Microsoft opted not to include DVD support because so many new computers – especially tablets and ultrabooks – aren’t coming with DVD drives. Microsoft pays a licensing fee for each copy of Windows that ships with DVD support.

Note: You can still use data DVDs with Windows 8. This only applies to video DVDs.

Install a Third-Party DVD Player

The easiest way to play DVDs in Windows 8 is by installing a third-party DVD player. We recommend the popular VLC media player. It’s free, and after you install it you’ll be able to play

VLC is far from the only media player you can use — there are a ton of free, third-party media players with integrated support for DVDs.

Use a Licensed DVD Player

If you purchased a new Windows 8 computer that comes with a DVD drive, your computer’s manufacturer has likely included DVD-playing software with your computer. It will probably be configured to open automatically when you insert a video DVD. If it isn’t, you can try typing DVD at the Start screen to search your installed applications and see if you have any applications with DVD in their name.

To examine all the software on your computer, use the All Apps screen. Press the Windows key to access the Start screen, right-click anywhere on the Start screen, and select All Apps. Scroll through the list of installed applications and look for a DVD-playing program.

Purchase the Windows 8 Media Center Pack

Microsoft no longer includes Windows Media Center with Windows 8. Windows Media Center, which includes DVD playback, is available separately. If you have Windows 8 Pro, you can purchase the Windows 8 Media Center Pack to activate Windows Media Center and DVD playback on your computer.

Microsoft is offering the Windows 8 Media Center Pack for free until January 31, 2013 – click here to get it.

If you have the basic, non-Pro edition of Windows 8 on your computer, you’ll have to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro by purchasing the Windows 8 Pro Pack before you can get Windows 8 Media Center. Use the Add features to Windows 8 control panel to upgrade. To open it, press the Windows key, type add features, tap or click the Settings category, and tap or click Add features to Windows 8.

Windows Media Center is not available for Enterprise versions of Windows 8.

While it may seem a bit weird that Microsoft has removed this feature from Windows 8, it’s explained by the increasing focus on streaming media and the amount of new computers coming without DVD drives.

The easy installation of VLC and the reality that computer manufacturers will include their own DVD-playing software mean that Windows 8’s lack of DVD support isn’t really a problem.

via: Two Guys and Windows 8

But the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook has my full attention. Hello, my $249 gorgeous…

That caused me to belatedly examine all of the progress the Chromebook has made in the past year. Not only did I come away impressed, but Google’s mobile platform moves suddenly made sense to me. Its hardware partners may disagree, but Google doesn’t really care if Android makes it in the enterprise. It’s a consumer platform. The cloud-centric Chrome is its enterprise play.

Let’s recap:

The first Chromebook was released at $349 more than a year ago. The price was good, but not great. But Samsung’s sleek new $249 Chromebook aggressively undercuts the $499 iPad on price the way many observers thought Microsoft needed to do with the Surface RT.

Instead, it’s the new Chromebook that is:

- half the price of the iPad and the Surface RT;

- half to one-third the price of Windows 8 convertible tablets (see my gallery of 17 of them here). Without keyboards, most of these Atom-based ‘tabtops’ or ‘laptablets’ run between $500 and $900;

- one-third to one-fourth the price of Windows 8 ultrabooks, which run between $800 to $1,200.

At these prices, what CIO or IT manager wouldn’t give the Chromebook a serious look?

You’d have to be crazy not to.

The new Chromebook is also a dramatic improvement in looks – important in the age of the Consumerization of IT. Whereas the first Chromebooks were drab, stripped-down laptops, the latest Samsung model sports MacBook Air-like looks and dimensions (0.8 inches thin, 2.4 pounds). It bears little resemblance to its forebears or their common ancestor, the undersized-yet-chunky netbook. As Computerworld put it, “Make no mistake about it: This is an attractive computer.”

The new Chromebook is also more powerful under the hood, being the first mobile device to sport Samsung’s Exynos 5 system-on-chip. The Exynos 5 uses a dual-core, 1.7 GHz ARM Cortex-A15 CPU that can support up to 2560×1600 resolution, 1080p video at 60 frames per second, and USB 3.0.

The Cortex-A15 has been benchmarked running twice as fast as the quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3, which, coincidentally, is used in the Surface and the Google Nexus tablet. The Cortex-A15 is so fast that the iPhone 5, probably the fastest mobile device today, was initially thought to be running it.

Alas, there’s theory and there’s IRL (In Real Life). The new Chromebook seems to be shackled by its 2 GB of RAM, with reviewers saying that the browser becomes sluggish after you open a dozen browser tabs or so. That’s annoying, but with an 11.6-inch, 1366-x768 screen, the Chromebook wasn’t going to please Browser Hoarders, anyway.

(For faster performance, you can opt for the $449 Samsung Chromebook Series 5 550, which has a dual-core Intel Celeron chip and 4 GB of RAM.)

Google has also improved the Chromebook’s offline capabilities so that you can read and write e-mail and Google Docs while disconnected from the cloud. Besides the 16 GB of local storage on the SSD, you also now get 100 GB of Google storage, too.

Read the rest Here.

Verizon Wireless has begun selling information about its customers’ geographical locations, app usage, and Web browsing activities, a move that raises privacy questions and could brush up against federal wiretapping law.

The company this month began offering reports to marketers showing what Verizon subscribers are doing on their phones and other mobile devices, including what iOS and Android apps are in use in which locations. Verizon says it may link the data to third-party databases with information about customers’ gender, age, and even details such as “sports enthusiast, frequent diner or pet owner.”

“We’re able to view just everything that they do,” Bill Diggins, U.S. chief for the Verizon Wireless marketing initiative, told an industry conference earlier this year. “And that’s really where data is going today. Data is the new oil.”

Verizon Wireless says that its initiative, called Precision Market Insights, is legal because the information is aggregated and doesn’t reveal customers’ identities. Also, the company says, its customers can opt out at any time.

via CNET News.

“Loozon” and “FinFisher” are the latest known versions of this type of malware, according to the IC3, which investigates Internet-related criminal complaints. The organization is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Nation White Collar Crime Center.

The malware lures victims in different ways. One advertises itself as a “work at home” opportunity that promises a lucrative payday just for sending out email; an attached link then leads to a website that spreads Loozon to its target, IC3 says in a release.

“The malicious application steals contact details from the user’s address book and the infected device’s phone number.”

FinFisher is spyware that can take over parts of a mobile device; when installed, phones can be “remotely controlled and monitored no matter where the target is located,” IC3 says. FinFisher can easily be transmitted to a smartphone when the victim visits a hyperlink or opens a text message that masquerades as a system update.

The organization also offers “safety tips” for mobile devices, including enabling encryption to protect personal data in case of loss or theft, installing apps that offer malware protection such as antivirus software, preventing connection to unknown wireless networks, and setting up a passcode.

Security breaches are becoming more common in the U.S., according to a recent study. One out of every four Americans had personal identification lost or stolen due to a data breach in the past year.

via Mashable.

• AdSense for Feeds was designed to help publishers earn revenue from their content by placing ads on their RSS feeds. Starting October 2, we’ll begin to retire this feature—and on December 3 we’ll close it. Publishers can continue to use FeedBurner URLs powered by Google, so they won’t need to redirect subscribers to different URLs. For more information visit the AdSense Help Center.
• Classic Plus is a Google Search feature that lets people upload or select images to use as a background on Google.com. Users won’t be able to upload new pictures starting from October 16, and we’ll turn the service off in November 2012. You’ll continue to have access to any images you’ve uploaded.
• Google storage in Picasa and Drive will be consolidated over the next few months, so users will have five GB of free storage across both services. If you’re paying for storage, your free storage will now be counted towards your total. So if you buy a 100GB plan, it will give you 100GB of total storage instead of adding to what you already had. We believe this approach will make it much easier for users. For both free and paid storage, people at or near their current storage limits will have the same amount of storage after this change.
• Spreadsheet Gadgets were designed to allow people to add customized features to Google Spreadsheets. But most popular gadgets have now been added directly into charts in spreadsheets. So we will slowly start turning off Gadgets in Spreadsheets next year.
• Starting on October 15, we’ll stop issuing and displaying Google News Badges, as well as showing Recommended Sections. People can still tailor their Google News experience by adding custom sections or adjusting the frequency with which news sources appear.
• We’ve merged Insights for Search into a revamped Google Trends. You can now see search trends and compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties in a single place: google.com/trends. We will no longer support Trends for Websites, which allowed people to compare traffic to and audiences of different websites.
• Places Directory was an Android app that helped people find nearby places of interest. We’ve removed the app from Google Play and are taking down the Places Directory site because users can find everything in Google Maps for Mobile, which offers a much better user experience.
• We introduced +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools to help publishers measure +1 activity on their pages. Given that webmasters now use Social Reports in Google Analytics to get a wider view of social activity (including +1’s), we’ll be discontinuing the stand-alone +1 Reports on November 14. Measuring social media remains a priority for Google Analytics, so stay tuned for future improvements.

We want people to have a beautifully simple experience when using Google. These changes will enable us to focus better so that we can do more to help improve the products that millions of people use multiple times a day.

Google Blog

The messages are followed by a shortened link using the goo.gl url shortener. Depending on your security setup, clicking on the link may be enough to infect your computer with the trojan. If you get a dialog that is asking you what to do, make sure you cancel it right away and do not open or save it to your computer.

The messages may come from your contacts, if their computer is already infected with it, or strangers that try to message you.hej is this your skype profile.

The trojan adds itself to the list of third party programs with Skype access, and this is one of the ways to find out whether your system is infected with it or not. When you are in Skype, click on Tools > Options to bring up the options window of the program. Locate and click on Advanced, and there on the manage other programs’ access to Skype link at the bottom. If you see programs listed here that you can’t identify, remove them from Skype. You won’t be sending out messages to Skype contacts anymore once the apps have been removed from Skype’s third party access list.

Then run your best anti-virus solution.  We suggest ESET.

via gHacks.net.

Gmail has constantly improved its search technology, but there’s something you couldn’t do until recently: search inside attachments. Sure, you could find an attachment if you knew the filename or some keywords from the message. If someone sent you a text file or an HTML file, Gmail indexed its content, but Gmail couldn’t index PDF files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and other popular attachment formats.

The good news is that Gmail has finally added support for searching inside attachments. I’ve just tested this feature for .pdf files, .doc documents, .ppt presentations and it works, even though some old attachments may not be indexed yet.

To find messages that have attachments, search for has:attachment and add some keywords to your query. To restrict your search to PDF files, search for has:attachment filename:pdf.

via: Googlesystem

An e-mail from “privacy@microsoft.com” with the subject of “Microsoft Windows Update” is hitting inboxes around the globe telling users that their Windows installation is “out of date”. The e-mail says that all Windows installations are tied to an e-mail account and provides a “verify” link that users must visit, or risk “account suspension”. Clicking on the “verify” link takes users to a page (which is not a Microsoft page, despite the attempt to fool you by using a “www.microsoft.com” sub-domain) where users are asked to enter their e-mail login details (username and password):

Once a user enters their login details, they are redirected to a legitimate Microsoft support page…so as to make the phishing scam seem legitimate.

The e-mail is obviously not really from Microsoft even though the e-mail claims to be from “privacy@microsoft.com”. Aside from Windows 8 users who may be confused by Microsoft’s new feature of logging into Windows with your Microsoft e-mail, any semi-technical person knows Windows is not associated with an e-mail address so an e-mail claiming otherwise can be nothing but a scam. Plus whomever looks closely will see red flags in the form of poor grammar (inaccurate capitalization of words). Still, I’m user the average Joe could potentially be swayed into providing their user name and password.

As mentioned before, any good spam filter should redirect spoofed e-mails — such as this one — to the spam box. If, however, you do find this e-mail in your inbox, simply delete it.

Stay safe!

Via dotTech

Here is a really helpful tool for you Chrome users.  Ever need to get that ‘just-right’ color from a website you are looking at?  Look no further….

Eye Dropper is open source extension for Google Chrome which allows you to pick colors from various sources.

Pick color from webpage

How to get it?

Eye dropper is extension for Google Chrome or Chromium, so if you have it, simply go to Chrome Web Store and click install. Access to all pages is needed because of nature of permissions system in Chrome.

The zero day threat, which was uncovered at the weekend and impacts most versions of Windows, has already resulted in the German government advising users to stop using Internet Explorer.

The rise in the SophosLabs internet threat barometer comes in response to in-the-wild detections that the team has seen in attacks exploiting the CVE-2012-4969 vulnerability in Microsoft’s popular web browser.

SophosLabs defines various threat levels from “Low” to “Critical”, based upon the prevalence of malware, spam and web threats, and intelligence regarding new vulnerabilities.Judged on its own, SophosLabs rates the Internet Explorer vulnerability as critical – but the seriousness of the threat means that our experts rate the threat level on the net as a whole as “high”.

At the time of writing, Microsoft has only published details of temporary workarounds to reduce the chances of computers being exploited by the vulnerability, but it’s clear that the ideal solution would be an official patch for Internet Explorer.

The good news is that Microsoft is working on a fix.

via Naked Security.