Software

UK Internet Gambling Firms Hit By US Online Betting Ban
Millions of game-toughened poker faces are showing signs of impending blubbering as the US Congress unexpectedly passed anti-online gambling laws last week.
Moreover, the new laws are set to hit Britain’s Internet gambling companies hard, with many of the US big players being based in the UK.
Shares of internet gambling sites like PartyGaming, Sportingbet and 888 plummeted as the new legislation made it unlawful for credit-card companies to collect payments for transactions with online-gaming sites.
The laws – contained in The Safe Port Act – are now just a George W. Bush signature away, with the President expected to put pen to paper within the next two weeks.
The new laws will wipe out US revenue for London-based online-gaming companies, with PartyGaming saying that they’d suspend business with US residents as soon as the law takes effect.
For PartyGaming it’s a calamitous blow. With more than half of the company’s revenue coming from US residents, share prices plummeted by 60 per cent, while 888Holdings – who enjoy a similar percentage of US revenue – saw its share price crash 45 per cent.
In a Stock Market announcement, the company said:
“After taking extensive legal advice, the Board of PartyGaming Plc has concluded that the new legislation, if signed into law, will make it practically impossible to provide US residents with access to its real money poker and other real money gaming sites. As a result of this development, the Board of PartyGaming has determined that if the President signs the Act into law, the Company will suspend all real money gaming business with US residents, and such suspension will continue indefinitely, subject to clarification of the interpretation and enforcement of US law and the impact on financial institutions of this and other related legislation.”
888 Holdings has already suspended its US operations, commenting that, “the board will continue to seek clarification of the overall US legal position to determine whether and to what extent if any resumption of participation by US customers is feasible”.
“At present however no assurance can be given that this will be possible,” they added.
Bizarrely, the anti-gambling legislation has been bundled in with The Safe Port Act, which is all about raising $3.4bn to “make ports safe” from evil terrorists by adding security measures like increased goods containers inspections.
PartyGaming Stock Exchange statement
2 October, 2006
ChanSkype: Skype And Asterisk Talk To Each Other
A Brazilian company has forged a software bridge between Asterisk and Skype.
Asterisk is an open source VoIP PBX that runs on Linux and other platforms which handles VoIP to VoIP calling as well as calls to landlines. Developed by Mark Spencer it has taken the community by storm, sprouting many tens of thousands of installations world-wide, with a thriving development community.
It can work with traditional telephony systems or POTS (plain old telephone system), with digital systems (ISDN etc) and modern VoIP protocols such as H.323, SIP, MGCP and more.
Digium (set-up by Spencer) now manufactures hardware and offers a commercially supported version of Asterisk known as ABE (Asterisk Binary Edition).
One feature that has been missing is Skype integration (the next version of Asterisk v1.4 supports GoogleTalk using Google’s libjingle library). A Brazilian company has now changed that, with their ChanSkype site.
ChanSkype
Currently the service is in test and you have to utilise ChanSkype’s own Asterisk servers. They offer a “free” trial whereby they allow a SIP connection and then by passing in a Skype address it sets-up a connection to the Skype user.
In the future they will be offering an actual chan_skype that plugs directly into any Asterisk server and can connect to the Skype network.
Of course it’s not quite so simple. The initial release only runs on RedHat’s Fedora Core or CentOS (which means it will probably also run on RedHat Enterprise Server too as CentOS is a clone of that). There must also be an X server running as well as the Skype for Linux client. So ChanSkype just bridges the two systems together.
A dual Xeon 3Ghz with 2 gigs of memory should run 30 simultaneous Skype calls without any noticable degradation of performance.
Pricing has not yet been set, but it will be licensed on a per-channel basis.
There may be licensing problems too as Asterisk modules should normally be available under a GPL license and with source code, but as Skype is proprietry they may get away with it.
Someone really needs to reverse engineer the Skype protocol and then a native chan_skype could be developed, but this is unlikely to happen in the western world as that could be illegal.
It’s a good idea, but really just a straight link into the Skype software which unfortunately is the only way it can be done.
ChanSkype
20 September, 2006
FakeCall For Palm Treo 650
You must all be familiar with this dreadful situation when you’re stuck in a late Friday work meeting that never seems to end, while your mates are already in the pub.
The boss is showing no sign of finishing his motivational Power Point presentation (backed by the soft rock ‘team building’ sounds of Boston and Foreigner) and you’re desperately trying to think of a good enough reason to get you out of this hell hole.
If only the phone would ring with an urgent call!
Thanks to Fake Call, there’s now a handy and convincing way to escape perpetual presentations (and unwanted social interactions) by setting up simulated incoming phone calls.
Using the programs straightforward interface, you can set an appointment in the Treo’s Contacts to activate the fake call (or discretely press and hold a preconfigured key) and a call will materialise right on cue!
Ringtones can be set as required and when the phone rings, it’ll even display the name of the fake caller, so you can let your boss see how really urgent the call must be.
When you answer the call, one of four pre-defined “hello” greeting messages will blast out of your phone, or you can record your own one-sided ‘conversations’ in wav/mp3/ogg/wma file formats for added, boss-fooling authenticity
FakeCall requires 50k of memory and can be purchased from Toysoft Inc – it’s got to be worth the outlay for just $5.95 (£3.20, €4.70)!
18 September, 2006
Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Announced
Adobe has announced the latest upgrade to their Photoshop Elements consumer photo editing software with Version 5 of the popular, consumer-friendly package adding more tools to help photographers organise, edit and share their pictures.
With a strong focus on sharing, Photoshop Elements lets users organise photos into themed and customisable layouts with online scrapbooks offering a choice of over 100 frames.
Using a trusty ol’ drag and drop interface, photos can be moved and resized within the templates, with a new Map View letting snappers mark photo-shoot locations on an online satellite map.
Adobe Photoshop Services makes it easy for users to share photos online, with the Flash-powered Adobe Photoshop Showcase allowing punters to go kerrrr-azy with spinning, whirring virtual scrapbooks, with lots of options to add unutterably cheesy effects like falling snow and spinning photo carousels (don’t do it!).
Powerful imaging tools
Amongst all the eye-candy fluff, there’s the usual powerful image editing tools which has rightly made Elements the best selling consumer photo editing software on the planet.
These include intelligent features that automatically correct skin tone, lighting, colour, contrast and ‘red eye,’ with tools to fine-tune colour, brightness, and contrast.
It’s even got some of the advanced features from its big brother, the industry standard Photoshop CS2, with smart tools like a Healing Brush for removing unwanted objects and ex’girl/boyfriends, a Spot Healing Brush for getting rid of dust and scratches in old photos, and Shadow/Highlight for lightening shadows and reducing the glare of highlights.
New tools for version 5 include a useful black-and-white conversion tool, a long overdue “Adjust Colour Curves” tool for fine-tuning images and a handy controls for correcting camera lens distortion.
“Digital photography has changed the way people capture moments and memories and today’s digital cameras and even camera phones have the potential to deliver some extraordinary results,” intoned John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe.
“Adobe Photoshop Elements gives customers the creative freedom to get more out of their digital camera, with the sophisticated and accessible editing features that the Photoshop name is famed for. The result is superior images that can be shared with family and friends in new, exciting, high impact ways – on the Web or in printed formats,” he frothed.
Premiere Elements 3.0
Adobe also unveiled the version three of their Adobe Premiere Elements software, which tightly integrates with Elements to let punters get wildly creative with their photos and home videos.
Both products will be available in October 2006 with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 for Windows knocking out for around £69.99 (excluding VAT), with the option to buy the Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0/ Premiere Elements 3.0 bundle for just under a ton.
It looks like Mac users are still stuck with Photoshop Elements 4.0 which also retails for £69.99 (excVAT).
Adobe
14 September, 2006
WordWeb Review: Free English Thesaurus/Dictionary (90%)
A long time favourite of the Digi-Lifestyles crew, WordWeb is a free, cut-down version of the WordWeb Pro software, and includes a comprehensive English thesaurus and dictionary with the ability to look up words from within external programs.
Originally an add-on for the Crossword Compiler application, WordWeb has developed into a formidable stand-alone product, regularly updated with new words and senses.
Once installed, the program lurks in your Windows system tray and can be activated from within almost any program.
Simply highlight the word you need a definition for and either click the system tray icon or use the default keyboard shortcut of CTRL+ALT+W.
Quick as a flash, WordWeb pops up with a dictionary definition of your highlighted word, often supplemented by a sample sentence demonstrating the correct usage of the word.
Minger
Seeing as we haven’t got over our childish habit of typing in naughty words into dictionary, we tried it out with the British slang word, ‘minger:’
1. (slang) a physically undesirable, smelly, or ugly person
“It wasn’t ’til we woke, the next morning, that I realised quite what a minger she was. I left pretty damn sharpish before she asked for my phone”
The program can also be used to look up word definitions and alternative synonyms or antonyms – you could, for example, look up “tree”, click on the “Types” tab and you’ll be presented with a list of different types of tree.
Click on “Part of” and the program will tell you that a tree can be part of a “forest” or “wood” (in case you weren’t sure).
Clicking on the “Replace” button will let you swap the highlighted word in your document with a listed synonym or you can keep on exploring alternatives by clicking on words to view more synonyms and definitions.
The WordWeb database boasts more than 156,000 root works and 124,000 synonym sets and is based on Princeton’s WordNet project, with the developers making “many thousands of corrections and additions to this base.”
The program – which comes in regionalised flavours – can also access the web to offer a web search of the highlighted word or link to a site with translation capabilities.
The $19 Pro version adds 6,000 more definitions and offers extra features like wildcard word search, full text definition search, custom glossaries and optional word lists
Notably, the UK-developed WordWeb is also one of the very few references that works with screen reader software for the blind – kudos to the authors.
Features: 85%
Ease of use: 85%
Value For Money: 85% (100% for freebie version!)
Overall: 90%
Free WordWeb 4.5 for Windows 95/98/2000/NT/Me/XP
WordWeb Pro
11 September, 2006
TreoCiel Weather Forecast For Palm Treo Review (90%)
Like most Brits we’re more than a bit obsessed with all things weather-related, so as soon as we bought a Palm Treo we were busily installing a host of weather-related applications, including Treo Alarm.
We thought that combo had left us most with isobaric bases covered until we came across the uncrowned Big Daddy of weather apps, the superb Tréociel.
This puppy positively assails you with weather info, serving up max and min temperatures, precipitation probabilities, weather forecast icons and wind speed and direction.
Of course, all that data’s a fat load of good if you can’t make head or tail of it, but here’s where the Tréociel really excels, presenting weather forecasts in a series of clear, easy-to-read scrollable charts.
Setting it all up
Before you start, you need to input which cities you want to monitor, and this can be done by typing in the city name, weather station ID or search.
Once located, the program prompts you to decide whether you want to track hourly or daily weather data, with a click on the ‘update’ button downloading the latest information off the internet (unfortunately, there’s no auto-update facility yet).
Reading the charts
Downloaded ten-day weather information is shown on a horizontally scrolling graph which can be set up with customised views.
By default, Tréociel will show min/max temperature, weather icons, wind speed and precipitation information, with the option to define three custom views.
Wind speeds can be shown in km/h, mph, m/s, knots or in the trusty old Beaufort Scale, with the choice to select temperature readouts in Celsius or old school Fahrenheit.
Graphs can display hourly or daily forecasts, with the scrollable graph making it easy to track weather trends.
Conclusion
We loved Tréociel, with the program’s novel and easy to read interface tempting us into wasting endless time checking out the weather in different cities around the world, as well as looking up the local forecast.
The internet updates meant we knew when to pack an umbrella before leavng the office and if anyone made the mistake of striking up a conversation about the weather, we had Tréociel on hand to bore them utterly senseless.
At just €9.95 the program represents great value to our eyes and looks to be an essential purchase for travellers and meteorological mullers.
Currently optimised for the Palm Treo only, owners of non Palm smartphones should be able to join in the fun soon with the authors promising versions for “Windows Mobile and other platforms” in the future.
Features: 80%
Ease of use: 85%
Value For Money: 90%
Overall: 90%
TréoCiel
6 September, 2006
87% Of Email Is Steeenkin’ Spam
A new report from anti virus firm SoftScan has revealed that spam levels remain hideously high at 87.72% of all email traffic, while reports of phishing activity have soared.
Virus levels have doubled, but at 1.02% they still represent a tiny proportion of the total email scanned by SoftScan last month.
The company said that 89.5 per cent of all viruses scanned were classified as phishing malware, although this increase could be attributed to improved or additional antivirus detection.
Diego d’Ambra, chief technical officer at SoftScan, said: “Recent enhancements and developments by the antivirus industry to their scanners has meant an increase in detecting phishing emails as malware, as opposed to spam. This gives the impression that phishing has risen significantly, but is really due to the reclassification from spam to malware.”
Spam levels are expected to reduce by a few per cent soon, with the post-summer holiday rise in legitimate business email pushing the spam percentage back down to its usual level of around 85 per cent.
A breakdown of the the top five virus groups in July are as follows:
1 Phishing: 89.50%
2 Netsky: 2.44%
3 Mytob: 2.19%
4 Bzub 1.42%
5 Bagle 1.22%
Mailwasher
Here in Digital Lifestyle towers, we’re plagued with spam like everyone else, but have been long time users of the excellent Mailwasher Pro software (Windows/Mac/Linux) which lets us swot spams from our server without having to download the things.
The software analyses each email as it arrives and flags up a warning if it is suspected junk mail using fuzzy logic and filtering, and there’s also the ability to set up custom filters.
There’s also a free version available for single accounts: Mailwasher freebie – well worth checking out for nowt!
5 September, 2006
SplashID Password Manager For Smartphones/PDAs (90%)
If you’re a modern, go-getting metrosexual-about-town like us Digi-Life hipsters, you’ll be the owner of a mile-long list of passwords, web logins, ATM PINs, program serials, bank account details, credit card numbers and passcodes for highly exclusive West End nightclubs.
Remembering all those numbers and passwords isn’t the easiest thing to do when you’re out and about, so it would be handy to be able to carry them all about on your smartphone, in a safe and secure way that will keep all your personal data safe if your phone gets purloined.
The best way to do this is to use a password-protected Password Manager that keeps all your personal info under lock and key, leaving you with just one password to remember.
Although there’s a ton of password managers available for smartphones/PDAs, we haven’t found any that do it as well as Splash ID – we’ve been using the program for several years and find it absolutely indispensable.
Using SplashID
Available for the Palm OS, Treo, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile Smartphone, Symbian UIQ, Series 60 and BlackBerry, SplashID securely stores all of your sensitive personal information in a database protected by 256-bit Blowfish encryption.
Launching the program on your handheld brings up a password request, and once you’ve inputted the right digits, you can access all your data alphabetically, by category or by searching.
Using its clean and simple interface, user names, passwords, credit cards, PINs, and other such personal information can be inputted on your handheld, with the option to include categories, create custom fields and assign icons in a colour-coded customisable List View.
Naturally, with all your precious data a mere password away, it’s vital that you make your SplashID password a good ‘un – if that kind of thing defeats you, there’s a handy password generator onboard to help you create hard-to-crack passwords.
Desktop application
Best of all, Splash ID ships with a password protected desktop companion and conduit that lets you store, add and edit data information stored in the database.
It’s a neat, small application that replicates the functionality of the handheld application, accessible with the same password.
A nice touch is that you can click the clipboard icon next to listed passwords and have the code automatically placed in the clipboard ready for pasting into your browser or program password box.
Conclusion
Whenever we’ve upgraded our phone or PDA in the past, this is one of the very first programs we install – it’s that good.
Because of SplashID’s cross-platform abilities, we’ve been able to exchange data from Palm to Windows Mobile devices (and back again) without a problem so it’s pretty much future proofed, and the desktop integration is a great way of ensuring that the info is kept up to date.
The program is simple to use and offers a convenient, secure and versatile way of safely storing passwords on your mobile, and we reckon $30 (£16, €23) is a small price to pay for such peace of mind.
Features: 90%
Ease of use: 85%
Value For Money: 85%
Overall: 90%
SplashID
1 September, 2006
Microsoft Windows Vista Prices Leaked
Prices for Microsoft’s much-anticipated update to their Windows operating system, Vista, have leaked out onto various Websites, including an official Microsoft site.
Retail prices for the four different versions of Vista (priced in Canadian dollars) briefly appeared on various sites before vamoosing in double quick time.
The top dog Windows Vista Ultimate Edition was spotted carrying a hefty price tag of $499 Canadian dollars ($450, £237) while the Home Premium version was listed at C$299 ($270 or £142).
The Vista Ultimate Upgrade was priced at C$299 ($270 or £142) with the cheapest option being the Home Premium Upgrade for C$199 ($180 or £95).
Vista on Amazon
As the scheduled release date grows ever-nearer, prices are popping up elsewhere, with Amazon’s ‘pre-order’ pricing advertising Windows Vista Ultimate Edition at $399 (£210) and Home Premium at $239 (£126).
Upgraders could get the Ultimate and Home Premium versions for $259 (£136) and $159 (£84) respectively (these prices seem to have varied, depending on the site).
Availability was listed as from “January 30th, 2007.”
As we reported earlier this year, there will be no less than six different versions of Vista, all in 32 and 64-bit flavours.
Users who like to live on the edge, can download Windows Vista pre-RC1 ISO file from here, but be quick – there’s only 100,000 downloads available!
Microsoft Vista
30 August, 2006
Spiralfrog Offers Free Universal Music Downloads
Vivendi Universal, the biggest music group on the planet have signed a deal with Spiralfrog to let surfers download the contents of its man-sized music catalogue for free.
The New York based company Spiralfrog will be launching the new service offering Universal’s songs for download in December – but in US and Canada only – bah!
As some old bloke in the pub used to tell us, “You don’t get nuffink for free in the world, no way, not ever,” and for once he was right – surfers wanting to gorge themselves on all that luvverly free music will have to endure tons of adverts, presumably of the targeted kind.
The dreadfully named Spiralfrog are looking to take on the mighty iTunes, and have high hopes that punters will be quick to switch loyalties when download prices of nuppence are whispered in their shell-likes, compared to Apple’s current rate of 99 cents per song in the US.
“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” enthused Spiralfrog Chief Executive Robin Kent said.
Making it pay
With an estimated forty dodgy downloads to every legal download over the Internet, Spiralfrog could attract the huge number of users currently risking prosecution from pirate file-swapping services, making their money by sharing income from advertising with content partners like Universal.
Amongst the music industry cognoscenti, a few eyebrows have raised about the practicalities of the new service, with music industry specialist Josh Lawler telling the BBC: “The Internet is very much a viable media, but the trick is going to be getting it off the ground in the first place”.
“Spiralfrog will have to find a way to pay artists from the advertising dollars they are generating. But they’re not necessarily going to know how many advertising dollars there are and so some artists are going to be hesitant about it,” he added.
If Spiralfrog does get it right, the company could seriously shake up a market that saw 60 million MP3 players sold and 420 million single tracks downloaded last year.
Spiral Frog
29 August, 2006