Activity for June 14

Review - Spybot - Search & Destroy (Beta)
2.0.3 Beta 1 (Jun 14, 2011)

Like some of the others, I too am wondering exactly what happened. I do like to install several spyware scanners and use these only for on-demand full system scan to improve my odds of catching the bad stuff. Most of these products can install and turn off the resident pieces.

This one apparently cannot. It offers quite a list of always-on options, and try removing any of those and leaving just the "essential" parts, and NOTHING works. I did just that, and was notified when I went to scan that "essential files are missing", which it suggested might be due to malware having removed it rather than the end user (me) using the software's own installation options to not install those "essential" parts that weren't described as "essential" at the time. It never would allow me to even do an on demand system scan. Everything I tried, with the sole exception of updating definitions and doing an immunization, failed due to "essential files missing". How useless is that? Why even offer the option of installing certain components if nothing is going to work without all of those?

My choices would appear to be either install the full, bloated app with all of its always-running stuff, or ... nothing. Oh well. Uninstalling it now. I had always depended on this as the on-demand sanity check for whatever the other guys left behind (and likewise, all of them were functioning for this role other than whichever was allowed to be active all the time), but I guess I'm down to just SuperAntiSpyware free edition and MalwareBytes free edition.

I may check back after the beta run is over and see if this has been fixed. I can't imagine this being the way it was designed. Surely one must be able to exclude the always-on stuff and still be able to do a basic scan.
Review - SolarWinds ipMonitor
10 (Oct 1, 2010)

Wow. Just wow. I never thought I'd see a $2,000 application showing up here.
Review - Update Notifier
1.1.6.141 (Mar 19, 2010)

This hasn't worked in some time now. Not only is it not scanning my system correctly, but it isn't showing the latest versions of apps from the list that it's allegedly retrieving online. For example, I'm looking at WizMouse 1.0.0.6 on my system, but somehow Update Notifier believes I still have 1.0.0.2 and that 1.0.0.2 is the latest version. Most of the apps in the list that it has built from my system have been upgraded since it last successfully checked, but it doesn't realize this. Nor does it realize that even if those were the versions that are installed, updates have been issued for all of those. Totally 100% broken. I've e-mailed the developer to ask whether this is still being maintained and in the meantime I'm uninstalling in favor of something else. I'll try FileHippo as others are recommending, but I also recommend the CNet TechTracker as another alternative. Perhaps between it and FileHippo we can stay up to date.
Review - DVDFab All-In-One for Windows
7.0.1.2 Beta (Mar 9, 2010)

Illegal my ass. No more illegal than a knife because it can be used to mug someone. This has been a real boon to me, which I use to rip DVDs that I've purchased from the store to make them playable on my Motorola Droid and my Archos 605 (transcoding with Handbrake). Without this I have a piece of plastic that I can't watch on the go, and believe me, it is really awesome to buy a new movie for my 3 year old and have it in my hands for him to watch when we're sitting in a restaurant and he's bored to death and otherwise having to be taken out of the restaurant. He's engaged in quietly watching his movie and I get to enjoy a meal out. It's also great to rip a few movies and have on my phone for when I'm sitting and waiting for my car to be serviced. There are many legitimate uses for this, not just for piracy.
Review - UltraDefrag
4.0.1 RC8 (Mar 4, 2010)

This is the only one of the many free defrag utilities that will actually move all of my files around to consolidate the free space. Others such as IOBit, while it is a good product, consolidate fragmented files to eliminate the fragments but still leave files scattered all over the place so as to have little pieces of free space scattered everywhere. A full defrag with this program took longer than the others but the space was neatly arranged. The boot time options also did a great job with the usually non-movable files, and not every free program has a boot time defrag option.
Comment - The real reason Android tablets don't stand a chance against iPad -- onerous monthly data fees
4.0.1 RC8 (Feb 16, 2011 - 9:59 AM)

The report I'd heard could be wrong, but I was thinking I had heard on "This Week in Google" that the Xoom's WiFi is disabled whenever there is no active data plan (a carrier imposition).
Comment - The real reason Android tablets don't stand a chance against iPad -- onerous monthly data fees
4.0.1 RC8 (Feb 16, 2011 - 9:56 AM)

I'm not speaking from personal experience, but the reviews I've seen so far are reporting some unfortunate performance issues with those. I, for one, would buy one of those if it came with at least Android 2.2, had a usable touchscreen, and wasn't so laggy as to make it unpleasant to use and impossible to play video smoothly.
Comment - It's here: Internet Explorer 9 beta
4.0.1 RC8 (Sep 15, 2010 - 4:28 PM)

Is the tab bar *really* that short? It doesn't look as if it's going to be very usable when you get a dozen or so tabs open. I can't install it at the moment because I'm on a company notebook which is running XP. I do hope there is some tab management magic that isn't apparent from the screen shot.
Comment - Verizon moves in on Google's turf again with V CAST Apps
4.0.1 RC8 (Sep 14, 2010 - 9:47 PM)

The Google apps are easy enough to add. I'm running Cyanogen 6, which is Android 2.2. I have all of the stock Google apps including the Marketplace.
Comment - Researchers find 80 different Android wallpaper apps skimming sensitive data
4.0.1 RC8 (Jul 30, 2010 - 9:21 AM)

I do wonder whether the apps are ACTUALLY pulling ANYTHING, or if the researcher simply installed the apps and noted which security flags were being displayed during the install. Back when I got my Droid, I went to install one of these and noticed that it wanted access to something along these lines that left me wondering what was up. I tried another,same thing. Every one that I tried did this.

I went to one of the Android community forums and asked if anyone had any idea what was up with the wallpaper apps wanting access to these specific things, and a software developer in the thread did a bit of looking around and reported back that for whatever reason, for an app to be able to change the wallpaper, it has to request access to some of these things that would look a bit screwy for a wallpaper app. The "change wallpaper" function is apparently connected in some way to those other things. I'm not a developer, so he may be full of s***, but my point is that maybe this needs to be looked into more thoroughly than just assuming that because the security notice says the app wants access to personal data, something must be wrong. I would like evidence that these 80 apps actually are doing something nefarious, and/or that they're at least asking for access to things that aren't essential to changing the wallpaper.