In the wake of Intel's announcement on Thursday that it intends to purchase software security vendor McAfee, some industry experts are predicting the slow death of McAfee's consumer security products. While that's not likely to happen in the near future, just what does the chipmaker get with McAfee's current consumer security line?

The best-known products from McAfee are the company's security suites. Built around the same detection engine, McAfee Total Protection, McAfee Internet Security, and McAfee AntiVirus Plus offer consumers a base level of security with additional features included as you move up in price point.

McAfee AntiVirus Plus, which retails for $39.99, serves as the entry point with antivirus and antimalware, silent scans, McAfee SiteAdvisor for search results warnings and Web site ratings, a file shredder, and some system performance-enhancing tools. McAfee Internet Security ($69.99) offers the same features, adding in antispam and e-mail protection, parental controls, and 1 GB free online storage. McAfee Total Protection gives users all of the above plus includes antiphishing tools in the SiteAdvisor component, network defense protection, and an encrypted vault for keeping data private even when your computer gets hacked or physically stolen.

This year, the company introduced a new vertically oriented interface that broke with the competition's horizontal designs. Visually, this set the product apart. But the software's efficacy has been called into question. Independent testing organization AV Test failed to certify McAfee Internet Security 2010 in its Q2 test on Windows 7, when the program scored 10.5 out of 18. (A minimum score of 12 is required to earn certification.) AV Comparatives, another independent testing organization, also gave McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2010 less than stellar marks. The program scored a "Standard" certification in the company's May 2010 Retrospective/Proactive test, below the other achievements of "Advanced" and "Advanced+."

McAfee took a large public relations hit earlier this year when poor QA practices allowed a malignant virus definition file update to get pushed out to consumers and businesses. It will take some time to see if McAfee's sales were affected by the update. McAfee wasn't the first security vendor to push out a bad virus definition file update, and it won't be the last, but this one caused a wide swathe of destruction, including hospitals, libraries, research labs, and police stations.

From a consumer standpoint those three programs have the highest profile, but McAfee does offer up individual components of its security suites for sale, as well as other services not included in the suites. McAfee Identity Protection, for $10.99 per month or $109.99 for 12 months, gives users unlimited credit reports, public records monitoring, lost wallet support to cancel lost or stolen cards with one call, automatic alerts, and three-bureau credit monitoring. McAfee Online Backup ($59.99) is McAfee's backup service that's available with limited storage in the suites. McAfee Family Protection ($39.99) expands on the parental control service offered in the suites, which is mostly limited to advanced filtering. An iOS version of McAfee Family Protection is available for $19.99.

A third tier of products include McAfee's SiteAdvisor Plus ($19.99), an upgraded version of the free SiteAdvisor that also appears in McAfee's suites. The Plus version is available only in McAfee Total Protection, the highest-end model. Another McAfee product is the McAfee Anti-Theft ($29.99), a tool for encrypting and protecting locally stored files.

These second- and third-tier programs offer a significantly lower profile than the security suites, and consequently there's far less data comparing their effectiveness. Partially because of crossover features with the suites, they tend to attract far less user interest

Voice navigation is now commonplace on modern-day Android devices, but on the desktop, many of the accessibility tools that would bring voice commands to the end user still require special system level software or customized hardware.

That's not the case with a new Firefox add-on called Firesay, which brings hands-free voice controls to just the browser. Once installed as an add-on, it can pick up voice commands to do Web searches, open and close sites, and even pull up TV shows on Hulu.

The number of commands, and sites users can visit is extremely limited for the time being. You can, for instance, only open up a handful of Web sites and TV shows, as long as they're in the list of those that have been programmed in. Though the add-on is able to recognize and transcribe voice commands for its Web search feature. The add-on also requires that the user is on Windows 7, leaving XP, Vista, and Mac OS users behind.

One very cool feature is the option to open up a new site in the background of another tab, which normally requires: the link be coded that way, a special mouse click, or the use of a contextual menu within the browser. Firesay's solution is to have the user say "multitask" in front of a site's name, which opens it up and lets it load in an adjacent tab. The same behavior is used to do Web searches, which for now, are all done through Google.

Firesay's creators say future versions will bring voice recognition that is more easily able to pull out words from a noisy room. To some degree, Google has gotten around this problem on the mobile side by making use of noise cancellation hardware on the phone and software algorithms within the Android OS. On the desktop side of things, Firesay is simply suggesting that users invest in a microphone with noise cancellation built-in.

Below is a demo video of how the technology works:

Originally posted at Web Crawler

RIM announced on Thursday that BlackBerry App World is now no longer in beta and is available for all BlackBerry owners.

A few things to note: Developers will be able to offer apps for $0.99 and $1.99, and there is support for both credit card and carrier billing. You can also use your BlackBerry ID to manage your account information across multiple devices, and the navigation has been improved considerably with new tabbed sections and the capability to quickly view the Top 25, Newest, and Recently Updated Apps. QR barcode scanning is also supported.

If you're a BlackBerry owner, you should receive a notification when the new app store is ready for download.

Originally posted at Dialed In

Already available in one form or another for BlackBerry and iOS, Trillian launched the beta version of its multiprotocol instant-messaging client for Android on Thursday. Trillian for Android brings many of the desktop program's core features to Android 1.6 and above, including tabbed chats, emoticons, and support for a broad range of instant-messaging services.

To install the app, be sure that you've enabled installing from unknown sources under Settings, then Applications.

The app will work with AIM, Facebook Chat, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, WLM, and MySpaceIM, and because it natively supports Android 1.6, it will work with the original Android handset G1. People with phones running more recent versions will receive better resolution graphics, according to the company. Current Trillian users will be able to automatically load their accounts on the phone using Trillian's Astra syncing service.

Some of the app's more esoteric features include "buzzing" your friends as a way to demand attention from them and sharing photos via IM. The app also offers a smooth transition to landscape mode, and in hands-on tests worked just as well with a slide-out keyboard as it did with the soft keyboard.

Although only a first beta, brief tests with the app on a Motorola Droid running Android 2.2 revealed that sluggishness in loading graphics was more of an issue than anything else. Sending and receiving messages, and logging into and out of different accounts, occurred smoothly. Bugs will probably become more apparent as more users test the app, but initially it handled well and didn't cause any system instabilities. Cerulean Studios, the maker of Trillian, cautions users that the beta version of the app will expire between releases, and that manual updates will be necessary.

Mozilla hopes to release its fourth beta of Firefox 4 on Monday, adding hardware-accelerated graphics for some Windows users but leaving it turned off by default.

Also coming is a major user interface change called tab sets, formerly known as tab candy.

Hardware acceleration, coming to all the major browsers in various forms, is designed to shift some tasks from a computer's main processor to its graphics processor. One way Firefox is tackling the technology is by using Windows' Direct2D interface, which can speed up the display of text and graphics on newer versions of Windows.

Mozilla planners had hoped to enable Direct2D in the fourth beta, but decided caution was appropriate. "b4 won't have D2D on by default after all; just not quite ready to send it to that many users. soon!" tweeted Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering.

The Firefox 4 beta 4 code is frozen for finalization, putting the "release target as next Monday, Aug. 23," according to Mozilla meeting notes.

Firefox 4 is designed to be faster and better so Mozilla's browser can compete better as Google Chrome matures and as Microsoft's Internet Explorer reverses its usage-share slide and gets a major overhaul. Faster display is crucial in the performance race.

Faster browsers can enliven use of the Web, not just for loading sites but also for using Web applications or otherwise interacting. Mozilla and Microsoft have been in a bit of a competition to add support for the feature, which made a splashy debut in "platform preview" versions of Internet Explorer 9.

Even though Direct2D rendering won't be activated by default, Mozilla hopes people will test it. Here are Mozilla's instructions for enabling Direct2D in Firefox by changing settings accessed by typing "about:config" into the address bar:

To turn on Direct2D: Go in to about:config and set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 6, andgfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled to true.

To turn off Direct2D, once it is on by default, set mozilla.widget.render-mode to 0.

To check whether you are running with Direct2D, go to about:support [in the address bar] and look at the bottom.

Speed isn't the only factor, of course. As people spend more time in browsers, though, it gets harder to manage all the different tasks running simultaneously. For this reason Mozilla developed tab candy. It will appear in Firefox 4 beta 4 with the less tasty but more descriptive "tab sets" name.

Tab sets let people group tabs into bunches and move them around for what Mozilla hopes will be easier management than just using multiple browser windows, each with a linear strip of tabs across the top.

Another change that already arrived in Firefox 4 beta 3 is a feature called "switch to tab," which can move a person to an open tab when they start typing it into the address bar. It makes it easier to locate specific Web pages amid the tab clutter, but makes it harder to open duplicate pages of the same site.

A third tab change that's already in the Firefox betas is app tabs, which let people shrink a regular tab into a narrow icon to the left of the tab strip. It saves real estate in the tab strip and helps organize tabs by task.

The next version, Firefox 4 beta 5, is scheduled to be the last with any new browser features, according to Mozilla planning notes that mention that "feature freeze."

"There's a lot of things to go in it," the notes say. Mozilla programmers hope to freeze the code at the end of August, a step that shifts developer attention to fixing necessary bugs rather than adding anything new.

Originally posted at Deep Tech