or format, so that they can play high-quality content in their living rooms. New certification partners include:

ROCSTOR, a leading provider of fast, high-capacity data storage and encryption solutions, announces the launch of Amphibious, an International CES Innovations 2012 Design and Engineering Awards Honoree. The Amphibious is a secure, ruggedized portable hard drive with real time hardware encryption and offers advanced two-factor authentication, USB 2 and Firewire 800. In addition, the crypto module is FIPS 140-2 certified.

The Amphibious is considered as one of the most secure and user-friendly devices in the world for size, strength of encryption, and method of authentication. It offers users the option of using the device in a cross platform and Operating System independent fashion, and no GUI or software installations required. The Amphibious is the result of several years of intensive R & D effort and collaboration. For the user it offers the value of data security by using an original concept of two-factor authentication with Smart Card and Keypad, real time hardware encryption, and futuristic design sense. The Amphibious is appropriate for consumers, SOHO's, enterprises, institutions, military and government applications who want to store data in a secure manner.

c|net has tried out a laptop prototype from Tobii at the Consumer Electronics Show, that can be controlled with the eyes - and it works. The reporter, Rafe Needleman, was initially sceptical, as the eyes are only designed for input not output, but it turned out to be very fast and intuitive for him. It works by having the user press the Windows key, look at a tile and then release the key to activate the tile. The use of the keypress prevents one's eyes, which tend to dart around in normal use, from scrambling input to the laptop. As the user's gaze darts over the screen, the system gives an indication as to which tile is currently selected by the user's gaze to ensure accurate tile selection by the user.

To achieve this feat, the modified laptop uses two infra red emitters and two special IR cameras along the Windows 8 customer preview released a while back. They use "the reflective point of the retina, plus the glint off the cornea" Rafe was told. From this, the computer builds a 3D model of the user's gaze to work out where they are looking on the screen. Rafe concluded, "I did not expect to like it, but I did. It is intuitive to use, and very fast. Tobii has done a good job of making your glances into workable input signals."

With three successors and design limitations posing as hurdles for security updates, Microsoft's iconic Internet Explorer 6 (MSIE 6) web-browser had been deemed a security vulnerability for anyone using it, and Microsoft undertook a campaign to get the world to update their MSIE to the latest MSIE 9. With December 2011 web-browser usage statistics out by several sources, the usage of MSIE 6 in the United States dropped below the 1% mark, causing Microsoft claim that the United States bid goodbye to MSIE 6. The MSIE team celebrated this development with a ceremonious cake and a little afterhours party.

MSIE 6 now makes up 0.9% of the US web-browser market. Czech Republic, Portugal, The Philippines, Ukraine and Mexico, are the other countries where MSIE 6 holds under 1% of the market. The browser is used by 25% of Chinese internet users (a huge number). Interestingly, South Korea, which has some of the fastest consumer ISP networks in the world, has 7.2% usage. 5.9% of Japanese netizens are still stuck to the decade-old browser, and so are 5.4% Indian users. Overall, MSIE 6 still holds 7.7% of the global web-browser market-share, which is respectable, considering it's greater than those of Apple Safari (Mac/PC), and Opera, and disturbing, considering it is a very vulnerable piece of software unless it's used for closed VPN intranets. More stats can be found here.

Almost everyone who understands something about technology will have heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (H.R.3261) currently being debated in the U.S. House. This is internet censorship legislation by any other name and anyone that doesn't have a vested interest in it like the big media cartels is against it. This is because it hands almost total control of the internet to powerful (read: money) special interest groups, allowing them to shut down websites at the mere whiff of an accusation of 'piracy', however small and however unfounded. This will easily ruin many legitimate businesses, all on the pretext of 'protecting copyright' from supposed 'financial losses' due to content 'theft'. It also does an awful lot of other things, all of them bad, which are fully detailed in the link above. Now, if anyone thinks that this is far-fetched, just look at how the current 'darling' of the internet, GoDaddy operates: they pulled the DNS records of weebly.com, because of one little complaint against the site and without even contacting the domain owner first to advise of the situation. Disgraceful. Give them SOPA and a webmaster doesn't stand a chance, regardless of their size.

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced the availability of new VMware View Clients for Kindle Fire, Mac and Linux, along with updates to its popular VMware View Clients for Android and iPad. Available today as technology previews, the new VMware View Clients for Mac and Linux allow IT organizations to empower more agile, productive and connected workforce or school communities by enabling an easy to access, high fidelity desktop virtualization experience optimized for the device of their choice.

"More and more people want the freedom to choose the device that best fits their computing needs in school and into the workplace," said Pat Lee, director, end user clients, VMware. "With the new VMware View Clients, both IT and end users win with a complete, secure and easily-accessible virtual desktop on the devices that best meet their needs."

Windows 8 implements a radical new user interface called Metro for desktop PC's, which has so far received a mixed reception. However, there's many other changes under the hood and one of those is how password security is handled, which we look at here. It's a fact of life, that in today's modern world, we have to remember a plethora of passwords and PIN's, which can be daunting. This leads to security issues as users end up writing down passwords and/or create very insecure ones which can be easily guessed. Windows 8 aims to uphold strong password security, while at the same time, easing the burden on the user. Also, passwords can be obtained in various ways by miscreants, such as phishing, keylogging, guessing, and cracking. Windows addresses each of these problems in three main ways:

Since we reported on the AMD Bulldozer hotfix, The Tech Report reports in an updated post, that the Bulldozer threading hotfix said to improve performance of the processor, has been pulled:

We've spoken with an industry source familiar with this situation, and it appears the release of this hotfix was either inadvertent, premature, or both. There is indeed a Bulldozer threading patch for Windows in the works, but it should come in two parts, not just one. The patch that was briefly released is only one portion of the total solution, and it may very well reduce performance if used on its own. We're hearing the full Windows update for Bulldozer performance optimization is scheduled for release in Q1 of 2012. For now, Bulldozer owners, the best thing to do is to sit tight and wait.

It will be very interesting indeed to see how this much maligned processor benchmarks after the fully developed patch is released. It's true, actually attempting to download the hotfix and agreeing to the licence terms, at the moment, one is lead to a page that shows it as unavailable.

Today Windows updater may have brought "Bulldozer" users a little surprise. A hotfix that increases the AMD flagship processors performance. As this "hotfix" is bleeding edge news any benchmarks have yet to be seen but this confirms Windows 7 was in fact hampering "Bulldozer" from performing at 100% in all prior benches. What percentage it was previously performing at has yet to be determined. Here is a small snippet from the Hotfix release notes.

This article introduces an update that optimizes the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs that are used by Windows 7-based or Windows Server 2008 R2-based computers. Currently, the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs is slower than expected. This behavior occurs because the threading logic in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2 is not optimized to use the Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling feature. This feature was introduced in the Bulldozer family of AMD CPUs.

You can download the Hotfix here.

Activision Publishing, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI), announced today that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 crossed the $1 billion mark in sales since its launch on November 8, 2011, according to Charttrack and retail customer sell-through information. Highlighting the trend of interactive entertainment gaining a greater hold of audiences worldwide, the game achieved this milestone in just 16 days, eclipsing the record set in 2009 by the feature film "Avatar," which reached the $1 billion milestone in 17 days.

While 2011 box office revenue is on the decline - down 4 percent this year at $9.4 billion, compared with $9.8 billion in 2010 -- the number of people purchasing and participating in gaming is on the rise, with no sign of slowing.(1) With more than 30 million gamers, the Call of Duty community now exceeds the combined populations of the cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Madrid.

Tomorrow, Tuesday aka December 13th Microsoft is set to let loose no less than 14 updates which are supposed to resolve 20 vulnerabilities affecting products like Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Publisher, and Windows Media Player.

Three out of the 14 patches are rated 'Critical' and target bugs that could lead to remote code execution, while the other 11 are rated 'Important' and are set to plug in holes that can result in remote code execution and (unwanted) privilege elevation. As always, Microsoft isn't giving out specifics on the vulnerabilities that will be patched so we'll have to wait for tomorrow to get the full scoop. And to update of course.

Today, we're happy to announce the release of Silverlight 5. Silverlight is part of a rich offering of technologies from Microsoft helping developers deliver applications for the web, desktop and mobile devices. Download Silverlight 5, a free plug-in less than 7 MB in size that can be installed in less than 10 seconds.

New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives.