Its been a over six months since we last saw an update to everyone’s favorite BitTorrent client. The uTorrent team has released version 1.8 of their BitTorrent client, with significant improvements and updates.

Added the already pent up excitement about the new uTorrent there is also a word that a Mac version of uTorrent is on the way.. Good news for all Mac users out there.. But I feel that a stable Mac build is quite a few months away.

We’ve had to wait for quite a while for this release since the last stable build 1.7.7 was released way back in January. A lot of work has been done in these seven months though, and the list of changes and additions that were implemented is “absolutely massive”, to quote Firon from the release announcement..

One of the most significant updates in the latest version of uTorrent is that it comes with built in IPv6 support, which improves connectivity and thus performance. The only problem is that IPv6 is still not common, and we have to wait for it to take over IPv4. Other new features are better Windows Firewall registration on Vista and improved distribution of new connections across torrents.

According to uTorrent developer Greg Hazel since 1.8 is finally out, the uTorrent team is going to be more focused to get a Mac OSX version ready on which they have been working already for the past year. According to Greg a private Alpha of uTorrent  for the Mac should be out in a few weeks.

uTorrent 1.8 can be downloaded from the uTorrent website, and the list of changes, improvements and additions is available in the forum thread announcing the release.

Way to go uTorrent! Its time to upgrade one of my favorite pieces of software. What are your thoughts on the latest and greatest version of uTorrent? I guess the Mac users are waiting to get their hands on uTorrent for Mac as soon as possible.

Via Torrentfreak

Reading through my RSS feeds today, I stumbled upon an interesting post over at Neowin entitled “Vista’s Security Rendered Completely Useless by New Exploit” which reports on a new technique that can “bypass all memory protection safeguards that Microsoft built into Windows Vista.”

Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. have discovered a technique that can be used to bypass all memory protection schemes that have been built into Windows Vista by Microsoft.  These new methods are basically used to get around Vista’s Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and other protections by loading malicious content through a web browser.

In a nutshell, this hack is something that many of us weren’t expecting.

While this may seem like any standard security hole, other researchers say that the work is a major breakthrough and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems. These attacks work differently than other security exploits, as they aren’t based on any new Windows vulnerabilities, but instead take advantage of the way Microsoft chose to guard Vista’s fundamental architecture. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher told, "the genius of this is that it’s completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That’s completely game over."

Microsoft has yet to post a statement officially, but they are apparently aware of the security issue and are waiting for the exploit to be made public. We can only wait and watch as to what comes up now…

If successful this could be a mess as good as the DNS exploit in the wild these days. This can potentially change the whole view of how the industry thinks about hacks in my opinion. Microsoft will have a quite a lot of work on hands in the coming days, I’m sure. We’ll know more about this in the near future and there even lies possibility of being faced with the prospect of your "secure" server being stripped completely naked of all its protection.

You think its game over for the already struggling Vista?

photo credit: jpctalbot

I’m not a Windows Vista fan, but even then everyone at my home uses Windows Vista, while I dual boot with OSX on my Hackintosh.. I’ve used XP before and for some reason I always felt that Internet speeds on Vista were comparably slower than on OSX, and more so even Windows XP.

Considering it was quite slower than what I used to get on XP, I realized that Vista was doing something extra that made my internet connection slow down. After a bit of investigation and a bit of googling I found the solution.

Before I give the solution, let me explain the problem in a bit more detail… It all comes down to Vista’s “Auto Tuning” feature. Turns out that this feature isn’t compatible with many routers and networking devices(including mine). Means the feature that was supposed to be a boon turned itself into some sort of a bane.

Anyways here’s what you need to do turn off the Auto Tuning feature on Vista..

At the Start menu type command, but don’t launch the command prompt immediately. Instead, right-click it and choose Run As Administrator. Once the prompt is open enter the following command.

netsh interface tcp show global

If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted

If this doesn’t help, substitute this command and see if it works

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

At this moment, you should notice considerable improvements in your browsing speeds, or rather you should be cruising now. If it works, you should notice the difference in browsing speeds immediately. If it doesn’t work for you, and you feel the need to put things back the way they were, you can type this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Here are screenshots showing the whole process, incase you feel the need for it..

Good luck, hope this works for you.. Please let us know if this worked for you or not..

The Mojave Experiment has been the center of the latest round of controversy surrounding Microsoft and its flagship operating system Windows Vista. Initially I thought Mojave was a brilliant marketing ploy and it would work wonders to clear the bad air on Windows Vista..

Well it is not really the best marketing ploy ever! If I were to choose my words, I’d call it the lamest marketing exercise of the year. The Mojave Experiment means Microsoft has stooped to an all time low, trying to do every single thing it can to clear the air about Vista. But trust me Microsoft its not as easy creating a beautiful new OS codenamed Mojave only to reveal that its nothing but Windows Vista.

Here’s how Microsoft describes the Mojave Experiment :

What do people think of Windows Vista® when they don’t know it’s Windows Vista? We disguised Windows Vista as codename "Mojave," the "next Microsoft OS," so regular people who’ve never used Windows Vista could see what it can do – and decide for themselves. Now decide for yourself.

Oh well, here are my top 5 reasons why the Mojave Experiment is Epic fail…

• Microsoft treats its customers as though they are stupid

  One of the chief reasons, why many people dislike Windows, is plainly because of the number of steps it takes to do a simple thing. Microsoft makes sure that the user has to go through an endless sequence of steps to get a simple job done. It’s always click, click, click, click, click, click, click, where one or two clicks should suffice.

  Microsoft treats its customers as though they are kids. They feel that the user should be shown around the system, and be told what’s right and what’s not.. These way of holding users hands just like a parent holding a child’s hands is not the way Microsoft should be working.

  It should instead focus on giving the power back to the user, in his own hands. Let him do as he pleases, after all its his PC. What MS feels is that by giving the power in users hands, it is going to make Windows more vulnerable. But in real life that isn’t the case, take for example Linux where the user is supreme and the number of attacks just pale in comparison to those on Windows.

  Come on Microsoft its high time you gave your users some respect, and treated them as smart humans!

• Microsoft tries to seduce its customers

  Microsoft’s initial campaign on Vista, was all about the new interface and the WOW! features. Somehow the we never heard people saying Wow while looking at Vista. Now Microsoft was downright frustrated and it wanted those Wow’s somehow, and that’s why Mojave began in first place.

  Here’s what MS told the participants of the Mojave experiment, “Hey! Listen, I’m going to show you a peek into the latest operating system from Microsoft. You’re really lucky and special, and I hope you like it”.

  Now when a tester hears that he’s all excited, and when he sees the demo later only to find that it was Vista he’s embarrassed. Of course he’s going to like it!There’s no one way he’s going to tell he didn’t like Mojave or Vista or whatever its called.

  Now this is something that’s human nature. When we are shown something that’s top secret we’re almost always going to like it, and that’s what Microsoft’s been targeting. I believe they have a good psychologist on the Mojave team.

• Microsoft completely controls the test environment

  The chief complaint of millions of users when Vista came out was it didn’t work well with their existing hardware. It ran terribly slow and many of there hardware didn’t work properly.

  Now with Mojave, Microsoft set up the hardware. Microsoft brought the accessories. Microsoft picked the software. Microsoft sat people down with Vista experts driving the mouse, and walked people through Vista.

  In such an environment, people liked Vista. What Microsoft fails to understand is that these guys want to be able to run Vista smoothly on their computers back home, and not have to run to the nearest computer store to buy a computer that can run Vista smoothly even though their existing computer is less than a year old.

  Windows users have always wanted to set up their own hardware, and they would expect Vista to work properly with the hardware they have, and not use the hardware that Vista is comfortable with.

• Mojave Experiment blames the customers for all the problems, rather than Vista

  What do you think is the problem? Why is it that thousands of people are downgrading from Vista to XP? Why is that many OEM manufacturers are still selling PC’s with both XP and Vista?

  What Microsoft feels is that all the negative perception behind Vista are because of the bloggers, forum posters, reviewers and hell even the Apple’s marketing campaign. Microsoft’s attitude has been more like, we’ve solved many problems with SP1, and we’ll solve many more with SP2. Until then just hang on tight alright!

  The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that you have one and this is something which Microsoft fails to do. The only way I read this experiment is that Microsoft considers Vista’s failure to be due to customer ignorance rather than failings of the product itself.

  Way to go Microsoft!!

• Mojave is Microsoft’s Arrogance at its best

  Microsoft’s attitude with Mojave is something on these lines, “We’re smart. You’re stupid”. Microsoft’s methods of choosing testers, specifically on the basis that they had strong negative attitudes about Vista isn’t right.

  What Microsoft feels is that by tricking people and making them feel that Vista is way better than they thought its just another way to reinforce its new corporate mantra “Customers are Stupid!”

  The problems that Vista has become famous for are not the kinds of problems you encounter in a few minutes of playing with it in a controlled environment that Microsoft setup with Mojave.

If Mojave is what Microsoft spends $300 Million to promote Vista, then am afraid that the bad is only going to get worser. What are your thoughts on the Mojave Experiment?

Atleast for me Mojave is Epic Fail!

Screw those guys who said iTunes is the best music library manager out there. MediaMonkey is very much renowned for being the best media manager available today. This one’s for you music lovers!!

A lot of people have strongly rated MediaMonkey as the best music manager out there and its been downloaded nearly 3 million times on Download.com. Its got all the features that you’d expect to find in such softwares, but it is the advanced feature set that puts it light years ahead of the competition..

Here are some of the features of MediaMonkey

• Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface.
• Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata.
• Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down.
• Manage all genres of audio: Rock, Classical, Audiobooks, Comedy, Podcasts, etc.

• Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume.
• Record CDs and convert MP3s, M4A, OGG, FLAC and WMA files etc. into other formats.
• Create playlists and let Auto-DJ & Party Mode take care of your party.
• Sync iPhones, iPods, & MP3 players, converting & leveling tracks on-the-fly.

MediaMonkey has tons of options for all of the power users out there who have to have things their own way! You can configure everything from dozens of keyboard shortcuts/hotkeys, plug-ins, automatic podcast downloading, CD ripping, and lots more…. As a power user you can’t be asking for more!!

Here are some screenshots of MediaMonkey in action..

Here are some of the stuff you are gonna miss out on, if you don’t upgrade to the Gold Version..

• File Monitor automatically updates your Library to reflect changes on your hard drive.
• Auto-conversion converts tracks on the fly as they are synced so that all of your tracks can play on your iPod or other device.
• Advanced Auto-Playlists quickly generate a mix to suit your mood. Specify the criteria, and the mix is created.
• Sleep Timer gradually fades your music over a set period of time, and optionally turns off your PC before bedtime.
• Virtual CD catalogs your CD’s without creating duplicate entries for tracks that exist on both your hard drive and CD’s.
• Burn CD’s and DVD’s at full speed.

“If you’ve been looking for a free program that can be a kind of one-stop-shop of audio, doing everything that you might possibly want to do with your library of audio files (and doing it well) – MediaMonkey just might be that program.”

Nothing beats MediaMonkey when it comes music management, not even iTunes..

The Giveaway

Well during the birthday celebrations of DailyApps we have 10 Gold Licenses (Valued at 19.95$ each) of MediaMonkey to giveaway to you guys. All you have to do is drop a comment below providing both your name and email address so that we can get in touch with you later.

We will be selecting the winners randomly using a random number generator. Here’s how we are going to give out the licenses for the giveaway of xplorer².

• 2 Winner will be picked from Comment Number 1 through 5
• 4 Winners will be picked from Comment Number 6 through 20
• 4 Winners will be picked from Comment Numbers 20 through how many ever comments are there.

You can leave your entries till 28th July 11:00 PM Eastern Time…