Tag: free
Panda launching free cloud-based antivirus product
If you want an antivirus product, but you’re not keen on having a weighty product bogging down your system, you might be interested in taking a peek at a new beta release from Panda Antivirus.
It uses proprietary technology that’s been developed over three years to identify new malware applications in as little as six minutes from their release into the wild. It also handles nearly 50,000 new samples a day. To improve performance, it scans executable files immediately, but the rest of your PC when it’s idle.
It’s free because Panda wants to use data from your computer to identify new threats. What Panda hopes will be ‘millions of users’ will send heuristics info to a central server that can crunch all the data nearly in real-time.
The program takes up 50MB on your hard disk, and just 17MB of RAM when in use. Panda hopes to get this down to 12MB by the time it’s officially released. Of course, if you’re not connected to the internet, you lose a certain amount of protection, but given that the internet is the source of most virus activity, that’s not such a big issue, really.
Panda Cloud Antivirus (via Cnet)
Google launching free, legal, music downloads… in China
Internet giant Google today launched a service that provides completely free, legal downloads of songs from all four major labels. The caveat? It’s only available in China. Damn.
There will be over 350,000 tracks available at launch, from both Chinese and Western markets. Users will be able to search by artist and song name, but also by the level of ‘beat’ in the song, and its ‘instrumentality’, whatever that is.
Google’s making the move due to massive levels of piracy in the world’s most populous country. The search engine lags behind its competitor Baidu in the country, mainly thanks to Baidu’s MP3 search functions. This launch should help Google compete in a market where 99% of music consumed is illegal.
Google’s free music service (via Reuters)
Google Voice launches in the USA
Damn. I want this so bad. Google Voice, formerly known as GrandCentral and acquired by the company in 2006, has finally launched officially in the US. It’s a service that gives you one phone number that can access all your phones, for life, for free.
It’s been invite-only for nearly two years, and there are apparently tens of thousands of people on the waiting list, but Google will shortly be letting some of those people in. Accounts have, in the past, gone for up to $650 on eBay.
The way it works is that you get given a mobile phone number, and then a web interface lets you redirect that number to any phone you like. Going on holiday? Redirect it to the hotel you’re staying in. Leaving the office for an afternoon? Send people to your mobile phone. Expecting a call you don’t want? Put the caller through to the fax machine.
There’s also Spinvox-esque voicemail transcription, text messaging, friend settings (so that certain people can bypass your voicemail) and call recording. There’s even conference calling, and you can add credit to the account to make very cheap international calls, just like Skype.
Sadly, the service is only available in the USA. That’s a big 🙁 for me. When can we get that going down in the UK? It’s got to be possible, right?
(via TechCrunch)
Skype gives away its SILK speech codec for free
Skype has just announced that it’s giving away its SILK speech codec, which is the bit of software that processes your voice into a small enough stream of data for you to be able to communicate over a slow internet connection. A codec is basically a balancing act between file size and audio quality.
The SILK codec has been in development for three years at Skype and was finally bundled with the most recent release of the software – Skype 4. It’s a major step forward in audio quality and scales depending on the bandwidth available.
So if it’s so great, then why is Skype giving it away royalty-free to its competitors? Good question. My best guess is that Skype has the VoIP market so firmly tied up that it wants some competition to help grow the whole market. Then, I suppose, it’s confident enough that those users will switch to Skype thanks to its fantastic software.
It might also be a sign that Skype’s considering offering an API. Opening up the service, which is famously closed, would mean that other programs could be able to make Skype calls natively, without people having to open and install Skype itself. It could mean that you’ll just be able to highlight phone numbers on websites and right-click to call them from the browser.
More information’s available on the SILK website, and TechCrunch has an interesting take too.
Cuba launches its own Linux variant
Cuba, long the subject of a trade embargo from America, finds it difficult to get its hands on Microsoft software legally. Given that MS Office formats are the global standard, it makes things rather difficult for the island nation, so the country has decided to put its eggs in the Open Source box.
Cuba has developed its own variant of Linux, called “Nova”. It was introduced at a Havana computer conference on “technological sovereignty”, the Cuban government’s desire to become more technologically independent from America.
About 20 percent computers in Cuba currently run Linux – but sales of computers to the public only started last year. The dean of the School of Free Software at Cuba’s University of Information Sciences, Hector Rodriguez, says “I would like to think that in five years our country will have more than 50 percent migrated (to Linux)”.
(via Reuters)
Google makes 1.5 million books available on mobile, free
Over the past couple of years, Google’s been industriously scanning, cataloguing and digitising millions of books whose content has passed into the public domain. These books have been available for a while on Google Book Search, but now they’re available on mobile too.
If you point your iPhone or Android browser towards http://books.google.com/m, then you’ll find mobile-optimised versions of the books which display text, rather than the digital images provided on the non-mobile edition.
I should admit, too, that the headline’s slightly misleading – 1.5 million books are available in the USA, with just half a million of those available outside the US. That’s a shame, but almost certainly due to copyright issues – books in the public domain in the USA may well not be in the rest of the world.
Google Book Search for Mobile (via Inside Google Book Search)
More about books: Vodafone extends entertainment portfolio with exciting new “books” option | British Library making rare books virtually available online
Top 10 Tuesday Wednesday: Free, Legal, Music on the Internet
I’m going to take a break from gadgets today, like Dan did yesterday for Technology Deathmatch, to tell you about some of my favourite sources of free, legal music on the internet. It’s entirely possible, contrary to what major record labels would have you believe, to live completely free of paying for recorded music.
Not all offer downloads that’ll work on your MP3 player – some just stream – and not all these sites are going to be around forever, due to the turbulent nature of the digital music market around now, but if you can live with both those caveats, then click over the jump for my top ten sites where you can get free, legal, music.
Isle of Man gets free, legal, P2P downloads
Residents of the Isle of Man, take note. You may soon be able to download all the music you like, from wherever you want, but you’re going to have to pay a little extra on top of your broadband bill for it. The Manx government wants to enforce a blanket music consumption license, tied to broadband bills.
“At the end of the day, we are not going to stop piracy, so let’s embrace it,” says the remarkably sensible Inward Investment Minister, Ron Berry. Surprisingly, the BPI endorses the move as well, with head honcho Geoff Taylor saying: “If ISPs take the position advocated in the Isle of Man, we’d be in an enormously better position.”
UK Lycos/Tripod users: you're unprofitable, get lost
There was a time when the black labrador at Lycos was a fairly common sight, but times change and the RSPCA may have to step in shortly to rescue the poor little mutt.
That is, if Lycos UK does to him what it’s doing to its email and web hosting users.
You see, it’s not very profitable running free email and web hosting services, particularly when there are much bigger (Hotmail) and better (Gmail) ones out there.
From 15th February, users with Lycos Mail or Tripod web hosting accounts will lose all of their data and no longer be able to send or receive emails. While I’ve not visited a Tripod page in about ten years, nor seen anyone in the UK with a Lycos email address for about the same period of time, a little piece of Internet history is slipping away…
Apple giving away music and downloads during the iTunes 12 Days of Christmas
Apple’s 12 Days of Christmas campaign is eating away at 2008’s profitability figures by giving away one free iTunes download a day between December 26 and January 6th.
The songs and TV shows, some of which may be by people you’ve even heard of and are interested in, will pop up on the site each day, along with some interesting facts about the material in question, which may come in handy if you’re planning on attending a Christmas pub quiz.
You don’t get a choice. Today’s is ‘Video EP’ by Jason Mraz.
The idea is no doubt meant to promote edgy new artists you otherwise wouldn’t bother listening to on the radio for free…
