Yugatech and Globe is giving away tons and tons of of gadgets this Christmas.  Join “The Yugatech Great Gadget Giveaway” and get a chance to win Php 3000,000 worth of prizes.

“Merry Tweetmas” which is part 1 of a series of more contest has just started this week.  So wait no further and follow the mechanics from YugaTech.com to join.

Here’s one way of joining:

Round 1: Our theme for this week will be Twitter. Here’s the mechanics:
1) Follow @abeolandres and @talk2globe on Twitter.

2) Post a tweet “Just entered to win a Modu Phone. Quick! Go follow @abeolandres and @talk2globe and retweet: http://bit.ly/6e2q7O #thanks2yugatech”
We’re giving away a Modu phone, 10 Globe Tattoo and 20 Php500 prepaid call cards randomly. That’s 31 winners in all for the Twitter giveaway.

Check out YugaTech for other ways of joining the contest.

The makers of Mozilla Firefox has released version 3.0 of their email client Thunderbird and it’s packed with a lot of improvements.

Thunderbird 3.0 comes with tabbed browsing which allows you to open emails into different tabs, ala Firefox.   It’s also got an improved search and filtering system and is even better than that of Microsoft Outlook.  Its available for Windows, Mac and Linux.  For the rest of other features check out their official website.

[DOWNLOAD]

Seagate just announced their first SSD drive – PULSAR. It’s a 2.5 inch SSD drive offered in 50GB, 100GB and 200GB sizes. The drive is targeted towards the enterprise segment.

It has a 3GB/s SATA interface and provides a read and write speed of 240MB/s and 200MB/s respectively. The SSD is still a growing market and Seagate is certainly a brand that has a solid reputation and credibility in storage technology. Hopefully seagate will be introducing this to the consumer segment soon.

The continued domination of Google over search has been made even stronger today as they announced “real-time search” on their recent event. Key to this new feature is search integration with Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Myspace, Jaiku and Identi.ca.

According to the official blog of Google, these features will allow you to discover breaking news the moment it happens, check the video below. As per mashable this feature is only available to select users but will be available to the public soon. However all users can still get a preview in Google Trends via their “Hot Topics” feature, just click on any of the topics there. But when Google launches the feature to all, you would see “Latest” as an added option in the “Show Options”sidebar.

Integrating the valuable data that their partners have like twitter and facebook definitely gives google capability of delivering real time data as they happen.  Imagine getting real time update on sports events with up to the minute detail by just doing a search on google?.. that’s definitely cool. 

Here’s a first look on real time search by Google:

UPDATE: tried it myself and i got it to work.

Social bookmarking plugins allows you to easily share your content to the most popular bookmarking sites and networks on the web. If you’re a blogger then you definitely need to get one to make it easier for you and your readers to share your content to others. I have compiled 10 of the best Social Bookmarking Plugins that you can use. I would suggest that you only pick one based either on functionality or which would fit your sites theme or design.

Sociofluid

Sociofluid features social bookmarking buttons for Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon, delicious, and most of the major social bookmarking sites. It features a mac effect when hovering on the icons and makes them bigger.

Download

Sociable

Whether they are on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, BlinkList, or any other social network/sharing site, the Sociable Plugin will allow your blog to be connected to the social media stream, making your content known to the world.

Download

Share This

Share this is another wordpress social bookmark plugin which provides a simple and unobtrusive way for your readers/visitors to share your content to most bookmarking sites as well as options to email or save the link via their sharebox.

Download

I Love Social Bookmarking

I Love Social Bookmarking is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your readers to submit your content to social media services via a clutter-free drop-down list of attractive icons.

Download

Add To Any

This plugin allows your visitors to save or share your content to most popular bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and others. Add to Any has a customizable Smart Menu which places the most used service at the top based on browsing history.

Download

Hey Social

Hey Social has a cool way of letting your visitors to bookmark or share your posts or content social bookmark services like Digg, Delicious, Mixx, Facebook, Twitter and others.

Download

Bookmarkify

The Social Media Marketing Plugin that lets you put social bookmarking links in your posts and other pages. Help your readers promote your blog and watch your traffic grow.

Download

obsocialbookmarker

bsocialbookmarker is a social bookmarking plugin which adds user-submission links at the bottom of each post for various social bookmarking sites which allows your visitors to easily submit them in a number of social bookmarking sites.

Download

Socialdropdown

This plugin displays several social bookmarking options in a dropdown. Unlike other social bookmarking displays, this does not cause clutter and takes up little screen space.

Download

SociBook

A really simple plugin that will add bookmark links of Del.icio.us, Digg it, Slashdot, RawSugar, Yahoo! MyWeb, and many other links to your wordpress. You can decide which bookmark services you want to show and in what order. You also can define, a own iconset.

Download

Just happened to chance on Friendster today and was surprised to see that it has been revamped.  The site has been redesigned and given a fun and fresher look, and they even changed their logo.   Aside from the noticeable change of color scheme from blue to green, they also remade their activity stream and shout-out boxes.  I just cant help but notice a similarity of the interface now with that of Facebook.

Most of the pages have been reworked to match their new theme and added new features.   One of which I noticed right away is their gift and games sections.  Wait! Facebook’s got this too right?  Anyhow, they have also got this Friendster wallet thing, its like a payment platform where you can purchase stuffs virtually like for buying those stuffs from their gift shop.  Im not sure of how big value this would be, I cant imagine myself buying a virtual cake for someone who cant eat it… but that’s just my take.

There is no doubt that Facebook is still the king when it comes to social networks but this makeover could definitely help Friendster regain some of their lost patrons.  But if the goal is to topple down the king?… I don’t think it will happen any time soon.

One of the largest torrent site in the world has   just been ordered to shutdown, well, kinda. Mininova has been recently ordered by a Dutch court to remove all copyright infringing materials from their site. Considering that millions of people visit the sites to download TV rips, dvd movies, music, games, software, etc., which are mostly copyrighted materials, will basically mean their going to have to loose almost all their content.

Although based on their blog they will continue to operate but only as a content distribution site, meaning… “start finding other torrent sites”.

Even with this giant being taken down, it will only be a matter of time that the torrents and their uploaders will find a new home soon.  Below are a few alternatives to mininova that you can check out.

1. The Pirate Bay
2. isoHunt
3. ExtraTorrent
4. alivetorrents
5. torrentzap
6. kickasstorrents
7. vertor
8. torrentroot
9. yourbittorrent
10. 1337x

I have been a big fan of mininova and most of the time only download torrents from their site, i do not personally have a lot of experience with these other sites. Please tell us which torrent site you prefer as an alternative. If there is a site that i missed, please leave a comment so that we can update the list.

On my previous post i mentioned about email passwords that have been released online.  If incase you have a hotmail, live.com, or if you think that you might have compromised your accounts security by logging in to insecure sites or you just want to secure your online accounts, i would suggest you change your password now to a more secure one.

I would suggest that you check the strength of your password using Microsoft’s word checker here.

A strong password should contains both letters and numbers as well as special characters and should be at least 8 characters long.  It should also have a mix of upper and lower case letters.  Also try to prevent using common words found on dictionaries because they can easily be cracked by brute-force password attacks.  One good way to make a password is something that you can easily remember but hard for others to guess.

Here’ what Microsoft suggests:

• Think of a sentence that you will remember
  Example: “My son Aiden is three years old.”
• Turn your sentence into a password
  Use the first letter of each word of your memorable sentence to create a string, in this case: “msaityo”.
• Add complexity to your password or pass phrase
  Mix uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers. Introduce intentional misspellings.
  For example, in the sentence above, you might substitute the number 3 for the word “three”, so a password might be “MsAi3yo”.
• Substitute some special characters
  Use symbols that look like letters, combine words, or replace letters with numbers to make the password complex.
  Using these strategies, you might end up with the password “M$8ni3y0.”

Here are some password strategies that you also need to avoid:

Avoid sequences or repeated characters
“12345678,” “222222,” “abcdefg,” or adjacent letters on your keyboard do not make secure passwords.

Avoid using only look-alike substitutions of numbers or symbols
Criminals will not be fooled by common look-alike replacements, such as to replace an ‘i’ with a ‘1′ or an ‘a’ with ‘@’ as in “M1cr0$0ft” or “P@ssw0rd”.

These substitutions can be effective when combined with other measures, such as length, misspellings, or variations in case.

Avoid your login name
Don’t use any part of your name, birthday, social security number, or similar information for your loved ones.

This type of information is one of the first things criminals will try, and they can find it easily online from social networking sites, online resumes, and other public sources of data.

Avoid dictionary words in any language
Criminals use sophisticated tools that can rapidly guess passwords that are based on words in multiple dictionaries, including words spelled backwards, common misspellings, profanity, and substitutions.

Avoid using only one password for all your accounts
If your password is compromised on any one of the computers or online systems that use it, you should consider all of your other information protected by that password compromised as well.

It is critical to use different passwords for different systems.

Be careful with password recovery questions
Many Web sites offer a “password ” service that lets you provide the answer to a secret question. If you forget your password, the service will send it to you if you can remember the answer to your secret question.

The questions are often random, but sometimes the answers to these questions are freely available on the Web. Choose your questions carefully or make up the answers.

Avoid using online storage
If criminals find your passwords stored online or on a networked computer, they have access to all your information.

Tons of hotmail, msn, and live.com passwords have been recently exposed online, about 10,000 of them.  Researchers who were able to study the leaked passwords found out that many are still using very weak passwords.  These accounts were said to have been genereted via phishing scams targeted mostly to Latino’s because majority of the passwords had spanish names.

Based on the study, 42% of the password used were all lower case, only about 6% were using passwords that mixes alphanumeric and other characters.  As said, there were a lot of spanish names used as passwords like alejandra and alberto, suggesting that the phishing attacks were propably targeted to Latino communities.

The passwords were posted over to a clipboard site Pastebin.com.  The list has already been removed by the site owner but Bogdan Calin of Acunetix was able to grab a copy.

Based on his findings, the most common passwords used were “123456″ and “123456789″.  The longest password used was 30 characters long “lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo”.  Average passwords were 6-9 characters long, 8 being the most.

Accoording to the data gathered, a big majority of users are still using very weak passwords.  If you are still one of those using weak passwords for your email, then you might want to consider changing your password now!  A more secured password would contain both letters and numbers, with a mix of capital and lower case letters, it’s also an added security if you use special characters.

We have an entry to add on our list of free antivirus software.  I have just created a new Downloads page so that it would be easier to find software that I recommend you to download.  New on our free anti-virus software list is the Microsft Security Essentials.  Yes, its from Microsoft and its free.   It’s basically a revamped Microsoft Live One-Care but has been made very light on resources and based on some reviews, it’s actually quite effective and unobtrosive. 
 
Although Live OneCare has not gained that much popularity and trust from pc users, with MSE Microsoft has taken all the not so useful from OneCare and left all the essentials and a very simple UI which users might really appreciate.  It has virus, malware and spyware protection. The UI has been made really simple to navigate and understand. The UI is separated by multiple tabs,  a green monitor icon tells you that everything is OK with your system, or a red one which obviously tells you something’s wrong, or yellow if your potentially unprotected.  The buttons you need to press to fix issues are hard to miss, so this is very suitable to ordinay home users. 
 
If your looking for a free virus protection software then give Microsoft Security Eseentials  a spin or you can check out my first list of free anti virus software for more options.  Keep on checking our new downloads page for new free stuff which I will sure to update.

Download Microsoft Security Essentials here.

Note:  If you are using a non certified copy of Windows, MSE will know and wont allow you to download the software if you dont pass the verification process.