Ezeecube wants to be the all-in-one media hub for your home. You can use it to wirelessly back up photos and other files from all your mobile devices and cameras, while removing duplicates and organizing with its photo management software. It also functions as a home media cloud so you can access your files anywhere, while streaming photos and videos to iOS and Android devices, or Windows and… Read More
A recent test done by the independent antivirus research group AV-TEST—whose tests we've mentioned in the past—took a look at the performance of today's most popular malware removal applications. Most of the applications showed excellent performance, but only Malwarebytes—a free download—managed a perfect score.
AV-TEST sought to answer an important question: can anti-malware software completely clean up and repair a Windows system after an attack?
It's a worst-case scenario many users have experienced: Malware defeats the security barriers of their system and becomes embedded there. Is it even possible, in the aftermath of such an attack, to restore the Windows system to its previous condition? It ought to work with the help of antivirus software or clean-up tools. But how effectively do these first responders do their job?
The good news is that overall each application was very effective at providing cleanup and repair to Windows machines, which is important if you think someone has broken into your machine or downloaded some suspicious plugins.
Each application was put through a rigorous endurance test that lasted a total of 10 months. During this time several different malware families were tested repeatedly and the malware even underwent constant evolution along the way. All of the samples used were already known to the removal applications, so the primary purpose of the test was efficiency in detection, complete removal, and restoration. Tests were also conducted on antivirus software, but keep in mind there's a difference between antivirus and anti-malware.
In the end, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free scored a cool 100% in total system repair. The paid apps Bitdefender Internet Security 2014 came close in second with a score of 99.4%, and F-Secure Internet Security 2014 tied with Kaspersky Internet Security 2014 at 97.8%. The next best scores for free applications came from AVG AntiVirus Free 2014 and Avast! Free Antivirus 9.0.
Remember, it's important to keep in mind that these were tested for malware removal and not for virus protection. We can show you what we think are the best desktop antivirus applications, and if you're curious to see how antivirus apps ranked at AV-TEST, click the link below to read more.
Amazon says that its Appstore for Android is now available in 236 countries and territories following this recent expansion of 41 more regions. That said, not all apps within the Amazon Appstore catalog will be available in all regions due to local laws and restrictions on certain apps and content. However, for consumers, this will be another venue to purchase and download apps, which will be especially beneficial to BlackBerry customers who rely on Amazon's Appstore to deliver Android apps to their devices.
Welcome back to Android Gaming Weekly, our weekly recap of new game releases. We still plan to cover upcoming releases and games we’re playing, but this column is dedicated to new games that you can start playing right now. Check out our top picks and let us know in the comments section if you have any suggestions for next week’s post.
Epic Skater
Description: Kickflip, grind, manual, and combo your way through the streets of Los Angeles in Epic Skater. This free skating game will keep you coming back for more as you master dozens of tricks that combine into endless combos.
Description: Meet Thomas, a curious rectangle, and help him unravel the mysteries of his existence in a wonderfully strange world. Experience 100 levels of award-winning platform gameplay and take part in an emotional story narrated by Danny Wallace.
Description: Join Camp Eagle Feathers’ newest ‘Brave’, Jacob Jones, on an amazing adventure to uncover just what is going on at Camp Eagle Feather on a summer vacation he will never forget.
Description: Test your skills with this addictive and extremely easy to control arcade game in which you’ll have to destroy discs that are the same color as your ship. It may seem easy at first, but the discs will spin faster and faster and it’ll become a total challenge that will get you hooked while you fight for a new high score.
Description: Together with the help of the mysterious thief Laura, his best intentions and no clue whatsoever, Robert sets off on his adventure to discover the secret of the wind’s disappearance. Will the young adventurer be able to save his world? And what are Laura´s secret intentions…?
Description: Help Mordecai, Rigby, Muscle Man, Skips and your other Regular Show favorites take the park back from Gene and his goons with a plethora of prank-related powers!
Description: Blood Bowl is the adaptation of the famous Warhammer Fantasy football board game created by Games Workshop. Assemble your team from among six fantastic races* in the Warhammer universe (Humans, Orcs, Dwarfs, Skaven, Wood Elves and Chaos).
Description: From design genius behind the classic game Chip’s Challenge, comes Chuck’s Challenge 3D, a fiendishly addictive puzzler that’s packed with features that will tease the brain and challenge the fingers. It also comes with a level editor that lets you upload and share your levels for everyone to play and rate, all from within the game.
Description:Legendary filmmaker John Woo presents his action-packed mobile debut, Bloodstroke. Gun in one hand, a blade in the other, Private Security Agent, Mai Lee – codenamed Lotus, shoots and slices through the street of Hong Kong and Beijing to ensure the safety of her first assignment.
Description: Get ready for Might & Mayhem, an arcade-style battle strategy game with live PvP battles and epic single-player quests! Assemble your team of knights, bandits, wizards, goblins, robots and monsters and strike out for adventure!
Twitter is acquiring a small password security startup called Mitro for its New York office. Mitro built a way that multiple people can share or control passwords to a single account. The most obvious use case would have been in the enterprise where team members need to share a single password for an account. Twitter isn’t keeping the product and we hear that the team will likely be… Read More
New apps need lovin’ too, right? Every day there are thousands of additions to the Google Play Store, but many go unnoticed and never receive the attention they deserve. We’ve shown in the past that this community can discover great apps and propel them to new heights. Our weekly Fresh Meat column highlights new apps with fewer than 100,000 installs. Browse our new Android app picks below and let us know which ones you enjoy.
Swipify
Description: Android wear is cool but there are a few major deficiencies. There is not multitasking mechanism & there is no easy and intuitive way to launch the apps. Swipify is designed to revolutionize multitasking, app switching & app launching on Android Wear.
Description: NPR One is the new audio app that connects you to a stream of public radio news and stories curated for you. Great storytelling and rigorous reporting that informs, engages, inspires and surprises—from the ends of the earth to your own city or town—available to you whenever, wherever.
Description: Learn to program with puzzles and easily build your own games. Start by solving coding puzzles. Over 200 puzzles included in 4 adventures. Then, easily build your own games using the Tynker Workshop which includes 9 game-kits and hundreds of characters.
Description: Created to mimic Android’s default “Complete action using” dialog, Better Open With shows you a visually similar popup screen when you choose to open a link, an image, a PDF or any other filetype – listing all possible app handlers as you normally see.
Description: To use, simply download and open the Wear Hotspot application on your Android Wear device and select the blue WiFi Button. Annnnnddddddddd Done. How convenient is that?
Description: Android Wear meets the ultimate in driving innovation with Tesla Command! Take control of your Tesla Model S driving experience with Android Wear.
Description: Very simple application that uses the coarse location as well as the Google Play Services activity detection API to automatically set the display brightness on your Android Wear.
Description: With Wear Apps Tracker you’ll get a notification on your Android Wear device stream every time you install, remove or update an app for your smartwatch.
Android: You've probably installed a huge number of apps, but the time comes to have a clear out. Easy Uninstaller makes it easy to uninstall multiple apps and also cleans up leftover files those apps leave behind.
If you have a long memory, you may recall that we looked at Easy Uninstaller some time ago, when it was known as Apps Uninstall. Things have changed a bit since then; as well as a new name, Easy Uninstall also has new features like file cleanup after removing apps. You can still select multiple apps and uninstall them in batches—and it's as easy as the app's name suggests.
Select the apps you no longer need, and when the removal process completes, you will be invited to remove residual files that would otherwise just waste space. It's a great way to make the most of limited storage space on older devices, but it also eliminates unwanted remnants of deleted apps to allay privacy concerns.
MIT’s research department working with the University of California at Berkeley has created digital display tech that can automatically compensate for vision problems, eliminating the need for glasses or contacts for specific uses like reading or viewing GPS navigation devices for far-sighted folks, among other potential uses. The new display tech is actually a variation on glasses-free… Read More
The European Commission is preparing an antitrust case against Google's Android platform, sources have told Reuters. Regulators have allegedly sent questionnaires to telecom companies and phone manufacturers, trying to get a sense of whether Google is strong-arming them into promoting its own services at the expense of competitors. One question is said to ask whether Google had ever said "that it was not in favor of your undertaking manufacturing, marketing, or launching a smart mobile device with your own or a third-party application or service pre-installed or set as default." Other questions asked for information about how revenue was shared with Google and whether other app stores had difficulty competing with Google Play, and...
Android: What's taking up all the space in your Dropbox? Are there multiple copies of the same file in your Google Drive? Get control of your cloud storage with Unclouded for Android.
Unclouded has an easy and appealing interface. You can sign in with multiple Dropbox or Google Drive accounts, but operate only one at a time, there's no cross-platform magic here. Unclouded is then like a disk space analyzer, but for the cloud. It will analyze your cloud storage to come up with the size of the whole folder, the kind of documents you have (images, audio, video, etc.) and how much space each takes, and sort files by when you last modified them. It also recognizes duplicates and lists them separately.
All of this is available in the free version of Unclouded. To take action on any this data, you'll have to pay $1.99 for the premium version. That lets you delete, upload, share, rename and move files, as well as create new folders.
The Amazon Appstore is currently giving away 30 paid apps for free. Consumers with Android hardware will be able to take full advantage of this deal through Amazon's app store today and tomorrow. The 30 apps included mean you could well save over $100 by downloading them all.
85% of the 5 billion people without Internet simply can’t afford data plans. So Facebook’s accessibility initiative Internet.org today launches its Android and web app for the developing world with free data access to a limited set of services including Facebook, Messenger, Wikipedia, and Google Search. It also provides local health, employment, weather, and women’s rights… Read More
If you’ve been to a Starbucks in the past year or so, it’s almost guaranteed you’ve seen someone in line pay with their smartphone by opening the Starbucks app and holding a bar code up to a scanner. Kash is hoping to bring the same experience to other retailers and small businesses while cutting out one of their biggest costs: credit card fees. Read More
This week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art put 400,000 high-resolution images from their collection up for download. So, to give you a taste, we decided to show off a few of our favorite wallpaper-friendly ones for your desktop.
Remember, we're now requesting your participation in the Wallpaper Wednesday series! You'll find a selection here, but post your favorites for this week's topic in the discussions below. Stick to our format as best you can, including a title, the image, resolution, and a link. Happy wallpapering!
Note: We've cropped a few of these to fit normal 16:9 dimensions, but you can view the original version at the link below each image and crop it for your own display!
Usenet is a great resource, but before you can take advantage of it, you need to find a good provider. Last week we asked you for your favorites, then looked at the five best Usenet providers based on your nominations. Now we're back to crown the crowd-favorite.
Voting was tight all weekend, and no one took the top spot by a broad margin. However, Newshosting crossed the line in first place with close to 29% of the overall vote. Its exceptional speed, tons of connections to saturate, and extra perks and services earned a lot of praise.
Hot on its heels in second place was EasyNews with 24% of the votes cast, thanks to its easy, web-based approach and different pricing schemes for people using third-party tools versus the web to access Usenet. Third place fell short of second by a mere 19 votes, and UsenetServersnagged it with 23% of the overall vote. Fourth place went to Astraweb, the only non Highwinds/UNS Holdings provider in the pack, with over 16% of the vote, and bringing up the rear was NewsDemon, the super-affordable provider with a partner VPN, with over 7% of the overall vote.
For more on these and the multiple honorable mentions and alternate block providers we highlighted, head back to the full Hive Five feature for more.
The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!
Encrypted Internet traffic surged worldwide after the Snowden revelations, with several developers releasing new tools to enable people to better protect their privacy.
Today BitTorrent Inc. contributes with the release of BitTorrent Bleep, a communication tool that allows people to exchange information without the need for any central servers. Combined with state of the art end-to-end encryption, the company sees Bleep as the ideal tool to evade government snooping.
Bleep’s main advantage over some other encrypted messaging applications is the absence of central servers. This means that there are no logs stored, all metadata goes through other peers in the network.
“Many messaging apps are advertising privacy and security by offering end-to-end encryption for messages. But when it comes to handling metadata, they are still leaving their users exposed,” BitTorrent’s Farid Fadaie explains.
“We reimagined how modern messaging should work. Our platform enables us to offer features in Bleep that are unique and meaningfully different from what is currently available.”
Bleep Bleep
The application’s development is still in the early stages and the current release only works on Windows 7 and 8. Support for other operating systems including popular mobile platforms will follow in the future.
Aspiring Bleep users can create an account via an email or mobile phone number, but an incognito mode without the need to provide any personal details is also supported.
The new messaging app is not the only ‘breach safe’ tool the company is currently working on. Last year BitTorrent launched its Sync application which provides a secure alternative to centralized cloud backup solutions such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
BitTorrent Inc. is inviting people to test the new Bleep application, but warns there are still some bugs.
Those who want to give BitTorrent Bleep a try can head over to BitTorrent’s experiments section to sign up for the pre-Alpha release.
Pinterest has acquired Icebergs, a “Pinterest for creative types,” which offered an online collaboration service that allowed users to organize their projects, including not only images, but also articles, files, videos, and other content, and share that content with others. The Barcelona-based company was founded last year, and had a team of just over a half-dozen in both… Read More
Google made a small but important update to Google Analytics today that finally makes it easy to exclude bots and spiders from your user stats. That kind of traffic from search engines and other web spiders can easily skew your data in Google Analytics. Read More
If you're hankering to live on the bleeding edge, a beta version of the desktop Chrome browser for 64-bit Windows 7 and Windows 8 systems is now available. No need to uninstall your existing version of Chrome, this one will haul in all of your existing settings painlessly.
Say what you want about Google+, but it incubated two great products at Google: Hangouts for video meetings and Google+ Photos. While Photos is still deeply integrated with Google+, Hangouts is starting to grow up and it’s shedding some of its Google+ past today. Until now, for example, you had to have a Google+ account to use Hangouts. Starting today, that requirement is gone. Anybody… Read More
Facebook will finally stop nudging you to buy your Facebook friends a Starbucks gift card on their birthdays.
The company is shutting down Facebook Gifts, the e-commerce service that lets users buy electronic gift cards from companies like iTunes, Starbucks and Sephora and send them to friends. Gifts will be gone on August 12.
TechCrunch first reported the news earlier on Tuesday, and the company confirmed the move to ReadWrite.
"We’ll be using everything we learned from Gifts to explore new ways to help businesses and developers drive sales on the Web, on mobile, and directly on Facebook," a Facebook spokeswoman told ReadWrite.
This is not the first time Facebook has cut back on its gifting options. Facebook had previously offered physical gifts as an option, later limiting its selection to digitally delivered gifts.
The Gifts shutdown comes on the heels of Facebook introducing a "buy" button, a way for businesses and advertisers to encourage people to purchase things simply from a Facebook post. That tool is currently in a limited test.
Facebook is clearly ramping up its e-commerce and payments efforts. It recently hired former PayPal president David Marcus to oversee its messaging products.
During Facebook's second-quarter earnings call on July 23, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there will be "some overlap" between its Messenger application and payments. In other countries, particularly China, messaging apps often include features that allow users to send each other money.
And Facebook funnels payments from consumers to app developers in some transactions, like the purchase of digital goods. But it has struggled to link its prodigious traffic to real-world transactions.
Google Now is bringing you a new way to live your vacation to the fullest. Beginning today, Google Now will notice if you have a hotel confirmation in your Gmail inbox and then give you suggestions on things to do. Feel free to ask Google Now for things to do near your hotel and it’ll oblige. Don’t fret about getting lost, either; simply ask Google Now to guide you back to your hotel and it’ll navigate the perfect path for you, no matter the mode of transportation.
Throughout its lifetime, Google Now has grown in intelligence, finding more and more ways to ease your life. The recent moves have been location-based, contextually aware of where you are and what you need most. While some may fear the influx of technology as it pervades further and further into life, we take the stance that these moves work only for the betterment of life.
The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year.
The Department for Transport is inviting cities to register interest in hosting driverless vehicle trials, with each city set to play host to one of the three trails scheduled to be conducted in the country. Cities registering interest have until October 1 to do so, and the UK government has announced that it is allocating £10 in funds to cover the costs of conducting the trails. Each project is set to last anywhere from 18 to 36 months.
Ministers in the UK are currently reviewing changes to the Highway Code to ensure that autonomous vehicles comply with existing safety guidelines in the country. Two areas under scrutiny involve scenarios wherein a driver can take control of an autonomous vehicle should the need arise, and for vehicles which do not have a driver onboard.
Residents in the UK, are you looking forward to autonomous vehicles?
Closets can quickly get cluttered with clothes and then it's time to clean. But what do you keep and what do you throw out? Owltastic Adventures designed a neat infographic that you can print and hang up to make quick decisions about what to keep, trash and donate.
The chart below follows a lot of the principles in our post on getting rid of clothes clutter. Question after question with a simple yes or no answer will guide you to one of the three outcomes. It also has a breakaway point for returns. Of course, it's up to you if you want to donate those clothes, you could even sell them at consignment stores for extra cash.
McCaffrey’s book range, which kicked off in 1968 with Dragonflight (itself a conglomeration of two novellas) has now expanded to include follow-on novels and two short story collections explores the world of Pern, a blend of pre-industrial feudal society that features Weyrfolk, some whom bond with dragons and team with them to fight off threats.
The biggest problem for Pern’s inhabitants is the Thread, a pernicious spore that rains down on the planet from the rogue world known as the Red Star and consumes organic matter. Through the books, various characters have been established and explored, and the stories offer plenty of material for a potential series of films.
Yet despite several efforts, most on TV, no-one has successfully brought the series to screens. Warner Bros. TV tried in 2002 with Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore in charge, but differences in the vision for the series led to it getting cancelled before it started shooting. Then, in 2006, Copperheart Entertainment announced it would try for a film based on Dragonflight, but even with David Hayter aboard to write the script, it never took off.
Now Warners is looking for the right creative folk to bring it to life this time. And given how successful Smaug and co. are these days, the time may finally be right for a trip to Pern.
Google has rolled out a new look for its Docs, Sheets and Slides productivity web app suite, with new homepages for each that present your content in a visual grid and that introduce just a hint of Material Design into the look and feel of the apps, with bold edge-to-edge fields of color and some basic animations. The new start pages for Docs, Sheets and Slides do make it a lot easier to find… Read More
One arm of the US government may be trying to crack Tor, but another arm is handing Tor money — a lot of it. As spotted by the Guardian, the anonymous browsing tool Tor is reporting that it received over $1.8 million in federal funds last year, a figure that's gone up 50 percent from 2012. It's ironic news, as the NSA and other intelligence organizations have been attempting to undermine Tor, which is generally able to hide the tracks of someone who uses it while browsing the web.
Most of Tor's funding didn't come straight from the US government, however. While it received over $1.8 million in federal funds, much of that was handed out through third parties. Two donors, the nonprofits SRI International and Internews Network, contributed...
Electronic Arts has announced a new subscription service that gives Xbox One owners access to some of its biggest games for a small monthly fee. Called EA Access, the service is launching to select users in beta today, with a starting price of $4.99 per month or $29.99 per year. The company says EA Access will "launch for everyone on Xbox One soon." Paying for the subscription will get you access to what EA calls its Vault, a collection of games you'll have unlimited access to as long as you're subscribed. During the beta, that will include a sampling of four titles — FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, Peggle 2, and Battlefield 4 — though the company says more games will be added "soon."
The service will also get you early access to some of EA's...
London’s Mayor has missed an opportunity to spend a £50 million fund set aside by the UK government to create a public building dedicated to both technology startups, events and public education around technology. The Prime Minister’s office has confirmed an earlier report that the large sum of money it had allocated to City Hall to create a building which would serve tech… Read More
Ezeecube wants to be the all-in-one media hub for your home. You can use it to wirelessly back up photos and other files from all your mobile devices and cameras, while removing duplicates and organizing with its photo management software. It also functions as a home media cloud so you can access your files anywhere, while streaming photos and videos to iOS and Android devices, or Windows and… Read More
Twitter is acquiring a small password security startup called Mitro for its New York office. Mitro built a way that multiple people can share or control passwords to a single account. The most obvious use case would have been in the enterprise where team members need to share a single password for an account. Twitter isn’t keeping the product and we hear that the team will likely be… Read More
MIT’s research department working with the University of California at Berkeley has created digital display tech that can automatically compensate for vision problems, eliminating the need for glasses or contacts for specific uses like reading or viewing GPS navigation devices for far-sighted folks, among other potential uses. The new display tech is actually a variation on glasses-free… Read More
These monuments to Victorian decrepitude dot the shores of England. They go up in smoke with alarming regularity, writes Rob Beschizza. Read the rest
85% of the 5 billion people without Internet simply can’t afford data plans. So Facebook’s accessibility initiative Internet.org today launches its Android and web app for the developing world with free data access to a limited set of services including Facebook, Messenger, Wikipedia, and Google Search. It also provides local health, employment, weather, and women’s rights… Read More
If you’ve been to a Starbucks in the past year or so, it’s almost guaranteed you’ve seen someone in line pay with their smartphone by opening the Starbucks app and holding a bar code up to a scanner. Kash is hoping to bring the same experience to other retailers and small businesses while cutting out one of their biggest costs: credit card fees. Read More
Encrypted Internet traffic surged worldwide after the Snowden revelations, with several developers releasing new tools to enable people to better protect their privacy. 
Pinterest has acquired Icebergs, a “Pinterest for creative types,” which offered an online collaboration service that allowed users to organize their projects, including not only images, but also articles, files, videos, and other content, and share that content with others. The Barcelona-based company was founded last year, and had a team of just over a half-dozen in both… Read More
Google made a small but important update to Google Analytics today that finally makes it easy to exclude bots and spiders from your user stats. That kind of traffic from search engines and other web spiders can easily skew your data in Google Analytics. Read More
Say what you want about Google+, but it incubated two great products at Google: Hangouts for video meetings and Google+ Photos. While Photos is still deeply integrated with Google+, Hangouts is starting to grow up and it’s shedding some of its Google+ past today. Until now, for example, you had to have a Google+ account to use Hangouts. Starting today, that requirement is gone. Anybody… Read More
Google has rolled out a new look for its Docs, Sheets and Slides productivity web app suite, with new homepages for each that present your content in a visual grid and that introduce just a hint of Material Design into the look and feel of the apps, with bold edge-to-edge fields of color and some basic animations. The new start pages for Docs, Sheets and Slides do make it a lot easier to find… Read More
London’s Mayor has missed an opportunity to spend a £50 million fund set aside by the UK government to create a public building dedicated to both technology startups, events and public education around technology. The Prime Minister’s office has confirmed an earlier report that the large sum of money it had allocated to City Hall to create a building which would serve tech… Read More