Category: News

E3 is probably the most famous game convention, but not the only one. There are many other game-related events along the year, held on both sides of the Atlantic. A good example is the upcoming Leipzig Games Convention, which will take place from August 23rd to 26th.

The 2007 Games Convention will have more than 400 exhibitors from 26 different countries, all packed in the Leipzig Exhibition Center. However, this may be the last year in this location, as the increasing growth of this event begins to cause problems. In fact, this year’s edition expects about 200,000 visitors, which is a much larger attendance than the one achieved by E3.

The trick is that the Leipzig Games Convention has a business area for games companies, developers and other professionals, but also public areas open to everyone. Just as an example, this year’s Convention will include family activities, an open-air summer festival and even camping facilities. So, if you don’t have anything else planned for those days, you might want to drop by!

To celebrate 10 years of Alexa, the company have released an official toolbar for Firefox. The application – called Sparky – makes tracking website rankings easier and has several useful features.

One of them is ‘Sparkline’ which is a small condensed traffic history graph and gives a quick overview of whether your site is moving up or down. There’s also a new ‘Reach Indicator’ which provides a qualitative view of whether a site’s rank is good or bad. In addition, there’s a ‘Related Links’ button which provides up to 10 related links in the browser’s file, edit and view menu.

Previously Firefox users were restricted to the SearchStatus toolbar for Alexa rankings. However, note that this official release does send information to Alexa’s servers to monitor traffic so if you’re worried about privacy, install it with caution.

An updated version of Firefox, 2.0.0.5, which addresses several security issues, has been released by Mozilla. You can download it by going to ‘Help’ and then ‘Check For Updates’ in the browser or you can download it directly from Softonic. The fix addresses three critical, two high, one medium and two low security vulnerabilities. The bugs include fixes to an ‘Unauthorized access to wyciwyg:// documents’ error and a ‘Crashes with evidence of memory corruption’ issue.

So far, all of my extensions are continuing to work with the new version although it’s inevitable that there will be one or two that won’t. Note that by downloading the new version from Softonic, you’ll overwrite your existing version whereas by updating from the browser itself, you’ll maintain your current setup.

Newslife is an RSS reader for your desktop with good sharing capabilities. The interface is very sleek and shows the custom icons for each feed. We particularly liked the news bin section, where you can store notes that you find interesting, then send them to social networks, email, post on your blog or listen to with the Mac Text-to-Speech tool.

Microsoft have unveiled a new tool in the fight against malware with the launch of their Malware Protection Center Portal. The site is basically a combination of warnings about the latest threats, encyclopedic information on malware plus downloads of Microsoft’s anti-virus and anti-spyware software.

In a further step, the software giant has also announced it will begin publishing a Security Intelligence Report about the latest PC threats. They’re even encouraging users to upload infected files to their Protection Center Portal to conduct further analysis and help other affected users.

First impressions are that the portal certainly looks useful. The homepage presents a list of the top 10 security threats relating to desktops, e-mails, MSRT detections and Adware/Spyware. At the time of writing, it lists the top three desktop threats as Exploit:HTML/IframeRef.gen, TrojanDownloader:JS/Agent.FA and Trojan:Win32/Fotomoto.A.

However, this should have been launched years ago by Microsoft who’s software and operating systems have been subject to constant security issues. Many will also surely ask, if they can’t secure their own operating system, why trust them with security software? In addition, there are so many third party security software developers on the scene now that Microsoft have missed the boat somewhat although the site will at least be a decent reference point to keep track of the latest global security threats if nothing else.

By the way, the team behind the project also have a blog with commentary on the latest developments on the portal.