Tech Thoughts Daily Net News – July 3, 2010

Freeware Files: 5 Reader Recommended Games, Apps, and Utilities! – From games, to apps to utilities, you’ve left few stones unturned in your various replies to my weekly freeware roundups.

Opera picks up AVG – After only a few weeks of public testing, Opera’s 10.60 Web browser graduates from beta to the real thing. It has an unexpected new feature onboard–anti-malware tech licensed from megapopular freeware antivirus app AVG.

A Comparison of Hulu Plus vs Netflix – Will Hulu Plus replace Netflix as the streaming TV service of choice for net-savvy couch potatoes? We compare both to see which of these titans of television deserves your dollars.

What’s a MAC Address, and How Do You Find It? – I’d like to use one of my router’s other features — something called MAC address filtering. According to the documentation, this would restrict access to the network to only the PCs that have been registered with the router. So even if someone managed to get my WEP key, they still wouldn’t be able to connect to my network. My problem is that the term MAC address is new to me, and I don’t know where to find it.

Improve Your Wireless Devices’ Reception with a USB Hub – As more and more peripherals—like your keyboard and mouse—go wireless, your cable management problems may end up giving way to reception problems. Tech blog Tested says moving your wireless dongles to a dedicated USB hub can do wonders for that reception.

‘Encryption On A Chip’ Raises Hopes For Better Security – Intel working on building random-number generation into future computer chips.

IE reverses downward trend – at Firefox’s expense – Internet Explorer has reversed a years-long slide in browser usage, at least for the month of June, reclaiming share at the expense of Firefox.

Apple can’t fix iPhone reception, will start telling truth about signal strength – Apple issues an open letter that offers no fix for antenna issue but reveals a software problem that’s been making iPhone users think that AT&T’s signal has been better than it truly is.

How to Buy a Small Business Computer – Buying small business computers can affect business profitability, efficiency and employee productivity in profound ways and — as with purchasing a new car – the trade-offs between the options and accessories are not as simple as shrugging your shoulders and lamenting, “You get what you pay for.”

More Than 80 Percent of U.S. Enterprises Hit By Advanced Attacks – Ponemon Institute survey shows 71 percent increase in attacks from unknown or stealthy attacks over the past 12 months. Advanced threats are growing and more companies are getting hit by attackers employing techniques that slip past most up-to-date security controls, a new study has found.

New Regional Attacks On Banks Fly Under The Radar – Detection rates for regional malware are between zero and 20 percent, suggesting that the majority of these attacks go undetected.

Off Topic (Sort of):

Bob Jones University Textbook Explains Electricity [pic] – Even scarier? Over 1 million children use these textbooks to learn science.

Right to broadband: like access to electricity, water? – When it comes to broadband as a legal right, maybe Finland has it right. The government in Finland has made it official: access to a broadband connection of at least 1 megabit per second is now a legal right for the residents of that country. And by 2015, the government hopes to impose minimum connection of 100 mbps to its residents.

Video: Ultra-hot Russian superspy talks Internet entrepreneurship – File this under “you can’t make this up.” What follows is a video of Anna Chapman, the hot Russian spy recently arrested by the FBI. In this 11-minute video, we see what appears to be a very charming (and genuine) young woman discussing her plans for a new Internet startup.

Who really controls BP? – There’s a lot of talk about BP being a British company. Actually, the ownership and control of the company is a lot more complex. Some facts not reported in the news…. (submitted by Dar)

Today’s Quote:

“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?”

–     Jean Cocteau

Today’s Free Downloads:

Immunet Protect – A free companion antivirus solution that combines the speed of cloud computing with the benefits of Collective Immunity to protect entire online communities against real-time virus threats. Stay protected against over 13 million viruses and thousands of new threats daily without ever downloading another virus detection file again.

AppCrashView – AppCrashView is a small utility for Windows Vista and Windows 7 that displays the details of all application crashes occurred in your system. The crashes information is extracted from the .wer files created by the Windows Error Reporting (WER) component of the operating system every time that a crash is occurred. AppCrashView also allows you to easily save the crashes list to text/csv/html/xml file.

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