MicroTechXP

A serious Gmail account hacking backdoor, has been found in the popular Gmail archiving software G-Archiver. This application, in all its innocence, allows you to download and backup all emails from your GMail account. But apparently the developer included the code to send an email to his email ID with all usernames and passwords!
G-Archiver has posted this explanation of what happened: “It is urgent that you remove the current version of G-Archiver from your computer, and change your Gmail account password right away. What happened was that a member of our development team had inserted coding used for testing G-Archiver in the debug version and forgot to delete it in the final release version.”
Hopefully, G-Archiver will release a new version very soon.
View: Details at WinVistaClub.

It’s no surprise that Sony has had some sort of new PS3 SKU in the works, but the company has now finally gotten official with it, and thrown in another surprise to boot. On that former front, Sony’s announced the Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots PS3 Bundle, which includes said game, an 80GB PS3 and a DualShock 3 wireless controller (also available separately), all for the usual $500 price tag. Look for it to coincide with the launch of MGS4 in the second quarter of this year. As if that wasn’t enough, Sony’s also taken the wraps off its new God of War PSP Entertainment Pack, which includes a spiffy red Kratos-approved PSP, the God of War: Chains of Olympus game, Superbad on UMD, and a voucher to download Syphon Filter: Combat Ops for free. $200 and it’s yours this June. [Engadget]

AOL and Yahoo! are said to have held talks as the search engine considers potential deals to help it evade the clutches of Microsoft.
Advisers from Time Warner-owned AOL met with representatives of search engine Yahoo! to see if a deal is workable, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
The talks with internet firm AOL come after Yahoo!’s rejection last week of Microsoft’s offer to buy the company for 42 billion US dollars (£21.4bn).
Among the other suitors for Yahoo!, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is thought to have offered to buy a 20% stake in Yahoo! in a deal that would see Yahoo! swap shares for a clutch of online assets, including social networking site MySpace. Mr Murdoch has ruled out making a full bid.
Details of the discussions involving AOL and Yahoo! remain unclear, although a potential sticking point could be Google’s small stake in AOL. Anti-trust laws would make any deal involving Google and either AOL or NewsCorp difficult, the newspaper report said.
Microsoft’s approach came a year after the two companies held talks over a possible tie-up to challenge Google, although Yahoo! rejected the proposals at the time because it hoped to reap benefits from an overhaul of the business.
But Microsoft warned on unveiling its offer that the competitive situation had not improved and that it believed a merger was the “only alternative” to challenging Google’s dominance.
The software giant wants to offer a credible alternative to Google through the tie-up, offering greater choice to advertisers, increasing research and development spending and stripping out overhead costs.
It has also hinted at a hostile bid by reserving the right “to pursue all necessary steps” to win over the firm’s shareholders if the deal is opposed [MSN News]

GLOBAL giants including Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are believed to be considering rival bids for the internet company Yahoo, which has received a $44.6bn (£22.6bn) offer from Microsoft.
The conglomerate InterActiveCorp was another company named as a potential bidder for Yahoo, which is said to be unwilling to give in to Microsoft without a fight.
After Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer made the offer in a letter on Thursday, it emerged that Yahoo had rejected a similar takeover attempt by Ballmer’s organisation a year before.
Yahoo chief executive and co-founder Jerry Yang is understood not to be Microsoft’s greatest fan, and would be prepared to line up another ‘white knight’ rather than concede to Ballmer. [Scotsman.com]

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A source familiar with Yahoo Incorporated’s strategy suggested that the company may consider a business alliance with Google Incorporated, as an alternative to Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover proposal. Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft’s bid, that source said. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo’s chief executive Jerry Yang to offer his company’s help in any effort to thwart Microsoft’s bid. Details of what conclusions the two men came to have yet to surface.
At $31 a share, Yahoo believes the bid undervalues the company, two sources said. In other words, it is quite possible that Yahoo’s efforts to find an alternative bidder could simply be a measure to pressure Microsoft to boost its bid. At the end of the day though, there is still no information of an alternative bid being placed, be it from Google, News Corporation or yet another company. I’ll try to stay on top of things as more information becomes available. [Reuters]

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced major software updates for its iPhone and iPod Touch devices. iPhone users now can send SMS messages to multiple people and iPod Touch users get access to several applications that have been available on the iPhone: Mail, maps, stock quotes, notes and weather reports.
Most significantly, however, is the addition of a GPS-like positioning feature: Rather than using a GPS receiver, Apple consulted with Google and Skyhook Wireless to come up with a technology that uses triangular Wi-Fi and cellular beacon layouts to determine the location of a device. iPhone users will be able to take advantage of the new feature through the free iPhone software upgrade 1.1.3, while people who already have purchased an iPod Touch will have to shell out an extra $20 for the upgrade. All new iPod Touch devices will come with the positioning feature without extra cost. [Toms Guide]

Google is apparently close to unveiling its phone platform within the next two weeks, but still has the considerable hurdle of convincing carriers to sign over some of the control of the phone itself.
While Google will provide many of the services which will come on the phone — such as its search, Maps, YouTube, and Gmail services — the platform on which those applications are built will be completely open, right down to the operating system itself. This is a dramatic shift from what is available currently. Most carriers and phone manufacturers lock most of the code down, making it relatively difficult to build new applications without either deals with the carriers or manufacturers themselves.
Only Microsoft offers anything close to what Google is going to do, through Windows Mobile. It took Apple some four months after it released the iPhone to finally agree to open up the device to third parties, and other manufacturers and carriers offer even more limited third-party support.
View: Full Article @ Wall Street Journal

Want to share and manage your photos on your Pocket PC? Well, here is an easy way for you to use your Pocket PC device and be able to share and manage all your photos.

Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you:

• Locate and organize all the photos on your computer.
• Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
• Share your photos with others through email, and prints on the web; it’s fast, easy and free.

What is nice is that your pictures are automatically re-sized to fit your device giving you fast and easy downloading. The built in search option enables you to find any photo uploaded by you (or your family and friends).

So what do you need? A phone with a web browser and a data plan … and you will always have all your photos with you!

Find out how you can take your photos further with Picasa from Google

View: Picasa

In a battle of Google against Microsoft, Google had said “Microsoft had purposefully designed Vista to make it difficult or impossible for users to swap the operating system’s built-in search tool for one from another vendor”, at Computerworld.

So, hours later, Microsoft contended that Google has no standing in the case, and so should not be allowed to join the settlement discussion. “Google has nothing new to offer the Court, except for the veiled request that this Court go behind the enforcement decision of the plaintiffs and make Google the ‘20th Plaintiff’,” Microsoft’s seven-page memo read.

And in that memo it also said, “Microsoft attempted to undercut Google’s reason for extending the consent decree by promising to release a beta Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) before the decree’s Nov. 12 expiration. Google had hinted that Microsoft, which had previously committed to launching SP1 only before the end of the year, might never implement the changes. The Nov. 12 deadline for Vista SP1 is the firmest timetable yet for any major milestone of the update.”

Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral, we’ve learned, and we have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed. We are trying to nail down the acquisition price.
The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.
The company, which has raised less than $6 million in capital from Minor Ventures (the exact amount has never been disclosed), beta launched just last September. Earlier this year mainstream press and blogger attention heated up.

News Source: Tech Crunch