The developer's build of Google's Chrome browser now includes WebM, the open-source and royalty-free video technology that allows browsers to use cutting-edge streaming video features without publishers paying a dime.

In the new Chrome dev released Thursday for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Google has baked in support for the VP8- and Ogg Vorbis-powered, next-generation WebM codec.

The developer's build of Chrome is now the third major browser to support WebM, along with versions of Firefox and Opera that are still in development. Chromium, the open-source fountainhead of Chrome, added rudimentary support in mid-May. Google has yet to indicate when WebM support will be made available in the beta version.

Google acquired the VP8 codec when it purchased On2 Technologies in February. The successor to the VP6 codec, which gained wide distribution when Adobe included it in its Flash Player, VP8's biggest claim to fame so far is that Google is releasing it royalty-free. Unlike fees tied to the H.264 codec, which is owned by the MPEG LA consortium of 26 companies that charge for the codec's use, Google will spare VP8's users such as Mozilla steep royalty fees.

Several other companies have begun to incorporate WebM into their products, including Logitech, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. Some believe WebM has the potential to become the standard audio and video codec for HTML5, although that debate is far from settled.

While the WebM news is big, there were also other changes made to Chrome dev. Google says it has fixed a bug that caused the browser to crash when changing networks or waking from sleep mode across all platforms. Mac users specifically should see several minor bug fixes, including the repair of a crash that occurred when downloading a file with no tabs open. Also, there's now a preference on Macs for the tab key to cycle through only form fields, or form fields and links, too.

Google also published an update to the beta channel Thursday that addresses multiple bugs that negatively affected stability for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The full changelog can be read here for the developer's channel and here for the beta channel.

Related: WebM and Google's Web-video plan (FAQ) and Google tackles VP8 video quality question

Microsoft will on Tuesday issue 10 bulletins fixing 34 vulnerabilities affecting Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer.

Six of the bulletins affect Windows, with two of those rated critical by Microsoft. Two bulletins target Office, one targets both Windows and Office, and one critical bulletin affects Internet Explorer, according to a Microsoft Security Response Center blog post on Thursday.

Microsoft also said that with the June bulletins it will be closing Security Advisory 983438, which involves a vulnerability in SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 that was disclosed in late April and which could lead to a cross-site scripting attack via the browser. Proof-of-concept exploit code has been published for that.

The bulletins also address Security Advisory 980088, which involves a hole in IE that could allow information disclosure for users running the browser on Windows XP. It was disclosed in February.

"The June release is a large update and will keep system administrators busy, even if they have migrated to Windows 7 already (the end-of-life date for Windows XP SP2 is coming closer and Windows 7 is certainly one of the options to migrate to...)," Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer of Qualys, wrote in a blog post.

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex

The DoubleTwist Player for Android that debuted in the Android Market this week is a good-looking alternative to Android's default media player.

The Android app is the mobile arm of the DoubleTwist media library for Windows and Mac, itself an iTunes alternative focused on managing media for a variety of smartphone platforms. As such, the mobile player is tasked with syncing your music, videos, and podcasts to and from your desktop and your Android phone.

The app lets you find songs by artist, album, title, or playlist. There are also shortcuts for synced videos and podcasts. The player then spins your picks, giving you basic controls to pause, skip, and shuffe.

We tested DoubleTwist's PC-to-phone syncing on two Android phones. One transfer worked quickly and as advertised, but the other became a source of intense and mounting frustration with incomplete and failed syncs, and even an attempt that led to a memory card error. DoubleTwist's engineers are still poring through our error log to pinpoint the problem.

If your music library is fit to burst, expect a lengthy first sync could take 10 minutes or so, though subsequent syncing should be speedier, especially if you're dealing with smaller media loads.

When it came to performance, we found the Android player itself to be reliable, but underfeatured. We'd like to see a search bar, a genre category, the ability to build an ad-hoc playlist by adding a song to the queue, and subscribe to podcasts, to name a few points on our wish list. The app could also benefit from controls on the lock screen. Plans are in the works for a home screen widget that will control the player outside the app.

DoubleTwist is advertising version 1.0 of its player as free for a limited time, but there's no indication at this point how much the company intends to charge. Until the feature set gets a boost, we remain skeptical that charging for the app is justified or will increase its usage.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

Though juggernaut Microsoft and smaller security suite maker Panda both introduced new cloud-based antivirus solutions for Windows last year, today's upgrade from Panda swiftly moves Cloud Antivirus back into the public eye by adding features without sacrificing snappy performance levels. Exclusively available today from CNET Download.com, Cloud Antivirus 1.1 now more closely resembles a traditional antivirus program, at least in features offered, and includes a behavioral blocking engine that can protect users against generic nonbrowser exploits, new configuration options, and default deactivation of autorun in Windows.

In a conversation at CNET's San Francisco offices yesterday, Panda Security's chief executive officer, Juan Santana, and senior research advisor, Pedro Bustamante, promised that Cloud Antivirus users would start seeing an aggressive series of upgrades, perhaps taking a cue from the Google Chrome-influence of relatively rapid program updates. This is a dramatic departure in the security field, where program updates traditionally are released only once or twice a year.

Panda's first effort in the free antivirus market appears to have been reasonably successful--at least according to numbers that Panda has made public. The company wouldn't release a current user count, but Santana said in an interview on Wednesday that Panda Cloud Antivirus has been downloaded about 10 million times since last April's beta. He also touted a recent Morgan Stanley and Alphawise report that found that 46 percent of Cloud Antivirus' users have switched from other free antivirus programs, and that 13 percent of paid-antivirus users plan on switching to Cloud Antivirus when their current license expires.

The new version includes several notable new features and also debuts a paid upgrade. The biggest security-related improvement in the free version is the aforementioned behavioral blocking, which is a proactive and signature-less protection against actions usually taken by malware. It also blocks generic "dropper" threats hidden as common file types. Cloud Antivirus now has a full scan-on-demand option, and it also automatically prevents the Windows auto-run feature. This can be toggled in the Cloud Antivirus options window, and by design it doesn't stop Windows' related auto-play feature, but it's a smart feature to have to prevent USB key infections.

Other enhancements include the safeguarding of the program's own antivirus processes; improved offline protection; and multiple new toggles for the behavioral blocking, advanced logging, recycle bin behavior, and exclusion lists. Two other changes are minor, but worth noting. The program now will run alongside other antivirus apps, which is convenient for home testing but not advisable as a long-term solution. Running more than one antivirus program at a time will unnecessarily slow down your computer, without adding any extra protection. Lastly, the free version has been translated into nine more languages, for a total of 20, including English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Greek, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Hungarian, Japanese, Slovak, Norwegian, and Finnish.

The paid upgrade is called Cloud Antivirus Pro and will cost $29.99 for a one-year license. It offers several features not in the free version, most importantly a behavioral analysis engine that provides runtime analysis which can block running malicious processes. Two other features restricted to the paid version are automatic USB key and external hard drive vaccination, for checking them as they're connected to your computer, and automatically upgrading new detection engines and features as they become available. That's an unusual feature to restrict to paid users since many free antivirus programs already offer it. Finally, the paid upgrade also provides 24-7 multilingual support.

Bustamante stressed that the company had no plans to prevent free users from accessing full protection, and insisted that many of the paid-only features would be added to the free version as ease-of-use features get added to the paid edition.

Panda Cloud Antivirus maintained its impressive performance from when it left beta in November 2009. The program took 8 minutes to complete a full scan off a cold boot on average, and the program now informs you of when it's looking at archive files so you don't think it's hung up. Included in the 8-minute average is that there appeared to be occasional but slight sluggishness just after the scan was initiated.

Internal Panda tests recorded a 3 percent to 5 percent performance hit, as opposed to the industry average of 10 percent, and also saw the program running on 15MB of RAM against the industry average of 60MB.

Further benchmark information will be added when released from third-party sources later this week.

Overall, Panda Cloud Antivirus shows a maturing program that can adapt to users' needs while gaining the trust of newcomers. The program feels light and simple, but the new addition of configuration and secondary security options should go a long way in convincing naysayers to give it a second look.

A new instant messaging app is on its way to BlackBerry smartphones, and it's name is Trillian.

Trillian-maker Cerulean Studios announced work on its BlackBerry beta in May, adding one more operating system for the multinetwork IM app that's already well-known on Windows, Mac, and more recently, on iPhone. Although we expect to see Trillian launch into public beta for BlackBerry phones running OS 5.x, we got to try it out this week.

The app closely resembles the screens we saw from the closed beta (see slideshow below). Trillian lets you quickly sign into accounts from a start screen, and gets you chatting with friends on MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, Jabber/XMPP, and Google Talk.

The feature set is basic at this point--not so unusual for a beta app. It can display avatar images, add emoticons, and send photos that you either grab from the image gallery or take fresh with your phone's camera. The app alerts you to new instant messages with a flashing LED light or with pushed e-mail alerts when the app is closed.

Trillian beta is easy enough to use, but not very elegant at this stage. You control the app with the BlackBerry's Back arrow and menu key, but unlike competitors, Trillian doesn't utilize a lot of on-screen buttonry. For example, competitors like Beejive do a better job alerting you to new IMs and who sent them, and makes switching among conversations possible from within open chat windows. Instead of being able to switch among open chats with a menu item, Trillian has you arrowing back to the buddy list and navigating to the developing conversation.

There are some hot key combinations, though, like Enter-Enter to jump to the newest message, Alt-Alt-Space to jump to the previous chat and Alt-Alt-Delete to close the current conversation, but we were hoping for either some user tips or some more intuitive combinations.

Earlier we mentioned that Trillian can trigger your BlackBerry camera to snap a photo, but you'll need to press the Back arrow to return.

Although Trillian's beta chat app comes with your choice of a black or white theme, we would enjoy a splash more color in some sections, especially to help determine which buddies are online and offline. We did appreciate that Trillian shows an ellipsis when your contact starts typing a message.

Other features include managing your contact list from the phone, copying and pasting, and staying signed on for up to a week even when the application is off. We're told that come Friday, you'll be able to download the open beta of Trillian 1.0 for BlackBerry and try it for yourself. Just keep in mind that as a beta app, Trillian will still be in development and may not be as stable as you'd like. We also hope it picks up some polish by the time it hits its final version.

Update, 9:16 a.m. PDT: with more details on hot keys.

If you're over the age of, oh, 25, this may not interest you much. For you youngsters out there, however, this is, like, so totally cool: MTV just got its own app.

Free but ad-supported, MTV News serves up the latest pop-culture gossip--er, news--about music, movies, TV, celebrities, and gaming. It's available for the iPhone and the iPod Touch now; an iPad version is in the works.

You can browse breaking news in a fairly standard list view or a much cooler photo grid, which, when left alone for a few seconds, reverts to a kind of screensaver mode, jumping between photos and overlaying the accompanying headline. It's kind of pointless, but also kind of cool (not unlike MTV itself--hey-o!).

The app also lets you browse news by category and create a custom My News page with just the categories you want--again with the same cool list/grid viewing options.

Beyond that, the MTV News offers videos (but only of the news variety--actual music videos are MIA), photos, and access to roughly half a dozen MTV blogs.

Within the Photos section lies another nifty convention: you can finger-swipe through photos using a traditional Cover Flow-style view, or switch to a "tabletop" view where you slide stacks of photos around, arranging them scrapbook-style. Again: kind of pointless, kind of cool. (It'll be cooler still on an iPad.)

And that's about it. MTV News does give you the option of e-mailing stories to friends, but for now there's no Facebook or Twitter integration. Ultimately, it's a solid, polished app, one that's sure to appeal to teenagers. And, hey, it's free.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas