Twitter adds video support. What!? No it doesn't!

Britain's Telegraph newspaper broke the story that Twitter's founders were planning to allow users to upload video snippets. These snippets would complement the already existing 140 text characters currently available to twitter users.

Reportedly, video snippets could be sent from mobile phones or any computer device with a webcam attached. This got people talking as to what the reaction of existing video tweet services Tweetube and Twideo might be, given that while heavily marketing their products online they continue to struggle in gaining a foothold in the Twitter market.

Hot on the heels of this news, mashable.com got in contact with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to get the lay of the land. Biz was quick to respond to mashable via email stating, "Haven't read the piece [in the Telegraph] but no video hosting. 140 characters of text including spaces. You know the drill!"

So, as quickly as the news made headlines it was debunked; and a good thing too, according to mashable reporter Pete Cashmore who suggests that Twitter retaining its existing structure is in the best interests of the business, because undermining applications that offer such functionality could jeapordise the relationship of trust between application developers and Twitter, and limit any future external development of the service.

Where the future lies for the microblogging service is still unclear. Although boasting a user base of around 55 million, the business is yet to become profitible, although reports suggest the site is valued at around $US960 million.

T-Mobile and Microsoft Danger Sidekick outage, lost data

Over the weekend T-Mobile and Microsoft Danger confirmed a huge outage on its Sidekick devices.

In a statement issued to customers T-Mobile confirmed "we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."

According to some reports, the failure was due to a SAN (Storage Area Network) gone wrong at Microsoft's end. It is claimed that Microsoft does not have a working backup of some of the data that has gone missing from customers devices. The SAN upgrade is rumoured to have been outsourced to Hitachi to complete.

This huge failure has affected hundreds and it's clear from some posts at the T-Mobile forums that customers are both confused and angry at what has happened. One user states "I just want to give hell to whom is responsible for this.

Sky Songs to take on iTunes

Satellite broadcaster Sky is to take on Apple's iTunes in the digital music marketplace, when it launches its new subscription-based music store later this month. While users of the service will be limited to one album download a month, music streaming will be ad-free and unlimited.

According to the Press Association, the new service, called Sky Songs, will enable customers to download up to 1 album, or 10 songs, for a £6.49 a month subscription fee. Although additional songs will cost 65p a track, the service will also allow ad-free streaming of music without any limitations.

The new service will also allow users to download songs for use on any MP3 player - something which iTunes does not allow.

Speaking about the coming launch of their new service, Sky's Chief Operating Officer, Mike Darcey, said, "Sky Songs will reach out to consumers who want legitimate digital services offering choice, ease of use and great value. Offering legal access to digital music is a vital step in combating illegal downloading."

Available from October 19th, the service will launch with a back catalogue of songs from major music labels including EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner, as well as over 100 independent labels.

Reports have been cropping up on the Apple Support forums that users have been losing all their data due to a nasty bug in Snow Leopard, Apple's lates

Reports have been cropping up on the Apple Support forums that users have been losing all their data due to a nasty bug in Snow Leopard, Apple's latest Operating System. Many users are reporting that all settings are being reset and most data is gone, according to iTWire.

The problem, can easily be reproduced when a user logs into the 'guest' account, either on purpose or by accident, and when they log back out of the account and back into their normal one, they find that their account has been fully reset with all data wiped and lost - the account is like a brand new one. The home directory still exists under "/Users/username" but is completely empty.

Users are reporting that the data is unrecoverable and cannot be found anywhere on the hard drive, and the only way to restore it is if the user has been performing backups on a separate hard-drive. Apparently the problem has been present since a few days after launch, as the forum post dates back to 12th September, but as of yet, Apple has been silent.

It seems the only work around at this stage is to disable the Guest account, or at least disable it and then re-enabling it so that it's a native Snow Leopard account. Another suggestion is to create a new account and enforce parental controls, if you really need a temporary account.

It's not clear how many users are affected, but it seems like any user who had Leopard before the upgrade, and had the guest account enabled are affected and are at risk.

Calender Gadget for Windows 7

A calender always come in handy. There are plenty of great calender gadgets for Vista and Windows 7.

If you are using the Windows Live service, you’ll always have to log into your account to check your important dates. To avoid that you can simply install the calender gadget for Windows 7 and do that right on your desktop.

Although this is still a alpha release the gadget is working very well and you no longer have to log into calendar.live.com manually.

You can download the calender gadget over at Codeplex:
http://wlcalendargadget.codeplex.com

You can set a start and end date for events and also get an alarm message whenever it is needed. You can also add html text to the description and add useful links. Definitely comes in handy!

New Ad-Aware offers behavioral detection

Lavasoft has updated its popular malware and spyware detection and removal tool Ad-Aware. Rather than a dramatic redo, version 8.1 builds on the improvements made in the previous version. The new version is faster, has better removal abilities, and introduces a behavioral detection engine.

Ad-Aware 8

Called Genotype, Ad-Aware's heuristic-based behavioral detection engine isn't explicitly called out in the interface. However, I noticed that files that had been flagged falsely as threats in earlier versions were no longer called out as such, and the Quick Scan was able to complete in about three minutes, as opposed to 10 minutes in the previous version. These are empirical observations, of course, but this version's improvements should be easy to see for long-time users of Ad-Aware.

Removal techniques have also been improved. Lavasoft is calling the new system Neutralizer, although it's not called out as such in the program interface. What users will see is a "family" of grouped similar threats, such as cookies, the category of the threat, and the action taken. The program defaults to the Recommended action, which means you need to click on the drop-down menu to the right of the listing to see what action will be taken on a per-threat basis. The big action buttons introduced in version 8 still reside at the bottom of the window, which feels further than necessary--it'd be better to have the action button closer to where the mouse already is, at the top of the window.

There is one big change to the interface in v8.1. At the bottom left corner of the window, there's a toggle to switch between Simple mode and Advanced mode. Simple mode is for users who are set-it-and-forget-it types, with fewer options displayed. Advanced mode allows for deeper settings customization. There's also a gaming mode, so that full protection continues to run while you play games or watch videos, but detected threats won't interrupt your entertainment until you're done.

Ad-Aware's new Advanced mode, presenting more options by default.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET

Fans of personalization get more skin action in this version, too. In addition to the included skins, the community support offered at MyLavaSoft now includes community-sourced translations and skins.

However, fans of the free version do not get all the features available in the paid upgrades. Antivirus is only for paying customers, and while rootkit detection is present, behavior-based heuristics and real-time registry protection are not. Ad-Aware Free cannot scan networked drives, and even a basic feature like the scheduler remains off-limits in the free version. The Ad-Aware toolbox for system tweaks is only available in the Pro version. I encountered a pop-up for the upgrade, although Lavasoft told me that this was an infrequent occurrence. Ad-Aware Plus is available for US $ 26.95, and Ad-Aware Pro is US $39.95, and both have a 30-day trial.

Translating Binary to Text

Translating Binary to Text

Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Binary System
3. Converting Binary to ASCII (Text)

Introduction:
We’ve all seen binary code. We’ve come to think of them as a bunch of ones and zeroes in long strings…
010010101010101001101011

But these ones and zeroes can also represent decimal numbers. First off, I will show you how to read these numbers as the decimal numbers we’re used to in our daily life. Then, I will show you how to use those numbers and your keypad to translate them into text. Note that your computer doesn’t use the decimal system, so technically, when it converts binary to text, it doesn’t go through the process I will show you. This is just a divertive way of explaining you how the binary system works.

The Binary System:
Here’s a simple example of binary:
10101

Let’s think of the example above as empty slots:
_ _ _ _ _

First off, you read binary from right-to-left. It’s just the way it’s designed. The first slot from the right represents a value of one, the second from the right a value of two, the third from the right a value of four, the fourth from the right a value of eight, the fifth from the right a value of sixteen, and the cycle continues by multiples of 2. This will never change.

By putting a 1 or a 0 in those slots you are either saying you want to corresponding value that’s attached to that slot or you don’t. A 1 means yes, and a 0 means no. For example, putting a zero in the first slot from the right, but a 1 in the second slot from the right means you want a two, but not a one:
_ _ _ 1 0

As such, the number above equals to a decimal value of two.

As an example, let’s say you want to represent eight in binary form. Well, thinking about the slots, you want the first slot to be 0 because you don’t want a one, you want the second slot to also be 0 because you don’t want a two, you want the third slot to also to be 0 because you don’t want a four, but you want the fifth slot to be 1 because you want a value of eight. As such, eight in binary form is:
1 0 0 0 (or simply 1000 without those underlines)

Now it is important to note that the amount of zeroes that precede the first value of one from the left is unimportant. So for example:
1 0 0 0 is the same as 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 (1000 = 000100)

To get it cleared up, here’s another example:
0 1 is the same as 1


Exercises: What do the following equal in decimal terms?
a) 100
b] 000100
c) 100000
d) 0010

Answers:
a) 4
b] 4
c) 32
d) 2

If you got the answers above right, then you pretty much understand the basics of binary.
Let’s now understand how to get the corresponding decimal values to the numbers which are not multiples of 2.

To get the total value of a binary number, add the values corresponding to each slot. So, for example, three in binary would be:
11

The above corresponds to three because if you add the total values of all the slots, that is to say a one from the slot to the right, and a two from the second slot to the right, then it equals three.

As another example, let’s say you want to represent 5 in binary terms. Then you would need a value of one to be added to a value of four, and you would not want a value of two:
101 [Reading from the right: 1(one) + 0(two) + 1(four) = five]

Here’s an additional example:
001011 [Reading from the right: 1(one) + 1(two) + 0(four) + 1(eight) + 0(sixteen) + 0(thirty-two) = eleven)



Exercises: What do the following equal in decimal terms?
a) 11011
b] 110
c) 010101
d) 10110

Answers:
a) 27
b] 6
c) 21
d) 22

If you got the above questions correct [without cheating], then you essentially understand the binary system. Understanding the binary system was the hard part. What follows is pretty easy.

3. Converting Binary to ASCII (Text)
ASCII is essentially the letters, numbers and symbols that are stored in our computers through the use of fonts. When the keyboard relays the buttons you pressed, it sends in a code which is then converted to the ASCII equivalent of “k” or “5” or whatever key you pressed.

Here’s an example of a message “hidden” in binary text:
0100100001100101011011000110110001101111

Now there are only so many letters, numbers and symbols stored for ASCII. Having sets of 8 digits for their binary equivalent is more than enough to represent all of these letters and the like. As such, all strings that represent text like in the above are separated into bits of 8 for simplicity:
01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111

Okay, so our example message was separated into 8 digit strings. The decimal value for each of these strings in the example was calculated for you.
01001000 = 72
01100101 = 101
01101100 = 108
01101100 = 108
01101111 = 111

The result was 72,101,108,108,111. Now, there is something called the ASCII table. It essentially corresponds to the binary numbers from yore to the equivalent letters/symbols/numbers. But since we found the decimal values of these binary strings, we can use a major shortcut.

By pressing ALT + [The Number], you will get the ASCII equivalent of that number. For example, by pressing the ALT key and at then (while keeping it down) the numbers 72 in any text editor, you will get the corresponding “H” to show up.

Let’s do so for the entire example message:
72 = H
101 = e
108 = l
108 = l
111 = o

So the entire “hidden” message translates to “Hello”.


Exercise: Decode the following message
01000011011011110110111001100111011100100110000101 110100011101010110110001100001
011101000
1101001011011110110111001110011 00100001

Hint: The first step on your way to decoding the message (separated into bytes for you)
01000011 01101111 01101110 01100111 01110010 01100001 01110100 01110101 01101100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011 00100001