marko

Sad news that Robin Gibb, aged 62, passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer.   The music the Gibb brothers produced was legendary, with the most infamous of all having to be from Saturday Night Fever.   Who amongst us (c'mon, be honest) didn't want to be John Travolta as young boys, strutting their stuff in the nightclubs to the Bee Gee's??? ...... ah, just me then

Given the horrendous outlook of Windows 8, I'm left asking myself will the next Windows really be the crunch for a lot of people?.   We're told that Windows 8 is most definitely geared towards mobile devices such as phone and laptops but what if we don't want to be dragged, yet again, in the direction MS want us to move in and instead use our laptops or desktops as we always have.

Is Ubuntu a viable option?.   Can we live with it or would we need to move onto Windows 8 purely for compatibility or familiarity sakes?.   Will it still be familiar to us?  Even if we disable Metro (or can we) will it be Windows 7 in a different wrapper?.

For anyone trying click the links in our latest newsletter, I must apologise - the links aren't working correctly at the moment and don't seem to be working in some of the email notifications either .. we're looking into this and hope things will be sorted shortly

In an action recently, raised by Firefox, it's claimed Microsoft are denying other browser developers access to the API code required to make browsers like Firefox and Chrome work on the new version of Windows!.

The General Council for Firefox have confirmed they consider Microsoft's refusal to allow API access a clear obstruction, although I feel that is precisely what this is for now - a pure obstruction.   I don't believe MS would dare take the chance of another session in court, especially when it comes to the choices available to the public - they attempted something similar in the past and as a result were forced to roll out an update which offered its end users with a choice of browser, as opposed to only including IE in their OS, so I really only see this as MS temporarily trying to make things a little difficult for other browser developers and not possibly the start of new court proceedings.

Simply put, the API (Application Provramming Interface) allows developers to communicate with each others work, or in other words, ensures they are able to make Firefox work on Windows 8 and not cause any issues or stability problems to either the operating system itself or other software on the OS.

Surely if they were serious about not allowing other browsers into Windows 8, this would have a major impact on the appeal for Windows 8 itself - I know I for one would take that as my cue to possibly dust down my "I'm moving to Ubuntu" speech again - not that I intend on going over to Windows 8 anytime this life, but hey!!

Just when I think it really can't get any worse for download.com, I recently came across an update for "Burn4Free" and decided to check our database.   Indeed, we had already removed the listing from our support (http://www.freewarebb.com/files/file/122-removed-burn4free/) because of multiple negative reports in WOT and after I found various suspicious files in the download itself.

So, I thought, I'll give the download another chance and see if anything has changed, so I popped over to the developers site (burn4free.com) and hit the download button, only to be redirected to download.com where I kicked off the download.   I hadn't even been allowed to finish the download and avast blew up in my face warning me of all kinds!!.

Nevertheless, I thought I'd overrule avast on this one and downloaded it anyway and scanned it using VirusTotal and Jotti's malware scan - which found multiple instances of a lovely little adware tool called "PUP.Bundleinstaller.Somoto".   A little more digging around and this is a particularly nasty little bugger which causes driveby's of various kinds and all manner of popups, some claiming even after it has been removed.

The developers of this adware toolbar as listed just as negatively as the developers who choose to use it (http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/somotoinc.com) and all the while being promoted by the biggest download repository on the net, download.com !!

When will people learn that bigger is most certainly not always better!