Hasta La Gadget!

After last week’s uproar over Microsoft’s 2012 snooping in a blogger’s Hotmail account , the company says it will no longer perform its own email snooping in criminal cases. In an official blog post today, Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad Smith said that, effective immediately, when investigations occur, "we will not inspect a customer’s private content ourselves. Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action is required." Which sounds like what should’ve been protocol in the first place.

Read more…

This article was written on October 10, 2011 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Steve Jobs Passed Away
Last Wednesday, a day after the iPhone 4S announcement, Steve Jobs passed away. This is a great roundup of all the coverage, and we wish the best for his family.

Google/Samsung Postpone Launch Event
Google and Samsung were expected to announce the first smartphone based on Android’s “Ice Cream Sandwich” tomorrow. AllThingsD reports that the event was postponed out of respect for Steve Jobs’ passing.

Nuance Acquires Swype
The Nuance speech recognition company has bought Swype, which is a unique on-screen keyboard for mobile devices. My guess is that Nuance wants to incorporate a speech recognition button on the Swype keyboard that is widely distributed and even ships with some Android phones.

Rdio Starts Offering Free Access
The Rdio music service now has an ad-free desktop music player that lets users listen at absolutely no cost. It should be noted that this isn’t unlimited music listening, and that Rdio hasn’t gone into details as to how the limits are determined.

Google Earth Downloaded Over 1 Billion Times
Google hit a big milestone: the Google Earth desktop app, introduced back in 2005, has been downloaded over a billion times.

Apple Announces iPhone 4S
During a keynote last Tuesday Apple announced their next generation iPhone, which is called the iPhone 4S. The new device looks the same as the iPhone 4, but is world phone, has an A5 processor, faster graphics, 8MP camera, and 1080P video.

The Evolution of the Windows Start Menu
Microsoft takes a look at how the Start Menu has changed over the years, and how they are re-evaluating the way people access their apps.

Leaked Sales Numbers for the Amazon Kindle Fire
Amazon Kindle Fire tablet preorders are doing pretty well if this leak is to be believed. The leak indicates that Amazon racking up about 2,000 preorders per hour for the new tablet that launches on November 15th.

Microsoft Kills Off Zune HD
Going forward Microsoft will be focusing their music efforts on the Windows Phone, and will no longer sell the Zune HD to consumers.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Windows 7 Explorer Tips and Tricks
Here is a guide covering how to do things in the Windows 7 Explorer like pick a different startup folder, add applications to the favorite list, and more.

Chrome Remote Desktop
This cross-platform Google Chrome extension makes it possible to connect to someone else’s machine who is also running the extension.

Killing Time With Reddit Tab Opener
The Reddit Tab Opener is a Chrome extension that will bulk open all image links on a given Reddit page. That way you can just sift from tab-to-tab enjoying the fun stuff Reddit has to offer without clicking on a bunch of links.

Plan the Next 101 Things You Want To Do
Day Zero is a free site that lets you plan out 101 things you want to do in the next 1001 days.

Official Hotmail App Available for Android
If you use an Android device you can go ahead and grab Microsoft’s official Hotmail app that can be used to manage your email.

PassMyWill Sends Out Your Passwords After You Die
PassMyWill is a service that monitors your Facebook/Twitter accounts, and if it finds that they are inactive it will send you an email. If you fail to respond to that message it will assume you’ve passed away, and will then automatically email out your passwords to a group of people you’ve specified.

Generate CSS Code for Website Loading Animations
This clever service helps you create custom loading icons/animations and provides the CSS needed to quickly get it running on your site.

Growl 1.3 for Mac Users
The new version of Growl has been completely rewritten, and includes a nice “rollup” notification center that displays alerts you missed while away from your computer. The catch is that the developers are now charging $1.99 for the app (which was previously free) in the Mac App Store, and they hope that the small fee will help them better maintain Growl going forward.

Parallels Desktop 7 and VMWare Fusion 4
Ars Technica provides an in-depth comparison of the two Mac virtualization technologies that are available: Parallels Desktop 7 and VMWare Fusion 4.

Automatically Export Evernote Notes
The free Evernote Exporter is an open source app that can save off all your notes on a schedule that you specify. It is a great solution for anyone wanting an offline backup of your notes.

–Downloads–

• Adobe Air 3.0.0.4080 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• BurnAware Free 4.0 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• CCleaner 3.11.1550 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Fedora Linux 16 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Flash Player 11.0.1.152 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Chrome 16.0.899.0 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Earth 6.1.0.4857 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• ImgBurn 2.5.6.0 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Opera 12.00.1085 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Paint.NET 3.5.9 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• SeaMonkey 2.5 ^{Beta 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• VMware Player 4.0.0 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• VirtualBox 4.1.4.74291 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• uTorrent 3.0.25756 [Homepage] [Mirror]

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

Hello, compatibility! Microsoft’s obviously a major proponent of Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), but if you’ve been using electronic mail for any length of time, you’re probably aware that IMAP is a darn near universal protocol. Now, Microsoft is adding IMAP (and OAuth) support to Outlook.com. In addition to this being a lovely sign of Microsoft not shunning rival standards, it also opens up a ton of new possibilities. For one, applications that haven’t supported EAS — programs such as Mac Mail and the Mac edition of Mozilla Thunderbird — can now host Outlook.com accounts.

Moreover, IMAP gives devs the ability to build third-party clients and services that are useful to end-users, and Microsoft’s announcing the first set of those as well. TripIt, Sift, Slice, motley*bunch, Unroll.me, OtherInbox, and Context.IO have taken advantage of Outlook.com’s new IMAP capability and are rolling out updates today that allow their apps and services to integrate with your Outlook.com email. If you’d like for your own app to follow suit, Microsoft’s providing a bit of instruction right here.

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft

Comments

Source: Outlook Blog

Microsoft announced today that it has completed the process of shifting Hotmail customers to Outlook.com. In a little more than six weeks the company has transferred some 150 petabytes of email data safely and securely to its new email service. Today they’ve also announced a couple of new features for Outlook.com, these include the improved integration of SkyDrive and SMTP send, which will make it easier for users to send emails from different email addresses.

Outlook.com came out of preview in February and at the time it already had over 60 million active accounts. Now with Hotmail accounts having been brought over, Outlook.com touts 400 million active accounts from all parts of the world. The deeper SkyDrive integration means that users will now be able to insert files and pictures in emails straight from SkyDrive itself. The integration rolls out today and will be made available worldwide in a couple of weeks. SMTP send enables Outlook.com users to send and receive emails from other accounts. Email sent through a different account will go through that account’s SMTP server, the recipient will not know that the email has been sent through Outlook.com. The team assures us that there are more improvements to come in the near future.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Video Messaging Comes To Skype For Windows 8, Google Hangouts Receives Remote Desktop Control Feature,

Yesterday, we brought you word on how Microsoft’s online services suffered from an outage, with the Outlook.com service experiencing issues that spanned a total of 16 hours thereabouts, and it is nice to hear what went wrong. No, it is not because of a ghost in the shell, and neither are there gremlins in the system, but rather, it was due to a botched firmware upgrade at the company’s datacenter.

This update caused some of Microsoft’s customers to remain locked out of their services such as SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Outlook. While Microsoft did manage to update their datacenter firmware without any issues in the past, the most recent attempt “resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the datacenter”, which sent the mercury high enough to kick off Microsoft’s safeguard process for a host of servers in the datacenter, which hence prevented users to access those mailboxes of theirs.

All’s well that ends well, and Microsoft has promised that something like this will not happen again. It should not anyways, considering the millions of dollars that Microsoft has poured in to advertise the Outlook.com service.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Merges Maps And Search Division, Digg Wants To Create Own RSS Reader,