What else will Angry Birds try to sell?

Rovio is closing in on a deal with Starbucks that will bring the company's famed franchise, Angry Birds, into the coffee shops.

According to an interview Bloomberg conducted with Rovio senior vice president Wibe Wagemans, the Angry Birds maker could soon bring electronic leader boards to Starbucks stores to promote top-scoring players. In addition, the companies will offer Starbucks customers exclusive in-store promotions, including virtual goods.

"It's tying in the real world with the virtual world," Wagemans told Bloomberg. "Retailers get new customers who've not been to their stores yet, and repeat customers."

Although exact details on the deal were not divulged, it seems to play into Rovio's strategy with Angry Birds. Aside from selling the title on a host of mobile platforms, including iOS and Android, the company has sold everything from shirts to plush toys to monetize its brand.

Related stories: • Angry Birds in real life--tabletop game, plush toys • ... [Read more]

Buttons across the top let you rotate an image, adjust tilt-shift effects, switch to front-facing camera, and toggle image borders.

Today, the developers of popular photo-sharing app Instagram announced a big update. Calling it the largest revamp since Instagram launched almost a year ago, the company is introducing a complete upgrade to Instagram's camera with a "brand-new technology layer."

Instagram had already become a big hit for photo enthusiasts by adding a simple filter effect to photos, which could then be uploaded and shared with friends. But now, the app offers live filters so you can see your chosen effects before you snap a photo. Instagram says the filters have been rewritten to be 200 times faster, allowing you to switch between filters after you've taken your shot with almost instantaneous results.

The app now comes with four new filters: Amaro, Rise, Hudson, and Valencia. Instagram says it took cues from popular Instagram user @colerise to produce the new effects.

In addition to new filters that add variation to your snapshots, Instagram handles tilt-shift shots better as well. You can select blur, pinch, and pan tilt-shift effects, and see the results in an included live preview.

One of the most requested new features is... [Read more]

A pair of researchers plan to detail an attack called BEAST that they say undermines a very widely used technology for securing browser communications.

Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong say the vulnerability compromises TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.0, the encryption mechanism that secures Web sites accessed using HTTPS (Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol). TLS is the successor to SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and is widely used at financial sites. Companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are urging the wider use of TLS on the Web.

Rizzo and Duong plan to demonstrate BEAST at the Ekoparty conference later this week in Argentina. "We also describe one application of the attack that allows an adversary to efficiently decrypt and obtain authentication tokens and cookies from HTTPS requests. Our exploit abuses a vulnerability present in the SSL/TLS implementation of major Web browsers at the time of writing," they said.

Security researcher Juliano Rizzo plans to detail BEAST at a conference this week.

BEAST stands for Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS, according to details published in ... [Read more]

It doesn't seem all that long ago that Adobe trotted out its first consumer image-editing application, but Photoshop Elements seems to have aged fairly well over the past 10 years. It hasn't changed that much--it still has a task-based interface and modular architecture--though it's gotten a bit glitzier looking and, as it continually absorbs new technology and features from its big sister Photoshop, has gotten a lot more powerful as well.

Premiere Elements' new Three-Way Color Corrector lets you adjust highlights, midtones, and shadows independently.

Along the way, Adobe paired it up with a consumer version of its Premiere video-editing software. Though not 10 years old, it carries the same version number, and some of the same baggage, which includes an interface that hasn't changed substantially over time, and therefore has a steeper learning curve than a lot of newbies want to climb.

The new versions of both applications don't boast a lot of shiny, gee-whiz new features, but Photoshop Elements continues to evolve in meaningful ways, and Premiere Elements makes the important jump to 64-bit operation, at least on Windows. Plus, the company unified the Organizer to better handle both video and still media.<... [Read more]