Independence Day is coming on July 4th, and that means people will be getting together to light fireworks or watch fireworks shows, and--perhaps most importantly--cook great food.

Though this might seem early with the 4th of July more than a week away, we wanted to make sure everybody had time to figure out their menus and get their supplies ready before the mad rush to the grocery stores. With these apps, you can start planning for the perfect Independence Day feast.

This week's app collection is all about cooking apps for iOS. The first lets you browse recipes from famous chefs on the Food Network; the second gives you a giant database of recipes and cooking guidance for any time of year; and the third is perfect for planning and cooking outdoors on the barbecue.

In The Kitchen ($1.99) gives you a database of delicious recipes from all your favorite Food Network chefs. The interface offers a number of ways to find a good recipe, either by using a search tool or by touching the image of a chef from the Food Network.

Browse through thousands of recipes from popular chefs including Bobby Flay, Alton Brown, Paula Deen, Giada De Laurentiis, and Rachael Ray, and get reviews for recipes from other users. Once you decide on a dish, you can have In The Kitchen create a shopping list for you so you can check off ingredients as you walk around the store. The shopping list is particularly helpful because you can add just the items you need or all the items from multiple dishes. Even if you don't want to make a particular recipe today, you can store favorites in a recipe box so you can get back to them later.

Along with tons of recipes from your favorite Food Network chefs, handy tools for shopping, and a recipe box for your favorites, In The Kitchen offers timers so you don't even need to set a separate one. With all these features and the addition of special seasonal recipe collections, anyone who wants to add to his or her cooking repertoire should definitely download this app.

How to Cook Everything ($4.99) is a cooking and recipe app based on New York Times columnist Mark Bittman's best-selling cookbook, and it offers several easy-to-use tools that will be extremely helpful for your holiday feast.

The interface is very intuitive, with an opening screen that acts as a launching point for whatever you might want to cook. You can browse recipes; learn how to perform specific kitchen duties with kitchen basics; or search for recipes by entering a keyword in the search field. You have additional options when you're not sure what you want to cook with buttons for Bittman's picks, most popular recipes, featured recipes, or a selection of easy-to-make quick dinners. There also are buttons across the bottom of the screen for your saved favorites, your shopping list, and more.

How to Cook Everything comes with more than 2,000 recipes, all with Mark Bittman's guidance and helpful illustrations and techniques. Especially handy are the built-in timers included within recipes that help you easily track each step of the process. You also have the option to show each step of the recipe onscreen, and with a swipe, you can move on to the next step so it's not as confusing.

Other extras include the ability to quickly print recipes and shopping lists wirelessly over AirPrint; the ability to share what you're cooking over Twitter and Facebook; and the ability to send up to 10 recipes a month to your friends via e-mail. Best of all, the recipes are embedded within the app so you can use it even without a reliable connection to the Internet.

Overall, How to Cook Everything is an excellent cooking guide and reference whether you're in the kitchen or standing out by the barbecue. With tons of recipes, illustrations, built-in timers, and other handy tools, this is the app to have to make your kitchen time a success.

Weber's On the Grill ($4.99) takes more than 300 recipes from the company's popular grilling books and adds some handy tools to make this app an almost perfect grilling companion on your iPhone. Start by picking the type of meat you plan to grill by opening up a large list of recipes with mouth-watering pictures to pique your interest.

From there, you can add the ingredients to an included grocery list that lets check off each ingredient while you shop. When the coals are hot, use your knowledge gained from more than 100 grilling tips and set the included timer so you know your meat will come out perfect. Weber's On the Grill also comes with a grilling guide for each type of meat so you know approximately how long to cook your steak and when to take that chicken off the grill.

Weber's On the Grill offers an intuitive interface for finding recipes, big clear pictures of recipes you want to create, and plenty of tips for grilling each type of food. The grocery list feature is a great way to make sure you have all the right ingredients at the store, and you can send the list to someone else (whoever might be doing the shopping) via e-mail. One issue we found is, as you grill, it seems like you should be able to launch the timer straight out of a recipe you're using rather than having to switch back and forth. In spite of this minor problem, Weber's On the Grill is definitely a worthy grilling companion for Independence Day BBQing, and I imagine there will be updates to smooth out any rough edges in the future.

Have a better cooking app we should know about? Let us all know in the comments.

From the first moments of its animated opening, which includes an execution, an implied rape, and a graphically slit throat, it's clear that Gameloft's BackStab deserves a stronger rating than "12+." Since when is it OK to expose 12-year-olds to "Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence"?

I guess that's the world we live in. I know parents who let their 8-year-olds watch violent, R-rated movies, which puzzles me to no end. Anyway, if the name alone didn't cue you in to BackStab's modus operandi, now you know. It's an extremely violent game.

But fun, if you can overlook the bugs. It's like wandering into the middle of a "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, but without Jack Sparrow. Instead, you take on the role of British naval officer Henry Blake (guess the Gameloft devs are fans of "MASH"). At least, you start off as an officer, but things go a little off the rails soon into the game. Suffice it to say, the aforementioned opening sequence foreshadows a lot.

If the setting is pure "Pirates," the gameplay more closely resembles Assassin's Creed. BackStab's world is an open one, where you can run around, fight almost constantly, scale walls, jump across rooftops, get stealthy when necessary, and take on various missions (both on the side and to drive the main plot).

You even man the occasional cannon, like in one of the game's early sequences. This is where BackStab first revealed its highly buggy nature: I sunk all the landing-party boats, but still ended up dying somehow. Turns out the game hadn't drawn in the huge Spanish ships that were launching those boats. I didn't even know they were supposed to be there until the level reloaded with them staring me in the face. Yo, Gameloft: I can't fire at what I can't see!

Other bugs emerge with the camera angles, the controls, and the world in general (don't be surprised when in-game characters suddenly disappear). On top of that, BackStab looked pretty chunky on my iPad 1, which is where I chose to play it. (A big screen is all but essential for a game like this--but the app is universal if you're keen to try it on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It looked a lot better on my iPhone 4, but was much harder to control.)

Bugs and blocky graphics aside, BackStab is hard to put down. The running, climbing, fighting, and laughably buxom female characters add up to an enjoyable experience, at least if you're into that sort of thing. If Gameloft could fix some of the bugs, it'd have a real winner on its hands.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

You won't find Skype for iPad available in the App Store until Tuesday, but we got a hands-on look, with plenty of pictures and testing, with the forthcoming app. The new iPad-optimized Skype client will take advantage of the tablet's larger screen real estate, making for crisp and clear video chat over Wi-Fi, and often less crisp chat over 3G.

Related link
• Skype posts, pulls video of iPad video chat app

The chat interface isn't as polished or snazzy as we've seen for other iPad apps, but it's fairly intuitive. Contacts are on the left with your text messages on the right. In our tests, chat over 3G or Wi-Fi worked predictably smoothly. But the real story with the iPad 2's front-facing camera was how well Skype handled video calls over different connection speeds.

Although Skype for iPad will work on both iPad versions, you'll only be able to broadcast video from the iPad 2, since it has a front-facing camera. You can still receive video on an original iPad. Skype for iPad will work on both Wi-Fi and 3G, but it was quick to point out that video quality might take a hit on slower 3G connections, and we were quick to verify that Skype quality is often subpar over 3G.

During our preliminary tests today, we made calls over Wi-Fi to an iPhone 4 (3G) and to Skype on a desktop computer with a hard line. Wi-Fi video calling to the desktop produced the best quality on both ends, with high image resolution and video that was mostly smooth; there was only a slight delay. During a call, our friends notices almost no difference in video quality when we switched between the front- and rear-facing iPad 2 cameras; they told us that both images had sharp edges and nothing looked especially blurred.

We were also able to easily send and receive chat messages while a video call was connected, although the chat window and keyboard obscured almost the entire image, and we had to manually close the keyboard when we were done so we could see the video again, a slight inconvenience.

The story wasn't as optimistic in our limited testing to an iPhone on a 3G network. We got passable video calling at best; at worst, the video (and audio) frequently froze. Fortunately, Skype offers the option to switch to audio-only during a video call so not all is lost if your 3G connection isn't displaying video properly.

As with any VoIP service, the image and audio quality often and ultimately comes down to the strength of the signal or bandwidth connection on both ends, plus the quality of the hardware itself (like a Webcam, for instance). That makes hands-on tests like this one inherently subjective and changeable. However, there's much that VoIP service providers can do to help jump technological hurdles, as Skype itself has touted in the past.

Among the new features, Skype for iPad offers a redesigned contact page that displays recent contacts and recent call history on the left, and thumbnails for your contacts on the right. Skype for iPad also supports Skype Out for those who have purchased credit. You tap a button to bring forth the dial pad.

We'll continue to take a closer look at Skype for iPad, but as with most of Skype's mobile apps, the essential features for communication are all here, although you won't find everything that's available on the more memory-intensive desktop versions.

Skype expects Apple to approve Skype for iPad on Tuesday. With the app's ability to call other Skype users on any device or desktop over Wi-Fi, it challenges Apple's FaceTime. Add on Skype's support for 3G connections as well (FaceTime is Wi-Fi-only), and you've got an app that could finally give Apple's FaceTime a run for its money.

Originally posted at iPad Atlas

Release the hounds! uTorrent 3.0 was released yesterday for seeders and leechers everywhere.

Four million users tested various alpha, beta, and release candidate versions of the anticipated v3 of the popular BitTorrent software, which is a darling of the download scene owing to its simple interface and lightweight footprint (for example, the installer is only 624KB). A slew of new features are embedded in the upgraded client, including streaming video; uTorrent remote; ratings and comments; and drag and drop sending. There's also mention of an exciting new encrypted Web-based UI, dubbed uTorrent Web, which enables access to µTorrent from anywhere on the Internet (you can also control the software using Android Remote for uTorrent).

BitTorrent also detailed a new app called uChat, which allows users of uTorrent 3.0 and BitTorrent Chrysalis clients to communicate with each other. Now all of those flame wars going on in torrent comment threads can happen in real time! The company hopes that the chat add-on will be a place for all users to help one another, share tips, and possibly pose as "an interesting marketing/social engagement opportunity for independent artists and creators to directly communicate with their fans."

Here is a breakdown of the new features in uTorrent 3.0, according to the official press release:

• Streaming: Watch videos within seconds with progressive downloading--no need to wait for the entire file to download. This feature is especially useful for previewing a file before committing to the full download.
• uTorrent Remote: Start, stop, and monitor torrent downloads on the go. Access the uTorrent client from any Web browser (visit https://remote.utorrent.com to sign up), or download the beta of our Android app.
• Ratings and Comments: Ratings enables the collective wisdom of the community to ensure the quality and security of downloaded torrents. Join in and contribute by simply clicking on the ratings or comment buttons in the torrent manager.
• Drag and Drop Sending: Easily send massive personal files--e.g., home movies, smartphone videos, and hi-res photos--directly from uTorrent. Select a file on your computer, drag it into the uTorrent "Drop files to send" box, and uTorrent will create a Web link. Send the link via e-mail, social-media post, or similar means to share your content.
• Simplified UI: Minimize parts of the uTorrent interface with a click. Perfect for anybody who wants a minimal interface, this feature cuts out distractions and focuses on the business of finding and playing content.
• Portable Mode: Run the uTorrent client directly from a USB key and take it anywhere.
• Stability, etc.: Under-the-hood improvements including a focus on stability as well as improved Web seeding to add speed and reliability to the process of finding the original source of a single-source file.
• uChat app (beta): Chat with other uTorrent users around the world in real-time by installing this optional app.

Some other interesting facts mentioned by the BitTorrent group about uTorrent: the software is available in 30 languages, usually supports 100 million active monthly users, and is downloaded on average more than 400,000 times a day.

(Via TorrentFreak)

Originally posted at Webware

Update: CNET has a hands-on with the upcoming software, which you can check out over here.

Skype jumped the gun today by posting a video of its yet-to-be-released iPad application to its YouTube channel before quickly setting it to private. The software is not due in the App Store until next Tuesday.

A reader of Razorianfly managed to record the video while it was still up, and repost it to YouTube. We've embedded it below.

The video demos the application's video chat capabilities, which rival that of Apple's built-in FaceTime service with a window for both the person you're chatting with, and one to view yourself in. Also included is standard phone dialing and integrated text-chat, the latter of which can be used during a video chat.

Skype's had an application available for Apple's iPhone since March of 2009, though it only added two-way video calling a few months ago. When Apple added dual cameras to the iPad 2, it seemed inevitable that Skype would eventually bring its application over to that platform to make use of the extra hardware.

The big difference from Apple's own FaceTime service is that Skype's application brings video chat over 3G networks. FaceTime currently only works over Wi-Fi, something Apple has said will change eventually. Additionally, Skype's iPad application brings video chat to owners of the first-generation Apple tablet, though only as receivers of video from the person with a camera-enabled device. Apple does not offer FaceTime to those same users, giving Skype an edge.

Microsoft agreed to acquire Skype in an $8.5 billion deal in early May. At the time, the company said it would continue to support the product on "non-Microsoft platforms," with Apple's iPad being one of those.

The video is below. And no it's not your speakers; there's no sound.

Update at 2:40 p.m. PT: Here's a shot of the software in action from our hands-on this afternoon:

Originally posted at Apple Talk

The city of Brno in the Czech Republic is a place people go to learn. Situated some 130 miles southeast of Prague, its 11 universities host approximately 80,000 students, many of whom are computer engineers. So it's no surprise that while AVG's corporate offices are headquartered back in Prague, Brno hosts the lifeblood of the company: the virus lab.

Although consumer computer security has grown tremendously in the past five years--with nearly all the major security suite makers including some form of community-based protection, URL verification, or phishing prevention to accompany more traditional tools like firewalls and antispam measures--antivirus detection remains the quintessential PC security feature.

AVG's Brno office is located in an complex that also hosts computer security vendorTrustPort, as well as a home appliance manufacturer. In most ways, the AVG offices on the sixth floor could be the offices of any software company. There's a game room with foosball and table hockey; a small library with muted lighting; a playroom for the children of AVG employees; and relaxation spaces designed to resemble places not often seen in the heart of central Europe, like beaches festooned with hammocks. The walls of one of the eating areas has been painted to resemble a Starbucks, complete with a massive Starbucks logo.

Two floors down, the only indications that you've arrived at the virus lab are the raft of warnings plastered to the door. Yellow caution tape and printed flyers emblazoned with the biohazard icon make the lab stand out from the rest of the conference rooms and offices. Of course, computer viruses have yet to actually pose a threat to your biological health, but the point is clear: The lab is restricted. Omezený, in Czech.

Inside, security analysts sit in high-backed chairs at Dell computers running Windows 7, and except for what's being displayed on their screens, the scene again returns to one of abject normality. The work that they're doing, however, is of paramount importance to your computer's security.

Karel Obluk, AVG's Chief Scientist, said that people tend to underestimate the speed at which threats appear and disappear. "There's more to do than calculate checksums," he said. Also known as a hash sum, a checksum is a number generated by running a file through a tool designed to create checksums. The number is fixed, and changes if any of the data inside the file changes. A virus that alters a file will alter its checksum, so many antivirus programs today will generate checksums for every file on your hard drive, and then whitelist them unless it detects a change.

Obluk added that there are more than 40,000 new viruses a day. "We do keep up, but not by processing each and individual sample." AVG's automation takes over here, leaving about 50 samples per day per researcher. The company employs 25 analysts in Brno, and has five in China dedicated specifically to malware originating from there.

And make no mistake, the threat to your computer isn't really about disrupting you or your life. The bad guys just want your CPU and bandwidth to make money. "A typical botnet can generate $11,000 per day, on less than 10,000 computers," said Obluk. The business of being a bad guy is so lucrative, he added, that malware writers have taken out ads in online forums not just for engineers, but for user interface designers, office managers, and accountants.

How the good guys stop the malware
The short version of how malware gets stopped from infecting your computer is quite simple, according to Pavel Krcma, the head of AVG's virus lab. First, the virus sample gets collected. It comes either via a user submission, is picked up by AVG's protection algorithm, or is shared from another virus labs. Whereas on the business and marketing side the security software industry can be brutal, the analysts and other members of the research and protection side communicate regularly, Krcma said.

Once the sample is in the lab, the next step is create a checksum signature for the sample. This then gets checked against the existing database of checksums to ensure that its not actually a legitimate file, known as a false positive.

Assuming it is malicious, the next step is a bit "like undressing the virus," said Jirí Bracek, AVG's director of Security Engineering. The easiest way to see whether a file contains malicious code is to create an entropy map of it, he said, but because the files are almost always encrypted they have to rely on an emulator.

"We put it in a 64-bit Windows emulator, and we have a script emulator. Mostly malware scripts are obfuscated, and it's the obfuscation that prevents us from using hashes or regular expressions, so we use the emulator to reveal it," he explained. Citing proprietary information, however, Bracek wouldn't reveal precisely

how the emulator works.

Inside the file's binary code there are three sections: A .text section for executable code, the part that sends instructions to the processor; the .data contains file data; and the .rsrc, which contains icons and other resources. "We can see healthy code in the binary because healthy code has uniform lengths of jumps, they are organized," said Bracek. "Malware code sometimes has code in different sections, such as .reloc or .rsrc. Malware also has code with chaotic jumps."

Once a file has been positively identified as a threat, the researcher generates a checksum for it and updates the database. The update then goes out to AVG's more than 110 million active users.

All told, from the point that AVG receives a suspected new threat to the point where the malware is blocked and that data is pushed out to AVG users around the world, the process takes about five minutes, said Krcma. The analysts are quite adept at what they do, he added. "It takes about one minute per piece of malware."

Not all threats can be detected using entropy maps. For example, rogue antivirus programs, also known as fake antiviruses, can't be detected using entropy maps, because those kinds of threats behave normally. The recent MacDefender attack was a rogue antivirus. Bracek explained that for rogue antiviruses, AVG instead looks at the user interface characteristics, since those are more likely to stand out.

Where the threats come from
"About 10 percent of attacks are coming from USB sticks," said Obluk, which leaves the Internet for the lion's share. But what does that mean? AVG's researchers are seeing a mixed bag of social engineering, rogue antiviruses, and traditional viruses and botnets.

Premium SMS is also a problem, and Obluk cited an AVG study that found that 8 percent of about 2,200 sampled U.S.-based smartphone users said premium SMS scams had happened to them. A premium SMS scam is where a rogue process gets your phone to send a text message to a number that charges for the receipt of the message. Premium SMS has been used to help donate money to victims of natural disasters and to relief organizations, but instead of a $10 donation, the premium SMS scammers use smaller denominations to avoid detection, Obluk said, because a $1 variance in your phone bill tends not to stand out to people the way a larger charge would.

Another big problem on smartphones, he said, is URL spoofing, because a phone's smaller browser makes it harder to read the location bar.

But Obluk cautioned that socially engineered threats--the threats that con people into giving up sensitive data--are the hardest to prevent and the hardest to inculcate against. "Mac and Linux and Windows are generally secure. It's usually the user that's the weakest link."

Originally posted at News - Security

PDF files have long been an awkward fit with the Web, but a new project from the developers of Firefox shows how online PDFs are changing for the better.

For years, the only way to view them was with viewer software from Adobe Systems, which created the Portable Document Format in the 1990s. Clicking a link to a PDF often meant a wait as the software loaded, followed by an alien interface, framed within the browser window, that meant actions like searching and printing were different. It's faster today, but PDFs still don't feel like native Web documents.

But PDF has become an international standard, and now PDFs are becoming less obstreperous. Google started indexing PDF content and showing PDFs in search results years ago, helping to ensure their utility on the Internet. And browsers have begun handling them better, too.

Google's Chrome, for example, added a PDF reader directly into the browser so that Adobe Reader, Mac OS X's Preview, or other third-party applications aren't required. (Well, except in cases where Chrome's plug-in isn't up to snuff; happily, it now sometimes warns you when a PDF has elements it can't handle.) Chrome is tackling the performance issue, too, making a PDF reader plug-in that uses the Native Client software technology.

Now Mozilla has begun a project of its own called pdf.js: a PDF reader that uses Web technology, not native software, to render PDFs in the browser. Eventually it will be built directly into Firefox, said programmer Andreas Gal in a blog post last week.

Thus, while Google is working on native-code PDF abilities--software tailored for a specific processor--Mozilla is working on an approach that uses the browser's engine instead.

We intend to use pdf.js to render PDFs "natively," within Firefox itself. Our most immediate goal is to implement the most commonly used PDF features so we can render a large majority of the PDFs found on the web. We believe we can reach that point in less than 3 months (the entire code so far is less than one month old, and it already renders a large set of PDF features).

Initially we will make a Firefox extension available to interested users that enables inline PDF rendering using pdf.js, but our ultimate goal is of course shipping pdf.js with Firefox. This will result in a substantial usability but also security improvement for our users. pdf.js uses only safe Web languages and doesn't contain any native code pieces attackers could exploit.

Indeed, security has been a problem for PDF reading on the Web. Adobe's widely used free Reader software needs regular attention as new security vulnerabilities are uncovered, some of zero-day problems that emerge before a patch is ready. Browser technology is by no means immune to security problems, but Web applications don't get the same privileges granted to native software, so that makes attacks harder.

The project uses JavaScript, the programming language of Web pages and Web applications, to interpret the PDF coding. It should be noted that Gal has been involved for years in improving Firefox's JavaScript execution speed. Another Web standard in use is the HTML5 Canvas technology for two-dimensional drawing.

For a look at how well the project compares to other PDF rendering software, check at the screenshots below.

Canvas is fast, something Mozilla likes given the sour sentiments that often arise at the prospect of loading a PDF. But it's got drawbacks, too, said Chris Jones in a blog post. For one thing, it's a low-level interface that doesn't easily let people select text. For another, high-quality printing is hard.

To get around those drawbacks, Mozilla also might use a PDF renderer using another Web technology, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). The idea is to render a quick version using Canvas, then swap in a more elaborate SVG-based version after it's been created, Jones said, mentioning that other approaches are possible, too.

To gauge progress, people can open a Web-based version of pdf.js showing a 2009 research paper about JavaScript that Gal and others wrote. Ordinarily I'd include a parenthetical warning to readers that they link leads to a PDF, but in this case, it leads to an ordinary Web page that shows a PDF.

Mozilla hopes the pdf.js will improve people's experience with PDFs, but ultimately help phase out the technology, too.

"It's important to note that we're not trying to promote PDF to a first-class web citizen like HTML5 is," Gal said. "Instead we hope that a browser-native PDF renderer written on the Web platform allows Web technologies to subsume PDF."

Perhaps the work will make PDF fade into the background. But people use PDFs for its advantages in formatting flexibility, archiving information in a standard file format, and sharing documents across a variety of operating systems and programs.

It seems possible to me, therefore, that Mozilla work to make PDFs easier and safer to use on the Web might actually strengthen the technology's position.

Originally posted at Deep Tech