Tag Archive for Bitdefender

| June 5, 2012
Comments Off on Tablet Notes

Tablet Notes

Tablet computer ownership will lead the industry over the coming 12 months as all-in-one devices continue to grow in popularity according to the CEA.

Windows 8 Tablets in November

Windows 8 Tablets in NovemberExpect the first wave of Windows 8 tablets to land in retail stores in November, according to CNET. A secret source deep within Intel (INTC) says the Intel-based Microsoft (MSFT) Windows 8 tablets will use Intel’s upcoming Clover Trail Atom chip. DailyWirless says that Clover Trail is Intel’s first dual-core Atom design based on its 32-nanometer process technology.

The author says the tablets will fall into two basic sizes: pure 10-inch tablets and hybrid 11-inch designs with physical keyboards. Windows 8, like Windows 7 before it, will be powered by chips from Intel and AMD (AMD) and will be able to run older, so-called “legacy” applications.

A separate release from Microsoft, Windows RT, will land on devices powered by ARM (ARMH) chip suppliers NVidia (NVDA), Qualcomm (QCOM), and Texas Instruments (TXN). RT will not run older Windows applications.

Chinese Tablet PCs Peel Away at Apple

Chinese Tablet PCs Peel Away at AppleApple Inc may find it harder to keep market share in China because homegrown tablet PC brands will win over more customers says a report on China Daily.com. Sun Peilin with Analysys International, told China Daily, Apple’s (AAPL) market share will shrink to about 70 percent, “Chinese tablet PC makers are trying to form a stronger echelon behind Apple by taking over the market share that belonged to small copycat manufacturers.”

Apple’s iPad and iPad 2 took 78.3 percent of the market share in China in Q1 2012, distantly followed by Samsung’s (005930) 5.1% and ErenEben’s 4.5% according to the article. AI’s data indicates tablet PC sales in China are expected to break 4.5 million units. Companies including Lenovo (LNVGY), Acer (ACEIY) and home appliance giant Haier Group, are releasing their own tablet PCs.

Sun from Analysys states in the blog the biggest obstacle Chinese brands face is how to come up with a different marketing angle against Apple, to avoid head-on competition with the iPad. “There are two separate markets for tablets: You can either go entertainment or business. The iPad is a big competitor in terms of entertainment, so Chinese companies should be different from iPad,” Sun suggested. Some Chinese companies have already differentiated their tablets. Beijing ErenEben Information Technology Co, a business tablet PC maker, won a government contract to provide tablets to the police department in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

According to Fang Liyong, COO of ErenEben, the company sold nearly 150,000 units of its first two generations of products in 2010, making it the biggest homegrown tablet PC brand by sales volume. “We are now selling nearly 30,000 units every month in 2011,” he said.

With a touchscreen developed by Japanese graphics-tablets maker Wacom Co Ltd, the ErenEben tablets were designed to offer an experience similar to writing on real paper. The COO boosts, “ErenEben has great growth potential, because China’s tablet market is so big, and Apple cannot take it all.”

iPad Suit

iPad SuitMohan’s Custom Tailors of New York is taking the boring and basic out of the word “suit” by designing a new and improved version for the modern man. According to their website, as men are dressing up and going out to dinner dates, museum galleries, and lounges in fine style, Mohan’s is creating contemporary and handsome designs to fit their needs. Mohan’s has introduced the fashion of the future with their new tech offerings, including pockets for your Research In Motion (RIMM) Blackberry, Apple (AAPL) iPod, iScribe, Bluetooth, and more. Most recently, they have revealed the first-ever iPad pocket in menswear, creating a fashion rush for “techies” around the world.

iPad Bacon Case

iPad Bacon CaseAt Antje Schmitt’s storefront at Etsy, the famous handcrafted Bacon Case for the Apple (AAPL) iPad 3 is now available. The Bacon Case is also available for older iPads, MacBooks, Netbooks, and Notebooks.

ZD.net – “The undisputed king of the weird category however, is the iPad bacon case ($59, pictured), which I’m ordering immediately.”

Gizmodo – “It’s $59, but who cares? Bacon iPad cases are what money was invented for, people. Well, that, and both actual bacon and actual iPads.”

Gearfuse – “Bacon and Apple products go together like peas and carrots. Or lamb and tuna fish. They’re both the perfect byproducts of their respective categories. Pimp your iPad with pork with the custom-made Bacon iPad case. It might not be actual bacon, but it’s realistic design is enough to make you wish you had a side of eggs to go with your balanced breakfast of pork and tablet.”

Clueful Scans Your iOS Apps For Privacy Behavior

Clueful by BitdefenderSecurity firm Bitdefender has introduced Clueful, an app that scans your Apple (AAPL) iOS apps lets you see what information other applications installed on your iDevice might have access to. Once downloaded and installed (iTunes), the $3.99 app scans your iPad 3, iPhone 4s or other iOS Apple products to see what’s installed and puts it in a list that can be filtered based on the various kinds of behavior. This includes things like:

  • Apps that can track location
  • Apps that can read the address book
  • Apps that might drain battery
  • Apps that use iPhone’s unique ID
  • Apps that display ads
  • Apps that gather analytics

These behaviors are listed in the results and explained on each app’s detail page. However, Clueful doesn’t log how often these behaviors happen. Clueful also notes if your data is encrypted, and if app makers anonymize you as a user, CNET News.Com reported.

Besides scanning what you have downloaded, the article explains that the software is designed to let you research what kinds of information an application wants to use before you buy it from the App Store. However, the author says, ” this appeared to be a work in progress, it is slow and unable to pick up a handful of big name games and apps.”

Bitdefender maintains all the data behind the privacy analysis, and users can ask to have apps that are not a part of that system analyzed. CNet states that Clueful comes some three months after Apple came after fire for the fourth time over how iOS and apps log and send user information to third parties.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Tablet computing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| February 28, 2012
Comments Off on Romney Defeats Gingrich in US SPAM Primaries

Romney Defeats Gingrich in US SPAM Primaries

Romney Defeats Gingrich in US Spam PrimariesJust in time to get rid of all the annoying political ads on TV and radio leading up to the Michigan primary, GOP presidential wannabe Mitt Romney has been crowned King of political spam. His high-profile run as the leader for the 2012 nomination for the US presidential election has made him popular with spammers.

Mitt Romney is also the favorite politician of spammers. He is used to tout knockoff drugs and dubious bargains in junk e-mail according to a Bitdefender analysis of 8 million unsolicited messages spread in January.

Mitt RomneyRomney is mentioned in 45% of SPAM messages that reference US politics, ahead of second-placed Republican Newt Gingrich, who scored 33%. Romney’s name was most often used in scam messages that advertise low-interest loans or free credit score analysis while Gingrich was mentioned in junk mail promoting miraculous energy-saving devices that almost certainly don’t exist. The article says most of these offerings actually redirect the unwary user to survey site scams or knockoff drugs for sexual dysfunctions.

U.S. Republican hopeful Ron Paul came third in the BitDefender spammers’ list, with 12.2%. The most popular politician outside the Republican race that caught the spammers’ attention this year was Bill Clinton, with 4%.

BitDefender logo“Winning Most-Mentioned Politician in Bitdefender’s spam survey is probably not an honor that many politicians want,” said Bitdefender E-Threats Analyst Bogdan Botezatu, who coordinated the spam study. “And I don’t think we’ll see spammers suddenly turning into political pundits. But the results could tell us which politicians spammers think are most likely to get a reaction from random e-mail readers. Spammers are, ultimately, after money and they’re essentially making a bet on popularity when they favor one politician’s name over another.”

The author says spam messages often use names of celebrities or politicians in fragments of news items in trying to give credibility to the message and to trick anti-spam filters that look for the percentage of links versus other words in the message.

Republican partyIn the BitDefender overall analysis of spam not filtered to include only political references – the Republican politicians were handily beat by celebrities including Jay Leno, Eva Longoria, Kobe Bryant, and even political commentator Rush Limbaugh.

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I wrote about spammers hijacking celebrities ‘ identities to spread spam. In the past, Jay Leno and Heidi Klum have been called the most dangerous celebs on the web.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| December 9, 2009
Comments Off on Which Anti-Malware is Best?

Which Anti-Malware is Best?

Which Anti-Malware is Best?In a report, AV-Comparatives compared the base performance of some of the top anti-malware products on the market. The objective of these tests was to identify how well antivirus scanners can detect new malware using their base functions.

Base anti-malware functions included their proactive scanning and heuristics methods, without the advantage of downloading the latest signatures. Forcing a test without the latest virus signatures makes it possible to evaluate the strength of the heuristic-or proactive, technology of the anti-malware engines.

ArsTechnica summarizes that the tests were run on two sets of malware. Set A, which contains malware from December 2007 to December 2008 (of which most products could detect over 97%). Set B, contained 1.6 million samples of malware collected between August 11 and August 17, 2009. This set included the following categories of malware: Trojans (69.5%), Backdoors/Bots (20.7%), Worms (6.1%), other malware (1.5%), and Windows viruses (0.4%).

Results

Ars reported these proactive detection results (rounded to the nearest percent):

After taking these results into consideration and adjusting for false positives, AV-Comparatives rated the security companies from best to worst in three categories:

  • Advanced+:
    • G DATA,
    • Kaspersky,
    • ESET,
    • F-Secure,
    • Microsoft,
    • Avast,
    • eScan.
  • Advanced:
  • Standard:

In September of 2008 NetworkWorld reported on Gartner claims that enterprises are paying too much for security software. Gartner says vendors simply aren’t doing enough to keep up with the prevalence of threats on the Internet. Neil MacDonald, a research vice president at Gartner says that security vendors are “maintaining high-profit margins on firewalls and antivirus software despite these products being nothing more than commodities.” NetworkWorld says that during his presentation at the Gartner’s 2008 IT Security Summit in London, Mr. MacDonald was vociferous in his condemnation of how security products are actually increasing their prices over the years across a backdrop of lowered effectiveness, contradicting pricing schemes across the rest of the IT industry.

Anti-malware pricing is broken

Security vendors have maintained a pricing scheme that contradicts the rest of the IT industry, Mr. MacDonald said. Typically with software or hardware, prices go down year after year with the introduction of new and better products. In some cases, however, security software often loses its effectiveness as new threats emerge, while prices stay high. “Why in antivirus year after year do we pay more for something that gives us less?” MacDonald asked. “It’s insanity. Why is information security immune from the trends of the IT industry?”

Gartner recommends that firms use the commodity status of security software to their advantage, “I know it’s hard to switch but you have to seriously enter the negotiations,” MacDonald said. “Let the vendors know that you are not afraid to switch.”  And he recommends that buyers should aggressively negotiate for better prices.

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While most malware writers are script kiddies with an affinity to making minor modifications to existing malware there are some very good black hat hackers out there that are not dummies.  These tests are important for buyers to understand which product’s core functionality is more efficient against new threats and not rely on constant updates to augment their capabilities. In the face of new threats, superior heuristic capabilities are crucial to anti-malware software? The weekly, daily, or even multiple times a day, definitions updates are the lifeline of the anti-malware industry. The need for constant updates is what drives the annual payments for subscriptions.

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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