Thursday, July 15, 2010

McAfee & Facebook Announce Collaboration

In a very significant announcement top social networking site, Facebook and Internet Security and Antivirus solutions provider, McAfee have announced a collaboration to work together. Facebook has a user base of 350 million users. Under the terms of the deal, Mcafee will provide free subscription of its Internet Security Suite software to the Facebook users for six months.
Facebook and McAfee are also working towards creating a custom scanning and repair tool which will be made available as free download or might be sold at discounted prices to Facebook users.
The interesting facet of the partnership is that Facebook will be using the financial accruals from this partnership to bring more benefits to its users. They will not be taking any share of revenues from McAfee. McAfee users can buy the products after expiry of the six month trial period. McAfee will be buying advertising from Facebook.
Social networking sites have always been targeted by hackers. Presently the scanning tool using English language is available in eight countries to Facebook users. Other languages are under development.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

AVG joins Opera on stage

The first beta of Opera 10.60 was released only two weeks ago, and it graduates to a wide release and sheds its beta tag. Opera 10.60 for Windows, Mac, and Linux incorporates security enhancements provided by popular freeware antivirus vendor AVG, improves performance, adds further HTML5 compatibility, and makes a noticeable tweak to the browser interface. New security feature indicates that while Chrome and Firefox are looking to further isolate plug-ins and add-ons, Opera address the immediate threat from malware-infected sites. Opera now comes with AVG's real-time Web threat data feed built in. It means when you encounter a page that's been detected by the AVG network to be malicious, you'll see the warning instead.

New feature uses multiple techniques to protect users. It uses exploit signatures to detect sites serving drive-by downloads, the AVG Online Shield and contextual analysis to detect social engineering scam-driven viruses, and reputation lists for safeguarding against malicious URLs. 

Version 10.60 is compatible with several nascent HTML5 features, including the next-generation video and audio codec WebM, geolocation compatibility, Web Workers, and App Cache. This update places Opera at or very close to parity with beta and development versions of Chrome and Firefox. Opera has also created an HTML5-geolocation-powered map showing real-time downloads and active users of Opera. The Windows changelog, Mac changelog, and Linux changelog are available at the Opera Web site.