Chat and e-mail

Pure Hacking's Gordon Maddern, a tech security writer, has uncovered a zero-day vulnerability affecting Mac users of the popular chat platform Skype. He writes: "About a month ago I was chatting on Skype to a colleague about a payload for one of our clients. Completely by accident, my payload executed in my colleagues Skype client."

Further tests showed that the payload was only executing in Skype clients on Macs. Windows and Linux appeared to be safe. After using metasploit and meterpreter to produce a proof of concept, Maddern was able to gain a shell remotely using the … Read more

Companies are actively looking for Microsoft Office alternatives such as Google Apps, but so far their interest hasn't dented the productivity suite's dominance, a Forrester Research study released today said.

"Adoption of alternatives relative to Microsoft Office is paltry, but interest remains high, with more than a quarter of companies actively looking at or experimenting with Web-based alternatives," Forrester said in the study. "While the free versions of these programs make it easy for companies to try, concerns over user acceptance and compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats continue to hinder broader deployments."

Interest … Read more

A security researcher said today that he found a serious hole in the Mac version of Skype that could be used by an attacker to remotely take control of someone else's computer.

In response, Skype says it released a "hotfix"--a quick fix to hold users over until a full update is ready--for the issue in a minor update released in mid-April, but did not prompt users to update their software because there were no reports that the hole was being exploited in the wild and it was planning on issuing another update early next week.

Gordon … Read more

Xobni, the popular and highly rated plugin for Microsoft Outlook has today announced the Xobni Gadget Platform and Store, which offers apps that add on to your add-on. With close to 20 big-name partners, including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Translate, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and so on, Xobni hopes to boost your productivity by souping up your Outlook inbox to yet another level.

To give you an idea of some of the platform's possibilities, the Evernote gadget puts the popular note-taking service's functionality into the Xobni sidebar. With it, you can view and take personal notes on a contact right from … Read more

Some interesting Apple news this week from AppleInsider revolves around Apple's acquisition of the iCloud domain name. Apparently, according to sources, Apple paid Sweden-based company Xcerion an estimated $4.5 million for the domain. It is rumored that the cloud service will be announced this summer at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference here in San Francisco.

There have already been plenty of rumors that Apple's cloud service would enable users to stream music to iOS devices, but according to the article, it may also offer a personalized "locker" where you can keep photos and videos as well. It will be exciting to see how this all pans out at WWDC, and whether people will be more inclined to sign up with iCloud than with MobileMe, which received a somewhat lukewarm response from users.

What kind of things would you like to see offered in an Apple-based cloud service? What would be a reasonable price for such a service? Let us know in the comments.

This week's apps are an instant voice mail messenger and a full-featured MMORPG that closely resembles one of the most popular games of all time.… Read more

An app that offers a range of features including low-cost SMS and international calls, phone callback, voice mail with transcription, and conversation-recording features sounds a bit like a magic bullet for many of the ailments that plague smartphone users. A new iOS app released today by Southern California-based VoxOx includes those features and others, and it's offering them for free in a partial port of its desktop software called VoxOx Call (iTunes Store link).

Following the desktop program revamp that the parent company Telcentris Inc., released at CES 2011, VoxOx Call offers a stunning range of free features. Users … Read more

Skype for Android users in the U.S. will be able to start making VoIP calls over 3G today in addition to calls over Wi-Fi, a feature that loyal users have been wanting since the app first debuted.

This isn't the first time 3G calling has been available in the U.S. Back in March 2010, a partnership with Verizon brought a special version of Skype Mobile to select Android phones (and also to select BlackBerrys, the first time Skype became available for that platform).

Skype wouldn't share with us what, if anything, prevented it from releasing this … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--AwayFind has been around for a while. It's a clever e-mail helper that will alert you on your mobile if you get an e-mail that's important enough to merit an interruption. But it's based on rules: You tell the service that e-mails from your boss are important but only when they're to you alone, and you'll always get a ping when she drops you a personal note. Unfortunately, managing rules gets old. So AwayFind is adding e-mail reading intelligence and sentiment analysis to its filters. The company is trying to build a system that can figure out which e-mails are important enough to break through to you, without requiring you to set up a filter ahead of time.

The first smart filter is coming out soon, AwayFind CEO Jared Goralnick told me today at the 500 Startups Demo Day here. It'll work by watching your online (or Exchange) calendar as well as your e-mail. If you get a message from a person with whom you have a meeting scheduled shortly before the meeting is scheduled to start, AwayFind will forward the message to you, assuming that the e-mail is likely to be about the meeting itself.

Coming soon, the company will be layering in sentiment analysis. It'll read your e-mails for you, and alert you when someone writes you in a certain tone or about a certain topic. Say you want to get alerted when a customer e-mails you with a complaint, for example. That might be a hard rule to write for you and me, but if the algorithm can discern "angry," it could be a very valuable service.

I don't care what the social-network punks say, e-mail isn't dead. But it is overwhelming. Anything that can help people tease out the important e-mails from their overflowing inbox is worth a shot. I'm looking forward to trying this one out. … Read more

Mozilla, which had hoped its Thunderbird e-mail software would rise to financial self-sufficiency like its better-known Firefox project, unveiled a Plan B yesterday that instead increases the organization's focus on other communication technology.

The Thunderbird group, called Mozilla Messaging, will become part of Mozilla Labs--a research center rather than a profit center--and lose its official name. David Ascher, who has led the Mozilla Messaging group, "now will lead a new innovation group within Mozilla Labs focused on online communications and social interactions on the Web," said Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, in a blog post … Read more